HOUSE OF PAINE blog

A former US President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti. A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’ Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.

Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.

Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another-the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.

This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.

A relevant Texas geological project

Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players-the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.

The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.

Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons-oil and gas.

Notably, the sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project under Mann are the world’s largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton. Curiously enough, the project is the first comprehensive geological mapping of a region that, one would have thought, would have been a priority decades ago for the US oil majors. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States ­ not to mention the US focus on its own energy security ­ it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. Now it emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.

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The “largest lie,” wrote hisorian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that “everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’”

“This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”

In an article published previously in The Long Term View magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba’athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., “only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.”

Zinn, popularly known as the people’s historian, pointed out that the U.S. may have liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but afterwards it became Iraq’s occupier. He noted this is the same fate that befell Cuba after the U.S. liberated it from Spain in 1898. In both nations, the U.S. established military bases and U.S. corporations moved in to profit from the upheaval.

Zinn recalled the words of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the NATO ministers in Brussels in June, 2002, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of weapons of mass destruction. “That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are,” Zinn wrote.

“This explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorizing the population,” he continued.

The historian pointed out that even if the U.S. experienced few battle casualties in its invasion of Iraq, casualties would mount afterwards in the occupying army from sickness and trauma, which took a high toll both in Viet Nam and after the Gulf War. In the 10 years after the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died and 200,000 veterans filed complaints about illnesses incurred “from the weapons our government used in the war.”

Zinn predicted accurately that once the American public realized President Bush had lied to them about Iraq they would turn against the government. “When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered,” he said of the Bush administration.

Writing of his personal feelings, Zinn said, “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over… I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President (George W. Bush) who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.”

Zinn called on his readers “to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress. We find ourselves today at one of those critical points.”

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It’s no exaggeration to say that President Obama was the Democrats’ last chance to maintain some level of political legitimacy in the eyes of working class Americans. Now, after a year of solid pro-corporate policies, it’s obvious Obama has failed; and with him the Democratic Party.

Well-known “liberals” are beginning to denounce Obama’s polices, but not the Democrats as a whole. Instead, these esteemed liberals are promoting “real progressive Democrats,” i.e. the Democrats who are used as props by the leadership of the party, and completely ignored by the corporate media. The Democrat-promoting liberals are a mixed bunch, ranging from university professors to television personalities. Their ideology has moved distinctly to the right over the decades, to conform to the general rightward movement of the U.S. political/economic establishment.

And yes, liberals and many “progressives” do constitute a wing of the political establishment — they do not propose measures that would overhaul our economic and political system, but only minor reforms to make things less blatantly exploitative. Sometimes, real reforms — like single payer health care — are proposed, but quickly abandoned so that the Party agenda can be pursued (corporate health care and corporate welfare).

By never advocating a solid revamping of the economic system, liberals are inevitably pushed into supporting the status-quo, a system where large corporations dominate society, and consequently massive inequality and social misery is produced.

Indeed, the corporate “elephant in the room” is rarely mentioned by liberals. They might occasionally denounce “corporate influence,” while proposing absolutely nothing concrete to address the problem. They, of course, would never mention that, while large corporations exist with their tremendous wealth and control of elections, the media and politicians will inevitably fall into servitude or corruption.

At times, liberals may resort to using radical language to gain populist credentials. For example, “We need to demand that our economic system works for Main Street, not just Wall Street.” Of course this demand, under our current system, is fantasy. Our economic system (capitalism) is set up to meet the needs of rich investors (capitalists) — nothing is built, no jobs are created, unless rich owners are guaranteed a stable and large profit. Demanding that this system “works for Main Street” is either incredibly naïve, or more likely, an incredibly deceptive distraction. Distractions, of course, serve the interests of the status-quo.

Mainstream liberals are notorious distraction servers. For example, they advocate “moderation,” and denounce “extremism,” even as society is clearly torn between economic extremes: the majority of working and poor people versus a tiny elite of very wealthy. The economic/political status quo is obviously broken, but to liberals, “extreme measures” must not be taken.

Most Americans, however, are now looking to the right and left of the two-party system, where more concrete, “radical” solutions are being proposed. Therefore, members of the Republican Party are jumping ship to more radical right-wing parties, or — in Ron Paul’s case — about to jump ship.

The Democrats, too, are losing members. Cynthia McKinney and Cindy Sheehan have abandoned the corporate-owned Democratic Party, while long-time liberal Chris Hedges and others have denounced the two-party system. But in contrast to the far-right, those who look left of the Democrats are not given spotlights in the corporate-owned media.

Some distraction techniques used by notable liberals appear more radical. Such is the demand of “peace” from the government, while not explaining the inevitability of war under the current economic system. The U.S. government — represented by the two-party system — is tightly wedded to the interests of large corporations. War will thus continue, since war equals incredibly large profits for a multitude of giant corporations, who depend on the cheap raw materials and markets that the U.S. military guarantees them abroad, not to mention huge engineering and construction corporations that help “rebuild” a country the U.S. recently destroyed.

Another radical-sounding distraction is the bemoaning over the morality of war, of ignoring the social crisis, etc., as if morality played absolutely any role in the minds of the profit-hungry corporations who dominate the government. Shaming the corporate elite will continue to produce zero changes in their policies.

As the economic situation deteriorates, mainstream liberals have had to reach for other distractions, including the “war on terror,” the war against immigrants, and the war on drugs or crime. Any tactic to drag people’s attention away from Wall Street and the corporations in general is being deployed.

Today’s liberals in Congress stand to the right of Nixon era Republicans: they shamelessly bail out Wall Street, wage war in the Middle East to fight “terrorism,” without ever explaining why terrorism exists. If the U.S. military would stop invading and occupying Middle East countries, while propping up dictatorships in the region — Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen,Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. — terrorism would cease to exist.

The basis for the Democrats’ giant leaps to the right has been the deteriorating position of the U.S. corporate elite. In the post-World War II era, the U.S. ruling class ruled the world uncontested (minus the Soviet states). Now, the natural processes of capitalism have re-created the competitors who were destroyed in World War II, while spawning new challengers to America’s economic/political hegemony — China, India, Brazil, etc. As a result, the wages of U.S. workers have been under unrelenting attack with the outcome that people now work more but are paid less.

In the past, this international competition, along with higher wages for American workers via the labor movement, helped bring down the profits of American corporations. The U.S. corporate elite were forced to rely less on their economic dominance, and more on their military might.

Unfortunately for the working class, many labor leaders have been profoundly influenced by the above mentioned liberal attitudes. Even as the number of union members drastically shrank — along with the living standards of the remaining union workers — most labor leaders advocate a moderate approach to politics, relying on false messiahs like Obama to produce change, instead of the combined strength of an active union movement.

The current economic and political crisis cannot be solved by the rotten “moderation” that liberals propose. The do-nothing Congress cannot fix the social crisis that now exists, except to continue to transfer wealth from working taxpayers to large banks. The byproduct of the bank bailouts and foreign wars is a now-tremendous U.S. debt. The working class will be made to pay for this debt if they do not adopt more radical forms of fighting back.

Indeed, demanding that our economic system “work for Main Street” implies a radical break from liberalism. The logical outcome of such a demand — if liberals ever chose to pursue it — is the realization that the power of the corporations needs to be smashed, something that cannot be done within the corporate-owned two-party system. The working class needs to organize itself independently to fight back against the corporations, who’ve been waging a one-sided class war for over the last thirty years.

Only a bold, independent working class movement can give inspiration to the majority of people longing for a political solution to the current social crisis. Americans need real economic answers to the situation — taxing the rich, taking over mega-corporations, ending the current multiple wars, etc. — so that the fake solutions offered by the right-wing — race, religion, patriotism — do not act as a magnet to a disgruntled populace.

Liberalism in the U.S. is already dead for all intents and purposes, but not everyone has recognized it, or acted upon it. Nevertheless, the first steps in achieving political independence — which amounts to breaking completely with the Democratic Party — have begun.

This is because large numbers of working people have begun to think and act for themselves. Millions of people are finding it impossible to live as they’ve lived before, with their interests subordinated to those of the employers, the banks, the wealthy in general, and the government that serves exclusively the interests of these groups at the expense of everybody else.

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In your recent column in the New York Times, “Ten for the Next Ten,” you wrote: “I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that…people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Your hope has already been fulfilled in the Palestinian territories.

Unfortunately, these Palestinian Gandhis and Kings are being killed and imprisoned.

On the day that your op-ed appeared hoping for such leaders, three were languishing in Israeli prisons. No one knows how long they will be held, nor under what conditions; torture is common in Israeli prisons.

At least 19 Palestinians have been killed in the last six years alone during nonviolent demonstrations against Israel’s apartheid wall that is confiscating Palestinian cropland and imprisoning Palestinian people. Many others have been killed in other parts of the Palestinian territories while taking part in nonviolent activities. Hundreds more have been detained and imprisoned.

Recently Israel has begun a campaign to incarcerate the leaders of this diverse movement of weekly marches and demonstrations taking place in small Palestinian villages far from media attention.

The first Palestinian Gandhi to be rounded up in this recent purge was young Mohammad Othman, taken on Sept. 22 when he was returning home from speaking in Norway about nonviolent strategies to oppose Israeli oppression and land confiscation. He has now been held for 107 days without charges, much of it in solitary confinement.

The second was Abdallah Abu Rahma, a schoolteacher and farmer taken from his home on Dec. 10, the only one to be charged with a crime. After holding him for several days, Israel finally came up with a charge: “illegal weapons possession” – referring to the peace sign he had fashioned out of the spent teargas cartridges and bullets that Israel had shot at nonviolent demonstrators. (One such cartridge pierced the skull of Tristan Anderson, an American who was photographing the aftermath of a nonviolent march, causing part of his right frontal lobe to be removed.)

The third was Jamal Jumah’, a veteran leader in the grassroots struggle, who was taken by Israeli occupation forces on Dec. 16th and is now being held in shackles and often blindfolded during Kafkaesque Israeli military proceedings.

Palestinians have been engaging in nonviolence for decades.

When I was last in Nablus I learned of a massive nonviolent demonstration that had occurred in 2001 – estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 Palestinian men, women, and children taking part in a nonviolent march. All sectors of Nablus had joined together in organizing this – public officials, diverse parties, religious, secular, Muslim, Christian.

Modeling their action on images of Dr. Martin Luther King, they marched arm-in-arm, believing that Israel would not kill them and that the world would care. They were wrong on both counts. Israeli forces immediately shot six dead and injured many more. And no one even knows about it. At If Americans Knew we are currently working on a video to try to remedy the last part; there’s nothing we can do about the dead.

But there’s a great deal you can do, Bono. You can use your talent and celebrity to tell the world these facts. You can write a New York Times op-ed about the Palestinian Gandhis in Israeli prisons and call for their freedom. You can sing of these Palestinian Martin Luther Kings you wished for, and by singing save their lives.

For the reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world. When it is made invisible through its lack of coverage by the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, et al, its practitioners are in deadly danger, and their efforts to use nonviolence against injustice are doomed.

In the New York Times you publicly proclaimed your belief in nonviolence. Now is your chance to demonstrate your commitment.

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In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth.

‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude.

To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority.

He said the “the world” supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but “a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and “security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into “target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so “secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

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I really don’t know what is going on here…
The other day was Pink and today it is Pastel colors.
Not a fitting time of the year for pastel colors. After all, it is the beginning of Autumn, with its golden brown, rusty red and dying green…

But pastel colors have been obsessing me…ever since those pink and red taints.
Maybe because it is the Eid, the feast that marks the celebration of the end of our fasting month, Ramadan.

I remember the Eid in Baghdad, what used to be the Eid…
We have a tradition for the Eid, we must wear something new. I remember young and old saving that new piece, that untouched garment, for the Eid.

I remember the little boys and girls dressed in their new clothes, laughing as they rock on their swings, as they cry with joy on their merry-go-rounds…
Eating “shaar al Banat” or “ghazl al Banat” as some may call it.
You know, that fluffy hair-like sugar, dyed in pastel colors, that feels like cotton in your mouth, wrappped around a wooden stick and glues all over your face and leaves your tongue colored in pastel…pink, green, blue, yellow and…white.

I also remember the conversations…

“Baba, baba, shoof, anee helwa?” – Daddy, daddy look, am I pretty? would ask a little one raising her eyes to her dad. Showing off her new pastel colored dress and the pastel ribbons in her hair…

“Mama, mama, shofee shlon atayerhom”- Mom, mom, look how I can make it fly! would shout a little one to his mother, pointing his finger to his brand new kite made of pastel colored paper…

And the father would respond “Hadha shlon Jamal” – What beauty you are. Or,
the mother would say “Shater, ibnee, enta shater” – Clever my son, you are clever.

I can still hear their giggles, their laughs and their shouts of excitement…
I can still see the joy in their shining innocent eyes, their funny faces, their tender smile…
I can still feel their hugs, their wet kisses smelling of candies and their warm little heads on my shoulder, when tired from too much running around…tired from too much play.

I am lucky to have such memories. I am lucky to have witnessed them.
Today’s children in Iraq are either too scarred or will not live to remember or… are already dead.

Only two days ago, 11 little ones were severly wounded by a mortar attack. Yesterday, 9 little ones were killed in a so called counter-insurgency attack by your brave boys. Today, at least 2 little ones were blasted away when a bomb placed in a toy cart exploded in their curious little faces…on the day of the Eid.

Our little ones are nothing but appetizers for you. Your anti-pasti, your hors d’oeuvres…The more, the merrier…

In the name of Liberty. In the name of Democracy. In the name of Freedom. In the name of the o’ so civilized West that you are.

For 13 years, our little ones suffered, our little martyrs…Over half a million died as a result of your o’ so civilized sanctions, while you were watching…

Thirteen fucking years and you watched, in silence, tasting your hors d’oeuvres in front of your TV screens.

Thirteen years of a deafening, utter silence.

Silence from the so called left and anti-war clowns. Silence from the international community. Silence from the so-called Islamic Ummah.

So silent, that the silence turned into a lullaby of agonies that you can still hear in the mass graves of our little ones. So silent, that they have slept, never to wake up again…A murderous lullaby.

The little ones who survived, experienced their final liberation in 2003.

God damn you. God damn you. That is all I can repeat for now. I will have to stop.
I need to regain my composure. Recompose what you have decomposed…

Am back…
The composed, rational, polite Arab woman…I am now wearing my satin gloves, lest your sensitivities get ruffled…

But let me ask you something, are you as ruffled by an average of 40′000 little ones killed each year because of an occupation carried out in your name, with your money, under your “benevolent” eyes ?

40′000 is the conservative estimate figure from the 2006 U.N Human rights report.
The real figure for 2006 is much higher. Way higher. And am not counting the orphans in the thousands…

Only yesterday, a new report warns of an ever-deepening humanitarian crisis, never seen before, since World War II…And I say, it is much worse than what this report states.

Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us…
You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you…
Come and search for them in the rubbles of your “surgical” air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head…pleading for your attention.
Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food…

Well over half of our little ones are under nourished or dying from disease. Cholera, disentery, infections of all sorts….
Under nourished does not mean on a diet like your fat little kids. It means not having food to eat. It means cannot find food to eat. It means starved.

Come and see, come….

See them being trafficked, raped, sold and “finally” killed by your brave boys. The “final solution.” Remember that one ? It was not so long ago…Except this time it is carried out by the “greatest Democracy on earth.”

And if you are too sensitive to such scenes, and your stomach can’t take it, even though your hands and pockets contribute daily to it, come and search for them in the alley ways of Damascus, Amman or Cairo…

Search for them, hiding behind walls. Find them selling or begging in street corners.
Look for them behaving like a 40 year old adult, fending for a whole family…

Come and see…

The other day, I overheard a 6 years old saying to her mother, “I want to die.”
Just in case one of your bullets does not get to her, you have ensured that she will finish it off herself…

Come and see them stutter, hear them shout at night during their sleep and see their wet beds…

This is no lost innocence. This is a raped innocence, a murdered innocence…
Raped and murdered by you. I will net let you off the hook that easily. I guess you know me by now.

As for the little assholes (I guess am losing my composure again) who call me a whining Arab bitch, let me not wish the same on your children…
Because by God, if I did, you would strangle yourselves in grief and…remorse.

An article in Haaretz states that the Holocaust is still affecting the granchildren of the survivors…and that is well over 60 years, later.

How many decades, centuries would it take our surviving little ones to get over being freed by “Democracy” ?

In the meantime, the little survivors of your Holocaust, those who were born under your bombs, under your occupation, under your destruction, in your ghettoes, in your prisons, in your new Iraq, and who have known nothing else but you, their primal “caretaker”, if they ever make it to adulthood, will bear witness on the day of Eid…

They, who have not known the Spring, Summer, of their lives. They who have witnessed nothing but the cold of the Winter. The coldness of Death…

They will remember, as I am doing now, the blown up cart of toys, the overflowing morgues, the rubbles of their homes, the mortars falling on their heads, the noise of explosions squatting their ears, their sisters and brothers in pieces, in front of their very eyes…
They will remember it, like some ugly melody, like some ugly lullaby…you lulled to them during their “liberated” childhood…

And those who have not and will not survive your “Liberation”, will be flying high above like the pastel colored balloons of the Eid, like the kites made of pastel colored paper, like some white feather plucked from an innocent Dove…
Only to fall on the ground like dying, dried up, Autumn leaves…

Merry Xmas, America

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Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises–the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of American legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two US senators, a US representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”

The vast majority have been released after years of abuse. The 100 who are slated to be removed to Illinois have apparently been so badly abused that the US government is afraid to release them because of the testimony the prisoners could give to human rights organizations and foreign media about their mistreatment.

America’s British allies are showing more moral conscience than Americans are able to muster. Former PM Tony Blair, who provided cover for President Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, is being damned for his crimes by UK officialdom testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.

The London Times on December 14 summed up the case against Blair in a headline: “Intoxicated by Power, Blair Tricked Us Into War.” Two days later the British First Post declared: “War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid.” In an unguarded moment Blair let it slip that he favored a conspiracy for war regardless of the validity of the excuse [weapons of mass destruction] used to justify the invasion.

The movement to bring Blair to trial as a war criminal is gathering steam. Writing in the First Post Neil Clark reported: “There is widespread contempt for a man [Blair] who has made millions [his reward from the Bush regime] while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law.” Clark notes that the West’s practice of shipping Serbian and African leaders off to the War Crimes Tribunal, while exempting itself, is wearing thin.

In the US, of course, there is no such attempt to hold to account Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the large number of war criminals that comprised the Bush Regime. Indeed, Obama, whom Republicans love to hate, has gone out of his way to protect the Bush cohort from being held accountable.

Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people. The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.

Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his
affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of US civil liberty. Americans don’t seem to mind that “their” government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago–simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.

According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both US and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court. Apparently, the brave citizens of the “sole remaining superpower” are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.

With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed.

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As a description of Obama’s Peace Prize speech, Macdonald’s phrase could hardly be bettered. But the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah – but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.

Many have already remarked on Obama’s adoption of Bush’s principle of unilateral, “pre-emptive” military action, anytime, anywhere, whenever a leader declares his nation is under threat. This approach — which Bush called “the path of action” — was roundly scorned by critics of the former regime, many of whom now scramble to praise Obama’s “nuanced” embrace of aggression. But again, let us give credit where it is due; in this aspect of the speech, Obama did in fact go beyond Bush’s more narrowly nationalist conception, saying: “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.”

Thus Obama would, apparently, extend the right of unilateral military action to “any head of state” that feels the necessity of defending his or her nation. But of course this is just empty verbiage, a pointless, bald-faced lie that not even Bush would have tried to get away with. Would Obama accept a unilateral, pre-emptive strike by Tehran against Israel, where top legislators and government officials routinely talk of attacking Iran? Would Obama cheer the “right” of Russia to strike unilaterally at Poland if the U.S. “missile shield” deal, now on hold, was suddenly consummated? Would Obama support a unilateral strike by India at Pakistan — or vice versa — in the still-seething cauldron of tensions on the subcontinent, where both nations legitimately feel threatened by the other? Would he support the right of Kim Jong-il to “defend his nation” by attacking South Korea the next time there is a threatening border incident there?

No, it is clear that only the United States — and its allies, like Israel — are to be allowed the supreme privilege of unilateral war. The line was inserted in the speech simply because it would sound good in the moment, and create a temporary emotional reaction that might carry listeners past the macabre incongruity underlying the entire event: giving a peace award to the bloodstained leader of a military machine hip-deep in the coagulate gore of two, vast, civilian-slaughtering wars.

Obama staked his boldest claim to American exceptionalism with a passage that he lifted, almost verbatim, from his West Point speech just a few days before, when he announced his second massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”

Here is chutzpah — and hubris — raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world — and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see — and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.

And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people (Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey) for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references — so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists — to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making, out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)

Although larded with usual hyper-yet-flaccid, florid-yet-false oratorical stylings that have become Obama’s trademark, his words about King and Gandhi drip with scorn and condescension. I was actually taken aback when I read these passages:

“I make this statement [about the moral justification for war] mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

The intellectual incoherence and arrogant sneering behind this supposedly laudatory passage is staggering. After claiming to be the personal embodiment of King and Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent action, Obama gives the game away with this line: “I face the world as it is.” Those two guys, they were just dreamers, they were unrealistic, they were unserious; they didn’t “face the world as it is,” they weren’t savvy and pragmatic, like me. I have to go to war because I’m a head of state “sworn to protect and defend my nation.”

[Here, Obama indulges in a trope that is pandemic among his apologists: the idea that he was somehow forced to become the head of a militarist state waging endless war around the world, that he has somehow woken up and found himself "the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. But of course he chose to pursue this kind of power in this kind of system -- chose it, pursued it, fought like hell to win it. It's what he wanted. Yet still this notion of Obama as a helpless victim of fate -- lost in a world he never made -- persists.]

He then goes on to give the lie to his previously stated admiration for Gandhi and King: “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” Thus, King, Gandhi and any practitioner of non-violent resistance to evil are, ultimately, naive, ineffectual — weak.

Notice the incoherence – or perhaps deliberate elision – at work here. Obama says he must face down “threats to the American people” — and then talks about Hitler’s armies, immediately coupling, and rhetorically equating them, with al-Qaeda’s scattered handful of hidden fugitives. Are the American people now threatened by Hitler’s armies? Are al-Qaeda’s paltry forces — less than 100 of them in Afghanistan, according to Obama’s own war-wagers — the equal of Hitler’s armies of millions of men?

But there is a deeper untruth beyond these cheap rhetorical tricks. For it is blatantly untrue to say that “a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.” First of all, one cannot make that statement because this approach was never tried. Therefore you cannot state categorically that it would not have worked. Doubtless it would have cost millions of lives; but as Gandhi himself pointed out, the violent resistance to Hitler’s armies also cost tens of millions of lives. But Obama’s formulation — which is a hackneyed one indeed — only deals with one view of non-violent resistance to Hitler: i.e., from the outside, resisting his armies as they poured across the borders. There is another way in which a non-violent resistance movement without any doubt could have “halted Hitler’s armies”: if it had taken root and spread throughout Germany itself, including among the armed forces and its supporting industries.

In the event, this did not happen. But it was not, and is not, an impossibility for humankind to pursue such an approach. Therefore it is fatuous and false to state what cannot possibly be known: whether non-violent resistance would have thwarted Nazism, and whether this would have been more or less costly than the way of violence.

Similarly, it is false to say that “negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” The only response to this bald statement is: How do you know? Has anybody tried it? No. Therefore you cannot call it an impossibility — and then use this supposed, untested “impossibility” as your justification for laying waste to whole nations. You may say that it would be unjust to negotiate with al-Qaeda, that those who use murderous violence to achieve their ends should simply be killed or prosecuted. (Where then would that leave the leaders of the exalted, exceptional, unilateral United States?) But of course this is precisely what Gandhi did: he sat down and negotiated with the representatives of an empire that had caused the deaths of millions of his own people. He negotiated with them in good faith, with good will, despite what they had done and were doing to his people — and despite the fact that many of his interlocutors, such as Winston Churchill, hated him with a blind, racist fury. And he was successful — although again, not without cost, both before and after the liberation. But Gandhi, and King, knew the costs of non-violence – because they were genuinely savvy, and genuinely realistic about the nature of evil.

In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify — to himself and to the world — his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.

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It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end.

That fact that in those days the US still had an independent media of sorts that sometimes framed the war in moral terms is ignored. Are we sure, for example, that the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm was ineffectual in arousing moral opposition to the war? Are we certain that it wasn’t an aroused moral conscience that brought about the end of the war but was college students’ fears for their lives and limbs?

If we ascribe ending the war to material interests, it makes ending the war look as unworthy as the war itself.

Yet, virtually every conservative columnist, commentator, newsperson and politician, as well as today’s antiwar protesters and apparently the Pentagon, believes that a military draft would reduce Americans’ toleration for wars because of body bags coming home to middle and upper class parents. Apparently, the lower class doesn’t mind its kids coming back in body bags.

Those in thrall to this explanation, which derives from Marx’s materialist explanation of history, do not notice that Vietnam was our longest war. It apparently took almost forever for the material interest of students and their parents to realize itself and stop the war.

Why are we afraid to say that the war stopped because American troops and the American population got tired, offended even, from killing women, children and noncombatants? Vietnam had not attacked the US. The US had interjected itself into a civil war in a far off place, as it has done in Afghanistan.

By invading Iraq the US started a civil war between Sunni and Shi’ite. In Pakistan the US has started a civil war between the religious tribal population and the secular US puppet state. In Palestine the US started a civil war between Fatah and Hamas.

One continuously reads from those Americans opposed to America’s wars of aggression that the wars are possible because they don’t affect Americans, just those few who sign up for the voluntary military. Thus, there are insufficient material interests at stake to stop the war. This is a common explanation for the weakness of the antiwar movement.

One could argue instead that it is the triumph of Karl Marx’s materialist thinking that has made moral protests impotent. What is morality? You can’t weigh it, define it, measure it. It can be dismissed as the whining of material interests. In contrast, material interests, such as lives, limbs, and bank accounts are real.

For whatever the reason, morality has shown itself to be an impotent force in 21st century America. Americans show no remorse at over one million dead Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis due entirely to an American invasion based on lies and deception. The lies and deception are now well proven. Yet, there has been no apology for the horrors that Americans inflicted on Iraq.

Afghanistan is another example. Intentional lies conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda and “terrorists.” The diverse peoples in Afghanistan who were first ravaged by Soviet bombs are now ravaged by American bombs. Weddings, funerals, children’s soccer games, people waiting for fuel or food, people asleep in their homes, people attending Mosques have all been murdered and are murdered routinely by US and its NATO puppets.

Each time civilians are murdered, the US denies it, only to be contradicted every time by the evidence.

Why is the president of the United States contemplating sending yet tens of thousands more US troops to kill people in Afghanistan?

The answer is that the United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side.

Humanity has endeavored for millennia to control evil with morality. In the American “superpower,” this effort has collapsed and failed.

The United States needs to be censured for its immoral behavior, not have that behavior rationalized as being in its material interests.

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In a world where war criminals like Tony Blair are rewarded and those that oppose war criminals, like the Iraqi shoe thrower Muntadhar al-Zeidi, are imprisoned and tortured, it comes as no surprise that another war criminal – Barack H. Obama – has been rewarded for his stoic service to imperial bloodletting with the Nobel Peace Prize.

The man who gallantly promised “change” from the Bush regime’s illegal wars and a return to diplomacy over belligerency in dealing with Iran, has perpetuated the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while expanding another in Pakistan and becoming belligerent towards Iran.

How in anyone’s mind can such behavior constitute a move towards peace?

Obama has done nothing to dismantle the sprawling network of well over 700 U.S. military bases all over the world.

Instead of coming to an understanding with Iran over their nuclear power program, Obama gleefully read from his trusty teleprompter and crafted the hoax that the Iranian nuclear facility at Qom was an evil secret that the Iranians had kept hidden from America as part of a clandestine agenda to build nuclear weapons. In reality, Iran had followed precisely the guidelines set out by the IAEA on when to report the facility and the U.S. had known about it for several years anyway.

Obama’s slick propaganda in expressing his shock at the “discovery” of the plant was worthy of an Oscar but not a Nobel Peace Prize, since the scam has increased the likelihood of sanctions on Iran that will only accelerate the path to war.

By dutifully playing his part in this contrived hoax, Obama was mimicking the tactics of how George W. Bush sold the attack on Iraq.

As Paul Craig Roberts wrote, “By accusing Iran of having a secret “nuclear weapons program” and demanding that Iran “come clean” about the nonexistent program, adding that he does not rule out a military attack on Iran, Obama mimics the discredited Bush regime’s use of nonexistent Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” to set up Iraq for invasion.”

The fact that Obama launched himself into the role of war hawk in an effort to propagandize for belligerency towards Iran completely discredits the claim by Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland that Obama “Has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

Obama’s acting skills in front of a teleprompter and his slick rhetoric about peace and diplomacy may look good on the surface, but the reality of what he has actually done to further the PNAC agenda for endless war underlines why the award of the Peace Prize is a sick joke.

If Obama intended to bring peace to the world, then why were his early appointments mostly neo-liberal war hawks who have a history of backing military adventurism?

If Obama is such a huge peacenik, then why has he sent 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan already, with tens of thousands more at least on the way?

If Obama plans to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and bring peace to the region, then why has he gone back on his promise and ensured that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in the country?

If Obama is so deserving of being recognized for his efforts towards peace, then why has he intensified the Bush-era missile drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed and injured countless innocent civilians?

If Obama is so interested in promoting peace, then why does he protect war criminals who have violated the Geneva Conventions from prosecution?

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize award is a disgusting farce, an insult to those who really are fighting for peace in the world, and just another reminder that the Nobel Peace Prize represents little more than a gaggle of back-slapping elitists who bestow awards upon each other so that they can pose as global saviors to the public when in reality they are mostly a bunch of crooks, con-artists and deceivers.

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