Thursday, November 29, 2007

U.S. led invasion of Iraq: biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century


...from John Pilger, antiwar.com:

"In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search revealed that the [United Kingdom] government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods "robust" and "close to best practice." Other senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey's "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Since then, the British research polling agency, Opinion Research Business, has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Thus, the scale of death caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century."


oh! why not...
peAce?
topbop!

Thursday, November 08, 2007

...the have mores...



George W. Bush - NEW YORK, Oct. 20, 2000, Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner, a fundraiser for Catholic charities hosted by the Archbishop. To the diamond-studded $800-a-plate crowd… "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores, some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

This post is a bit of stream-of-consciousness... a riff on how things are, really... hope you find food for thinking...
topbop!


How will we keep the vassals toiling to our ends?

We will create a system above their heads from which we will conduct businesses to suspend desirable things attainable based on an arbitrary and imaginary value in the form of a monetary system. This will enable us to enslave the population in the pursuit of these things that we cause to be created by employing them to create them. Of course the actual workings of the harvesting system will be concealed behind a confusing network of laws and regulations. Our profits, explicit and implicit taxation, banking interest and governmental fees represent the winnowing edge of our great machine. We will create an ownership society where we will establish the illusion of ownership of land. We will possess and deploy weapons of planetary obliteration while arresting and incarcerating people for writing poetry contrary to our views of the world order...

How will we keep them contained on the physical plane and inactive on the spiritual plane?

We will stimulate their lusts and desires with packaging and advertising. We will consume their concern with fear mongering and war-making. We will confuse them with weapons of mass distraction like terrorism, real and otherwise. We will appear to align with the spirit of all that is right while all the while siding with the spirit of all that is right for us. The spiraling price of oil is making certain people, a small percentage of the world population, very, very wealthy…

How do we seize even more control?

We will declare martial law. We will pretend to tell other world leaders to stop oppressing their own people in vastly different ways depending on whether they are our “allies” or not, at the moment. In one case we will invade a former allies country and arrange their hanging. In another, the reprehensible and oppressive military government oppression of a current ally is rampant. Blockage of opposition party efforts via imprisonment of the entire cadre of organizers, along with obvious direct interference with basic rights and liberty, is met with a request to stop wearing your military uniform. We will use their artificially stimulated fear alert levels to raise the level of distrust throughout society. We will jail border guards for shooting at drug smugglers while never explaining how two DC9 jets, both with recent history of CIA ownership and CIA flight plan destinations crash with several tons of cocaine abroad each… Then pass the p.a.t.R.I.O.T.a.c.t. and ignore FISA, that's how.

Where does this all lead?

The population of the world is growing. Growing at an ever-faster rate. As the population grows, and more and more of that growing population enters industrialized society, there is more and more consumption of water, food, resources, and the very fabric of our planet. Also, because our technology base is so ecologically dirty, more and more spewing waste and polluting effuse is produced. Arable, habitable land and natural resources on the earth are finite, so, as far as we, the ruling elite class can see, the population that the world can sustain is limited, and also finite... The world, we believe, is in actuality only sized to sustain human beings in a really long term way up to some number of individuals, say X or so. The logical extension of this line of reasoning is that it will come down to a struggle to survive at some point, should the population continue to grow, unchecked…

07/01/07 6,602,274,812
08/01/07 6,608,818,475
09/01/07 6,615,362,139
10/01/07 6,621,694,717
11/01/07 6,628,238,381
12/01/07 6,634,570,959
01/01/08 6,641,114,623
02/01/08 6,647,658,287
03/01/08 6,653,779,780
04/01/08 6,660,323,443
05/01/08 6,666,656,022
06/01/08 6,673,199,685
07/01/08 6,679,532,264...

So perhaps it should be obvious, in a rather subtle way, that if you follow the argument thru, an unprovoked war that kills off a million or so people and destroys an entire nation filled with the treasures of antiquity in a far-away land is a worthwhile endeavor for this nation that would appear to fashion itself towards actions to survive by the weight of its Billy club.

What is next...?



certainly...not...peAce...?
topbop!

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

...sign of plans for an attack on Iran...

Buried in the $196.4 billion supplemental war spending proposal that Bush submitted to Congress on Oct. 22 is a request for $88 million to modify B-2 bombers so they can drop a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, a conventional bomb still in development that is the most powerful weapon designed to destroy targets deep underground.

This appropriation will support a new contract with the builders of the B-2, Northrop Grumman. Some Democrats are worried that President Bush’s funding request to enable B-2 “stealth” bombers to carry a new 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb is a sign of plans for an attack on Iran. James P. Moran, D-Va., a senior member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he did not believe the MOP could be used in Iraq or Afghanistan and cited Iran as the potential target for the bomb. He said he would oppose the funding. "That's a clear red flag," Moran said. Jim McDermott, D-Wash....said the funding request was the latest of many signs that indicated Bush was contemplating an attack on Iran. McDermott said such a scenario was his "biggest fear between now and the election."




"We are not authorizing Bush to use a 30,000-pound bunker buster," he said. "They've been banging the drums the same way as they did in 2002 with Iraq."




peAce...please!
topbop!

Monday, November 05, 2007

Pakistan arrests hundreds...


Pakistani police arrested hundreds of lawyers, human-rights activists and opposition politicians Sunday in an apparent bid to ward off protests over President Pervez Musharraf's weekend declaration of a national state of emergency and firing of the country's Supreme Court chief.

In Islamabad, aides to General Musharraf — who had dismissed pleas on Friday from Sec. of State Rice and Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior military commander in the Middle East, to avoid the state-of-emergency declaration — said they had anticipated that there would be few real consequences. They called the American reaction “muted,” saying General Musharraf had not received phone calls of protest from Mr. Bush or other senior American officials. In unusually candid terms, they said American officials supported stability over democracy. Could this have been a better choice in Iraq?

Extremism and oppression are okay when imposed by a dictator who is currently on the U.S. State "Friends" list...



peAce...
topbop!