When It Comes To Iran, It's About Oil Dummy! (AUDIO) | Air America Media

http://airamerica.com/lionel/blog/2009/sep/25/iran-its-about-oil-dummy-audio
Interesting perspective. "Think of the middle east as a vagina, and Iran is a yeast infection"
Seriously.

Report: Georgia Triggered War With Russia - WSJ.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125431087432152321.html
BRUSSELS--A nine-month European Union investigation into the 2008 war in the Caucasus has concluded that Georgia triggered the conflict, but that Russia prepared the ground for war to break out and broke international law by invading Georgia as a whole.

Conclusions to the roughly 1,000 page report, released on Wednesday by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini, also found that Russia-backed South Ossetian militias committed atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" of Georgian villages during and since the war. It faulted Russian forces in control of the territory that either "would not or could not" control the South Ossetians.

The report found no evidence to back Russian claims that Georgia committed genocide on the night of Aug.7-8.

The conflict, which briefly brought the United States and Russia into Cold War-style confrontation, left some 850 people dead, 35,000 permanently displaced and Europe's security infrastructure severely weakened. Russian forces remain in occupation of the two territories, while Moscow has recognized them as independent states.

U.S. Child Labor [sic] Laws

With thanks to my contact @ Human Rights Watch

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/09/15/us-adopt-stronger-laws-child-farmworkers

US: Adopt Stronger Laws for Child Farmworkers

Proposed Legislation Would Eliminate Double Standard in Child Labor Laws

September 15, 2009

The US Congress should amend outdated labor laws that allow even young children to work in commercial US agriculture, Human Rights Watch said today. Legislation introduced today by Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard of California would for the first time apply the same age and hour requirements to children working in agriculture as for children working in other occupations. Hundreds of thousands of children under age 18 work in US agriculture.

In states including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Michigan, Human Rights Watch has found that child farmworkers work longer hours, at younger ages, and under more hazardous conditions than other working youths. This summer, Human Rights Watch interviewed children hoeing cotton and sorghum in scorching heat, cutting collard greens and kale with sharp knives, hitching and driving tractors, and stooping for hours picking cucumbers.

Pay was, at best, minimum wage, but was often far lower. Many employers provided no drinking water or toilets. Children described smelling and, in a few instances, being sprayed with pesticides. Many left school in April or May, or were still working elsewhere when their schools started in August.

"Children as young as 11 and 12 are working 10 or more hours a day in one of the country's most dangerous occupations," said Zama Coursen-Neff, deputy director for the Children's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. "It's time to update antiquated laws and make sure that children harvesting food in the fields receive just as much protection as the teens serving that food at McDonald's."

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous types of youth employment in the United States. In 2000, the Department of Labor reported that the risks of work-related fatalities for youth working in agriculture were four times as high as the average for all working youth.

The Roybal-Allard bill, the "Children's Act for Responsible Employment (CARE)" would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit the employment of children ages 13 and younger in agriculture, except for those working on farms owned and operated by their parents. It would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work only for limited hours, outside of school hours, and would raise the age for hazardous agricultural work to 18.

Currently, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, any agricultural employer can hire children ages 12 and 13 to work unlimited hours, outside of school hours with parental permission. On small farms, there is no minimum age for children who work outside of school hours with their parents' consent. In contrast, employers outside of agriculture are prohibited from hiring children below age 14, and can employ 14- and 15-year-olds for no more than 18 hours in a school week, and not more than 40 in a non-school week. No such restrictions apply to children working in agriculture.

 "The long hours and low wages of child farmworkers undermine their education and perpetuate cycles of poverty," Coursen-Neff said. "US practices also violate international law."

In 1999, the US ratified the International Labour Organization's Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention, which prohibits work that is likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children. The guidelines that accompany the convention recommend that prohibited forms of child labor include work with dangerous machinery, equipment or tools, and exposure to hazardous substances and temperatures.

In a letter sent on September 15, Human Rights Watch urged members of the House of Representative's Committee on Education and Labor to support the bill and act quickly to ensure its passage.

Roybal-Allard announced the introduction of the bill in advance of a September 16 US Department of Labor event focusing on the plight of migrant farmworker children. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is the host.

*****************************************************************

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/14_million/poor3.shtml

Children in the Fields

By John Biewen - Correspondent

Part of 'The Forgotten Fourteen Million'


When Americans talk about the problem of child labor, they're usually talking about other countries. The U.S. banned most kinds of work by young children decades ago – and certainly dangerous work - except in the nation's orchards and fields. Farmworker advocates say agriculture is the last big stronghold of dangerous child labor in the United States. Much of that labor is legal. And most of the children doing it are poor.

SANTIAGO AND EMMA MATA work side by side inside a natural tunnel formed by overlapping branches of Granny Smith apple trees. They wear gloves and surgical masks to guard against dust and pesticide residue. It's a crisp, perfect October day near Mattawa, in south-central Washington State. The Matas are not migrants. Like thousands of farm workers in this part of Washington, they live here year-round.

"I work all the time," Santiago says through an interpreter. "Picking cherries, picking apples, trimming and pruning the trees ... "

The Matas pluck the green apples with smooth, rapid motions, quickly filling the canvas bags strapped over their shoulders. Every few minutes, each of them climbs down to lay a bagful into a squat, wooden bin the size of a big freezer chest – very gently, to avoid bruising.

Together, the husband-and-wife team can fill a 900-pound bin in half an hour. This orchard pays 12 dollars a bin, so it's a good day; the Matas are each making about $12 an hour.

"But it depends," says Emma, as she empties her sturdy canvas bag. "Sometimes, when there's a good, long row with lots of fruit on the trees, we make good money. But if there are other workers near us and not much fruit, we don't make much."

Economists who study the industry say on average, hired farm workers make $6 or $7/hour, with no health coverage, workers' compensation coverage, or overtime pay. Between seasons, farm workers live through long stretches of unemployment. So the average farm worker in the US earns about $7,000 a year.

"I strive to pay a fair wage, and I believe that we do, I believe that we do," says Larry Knudson, 59, who owns a midsize orchard outside of Yakima.

Knudson is blunt but amiable; he wears a wide-rimmed leather hat and scuffed canvas jacket. "Our base wage on this operation is $6.75 an hour," he says proudly. His speech grows halting, though, when he's asked how his workers get by. "All my year-round people, they're all raising families and ... are living ... fine."

Helping Pay the Bills

"I sleep [on] the floor, because I feel better on the floor," explains 13-year-old Luis Hernandez, giving a tour of the small house where he lives with his parents and five siblings in Toppenish, Washington. "My big older brother, he sleeps right there, in the bed."

The bed is right. It's the only one in the house. The four younger children sleep on thin mattresses on the living room floor, Luis says matter-of-factly. "And my dad and my mom, too."

Luis's parents, Juan and Antonia, are Mexican immigrants. Their children were all born in the U.S. The Hernandez' don't work for Larry Knudson, but, like his year-round employees, they make more than the average farm worker family – $18,000 last year, they say. That's still $10,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of eight.

To ease the burden slightly, Luis and his 14-year-old brother, Jose, work sometimes, too. Jose picked cherries last summer, then kept working after school started, harvesting apples on weekends through mid-October.

"Not all day, but in the morning [until] 3 p.m.," he says in an adolescent's shy monotone. "To help my parents get money to pay the bills and all that."

Antonia and Juan Hernandez seem sensitive to questions about their sons doing farm work. They say they don't require the boys to work.

"No, they wanted to come and help us," Antonia says in forceful Spanish. "It was their idea."

The eldest boy, Jose, goes to the orchards, Juan explains, "so [Luis] wanted to go too. Because he wanted to make some money. We let them keep some. Only a little, but some."

Media reports often focus on illegal child labor in agriculture. But it's legal for 14-year-old Jose to work in the orchards. Thirteen-year-old Luis broke state law by picking cherries last summer; cherry orchards are off-limits in Washington until age 14. But at 13, he could work legally in cucumber, berry, and spinach fields. Agriculture's child labor laws vary from state and state and crop to crop, but as a rule they're more lenient than in any other industry. That's true in most states, and it's strikingly true at the federal level. That despite the fact that farming ranks with mining and construction as one of the most dangerous industries.

"It's OK for a kid under 14 to work in the fields using knives and machetes and other sharp cutting instruments, but they can't work under 14 in an air-conditioned office collating paper," says Diane Mull of the Washington D.C.-based Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs.

Mull estimates 800,000 children work legally and illegally in agriculture. Hard numbers aren't available. One census bureau estimate says 155,000 minors work on farms, but that survey didn't count kids under 15. A recent survey in Wisconsin found 92% of farm workers' children over the age of 12 worked in the fields.

Farm leaders insist their industry has the most relaxed labor laws for good reason.

"The average agricultural producer is a very, very small business," says Bryan Little, chief lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. "And family farms by and large cannot succeed without relying on the efforts of family and friends and extended family and anybody else you can find to try to come and drive the truck, drive the combine ... and do stuff like that when you're trying to get the harvest in before it rains."

But that communal picture of child labor is largely outdated, statistics show. The Census Bureau says only a quarter of kids working on farms are the children or neighbors of farm owners. Three-fourths are hired laborers.

A report last fall by the National Research Council's Institute of Medicine called on the government to tighten restrictions on child labor – especially on farms. Working on farms can be healthy for children if the work is safe and doesn't go on too long, says commission member Barbara Lee, a rural Wisconsin physician. "But if you put them into a situation where they're actually taking the place of an adult laborer, you have to ask the question: Would it be acceptable in any other industry? And if it is not, then we have to say we've got a problem here," Lee says.

Children At Risk

Luis Hernandez worked on the cherry harvest for just a few days last summer. That's because in the first week, just before his 13th birthday, he took a break to play, and got seriously hurt.

"I was standing on a ladder," he recalls. "When I got off, I was playing with the guy, a friend, that was on a tractor. I was playing with him, throwing cherries. Then I tripped, and when I tripped, the tire, it ranned over me and stopped right here on the middle of my stomach."

Luis's mother, Antonia, was working on a ladder nearby. She screamed when she saw the tractor's flat-bed trailer, loaded with bins of apples, knock Luis down and roll onto his chest.

"[The driver] heard me and he stopped and looked down," Antonia says. "The wheel had come up just short of Luis's head. The driver then backed off him."

Luis was flown to a hospital in Seattle with a bruised heart and blood in his lungs. He's O.K. now. But a 17-year-old boy picking peaches in Utah last summer was not as lucky; he died of a brain hemorrhage after being sprayed accidentally with pesticides twice in one week.

Teenage farm workers make up just 4% of all employed teens, but a much higher 25% of those killed on the job.

Farm groups say those figures overstate the danger to young hand laborers. Most of the kids killed on farms are those who live there, says Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League; they are far more likely to handle dangerous machinery and pesticides.

"But for somebody who is involved in a fieldwork position, who's not working around concentrated forms of pesticides, who is handling a piece of fruit that is going to be sold and marketed the next day, the threat is not there at all," Gempler says. "The hard evidence doesn't stack up."

But critics counter that there's no hard evidence either way. Federal officials acknowledge that the long-term effects of pesticide exposure on field workers have never been studied. Farm worker advocate Diane Mull points out federal standards for when workers can enter a field after pesticides have been sprayed are based on the estimated risk to an adult male – not a child.

"We're using these kids, we're using farm workers, as guinea pigs, to really look at what intensive pesticide exposures are," she says. "If you look at that population and you know that they're largely minority, that's an even more egregious form of discrimination."

Farm worker advocates say the best way to curb child labor in agriculture is to reduce the need for children to work, by raising the wages paid to adult farm workers. Farm employers reply that they couldn't compete in global markets if they had to pay much more.


Related:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/kids-in-the-garden/

NATO / Media Lies in Former Yugoslavia

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6386/
I've begun digging on this topic, following this claim by a friend, elsewhere:

"Remember the ex-Yugoslavia? Remember all those front page articles about the supposed "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs? That demonised sovereign nation which was likened by those "erudite" broadsheets as akin to Nazi Germany?

Remember?

Let me tell you a little "secret"... one which your [US] newspapers failed to reveal.

The Serb "holocaust"? The one which lead NATO (the gendarmes of the USA) to bomb a country for 78 days non-stop? You know how many "mass graves" were found?

Yeah... I didn't think so.

The FBI failed to find a single mass grave. Uh huh. Funny how that "little" secret failed to get mentioned.

The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines". That's right.

Del Ponte's tribunal announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA.

2,788. That's less casualties than the American Civil War. And an entire nation was smashed to smithereens because of a US lead PR campaign. The war mongers at work. Tell me which one of your great newspapers spilled the beans regarding THAT little secret?

So, forgive me if I take what you say with the proverbial pinch of sodium chloride."

**********************************************************************************************

My co-moderator here, Diio, remarked that he was unable to find much online to back up this statement, so I'm looking...

Here's one or two to start us off...

The Rise of The Laptop Bombardier

March 2009

"Journalists and editors did more than simply cheer NATO’s bombing of Belgrade: they wrote the script for it."

Full article at link


Meanwhile... Gurcan, if you will, I remember a great piece you wrote (for yourself) on the Balkans in general... would you mind posting it here?

Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia etc.... I still don't think I've quite got my head around it all


Don't Forget Yugoslavia

by John Pilger

The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals unpalatable truths about the West's intervention in Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.

The tribunal was set up and bankrolled principally by the United States. Del Ponte's role was to investigate the crimes committed as Yugoslavia was dismembered in the 1990s. She insisted that this include NATO's 78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, which killed hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks, and television studios and destroyed economic infrastructure. "If I am not willing to [prosecute NATO personnel]," said Del Ponte, "I must give up my mission." It was a sham. Under pressure from Washington and London, an investigation into NATO war crimes was scrapped.

Readers will recall that the justification for the NATO bombing was that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the secessionist province of Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered. Tony Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War." The West's heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose murderous record was set aside. The British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him anytime on his mobile phone.

With the NATO bombing over, international teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume the "holocaust." The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines." A year later, Del Ponte's tribunal announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The "holocaust" was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.

That was not all, says Del Ponte in her book: the KLA kidnapped hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia." She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar Albanians – the very people in whose name NATO had attacked Serbia.

Indeed, even as Blair the war leader was on a triumphant tour of "liberated" Kosovo, the KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. Last February the "international community," led by the U.S., recognized Kosovo, which has no formal economy and is run, in effect, by criminal gangs that traffic in drugs, contraband, and women. But it has one valuable asset: the U.S. military base Camp Bondsteel, described by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner as "a smaller version of Guantanamo." Del Ponte, a Swiss diplomat, has been told by her own government to stop promoting her book.

Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been struck; Germany recognized Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the U.S. ensured that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct NATO was reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by NATO forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Link:

http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=13303


Related:

http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/03/carla-del-ponte-slams-muted-response.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/12/warcrimes.kosovo


Pictured: Carla Del Ponte

Typhoon Ondoy leaves 106+ Dead in Manila, Philippines

http://swerver.multiply.com/journal/item/299/MANILA_NEEDS_OUR_HELP?replies_read=6
http://otsopya.multiply.com/journal/item/728/Ondoys_Wrath

http://otsopya.multiply.com/notes/item/35 (List of Relief Centres)

Targeting Pakistan and silencing the critics

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=196326
It is a strong sign that we (the US and NATO) need to get the hell out of Afghanistan AND Pakistan when the US ambassador starts getting Pakistani press freedom suppressed, and when we find that Xe, formerly known as Blackwater is still being used for anything at all by our government, let alone in a country that doesn't want it there, for understandable reasons. No company whose owner is an avowed anti-Islam holy warrior should be used anywhere near a Muslim country.
(link from http://multiply.com/gi/elephantsmemory:journal:508)

US Gets Pakistani Column Pulled Over Blackwater Report

Taken from here.

US Ambassador Pressed Pakistani Paper to Pull Column
by Jason Ditz, September 06, 2009

The United States embassy in Pakistan reportedly managed to get the weekly column of a top critic of US policy pulled from the major English-language newspaper in Pakistan “The News International,” following a secret letter from Ambassador Anne Patterson to the newspaper earlier in the week.

The US embassy confirmed sending the letter but would not discuss its content. The newspaper’s editorial team said they were open to publishing the column at a later date, and indeed the article, entitled “Targeting Pakistan and Silencing the Critics” was made available on their website. Still, Pakistani media are saying that the embassy’s ability to block an article it found objectionable from a long-time critic of US policy is a sign of the enormous power the US wields in the nation.

Dr. Shireen Mazari, the author of the article, was interviewed on Iranian state media regarding what she called US censorship, and appeared to be not particularly surprised by the turn of events, though she insisted all the claims she made in the article also appeared in Western media sources, including Deutsche Presse-Agentur. She also vowed to continue her criticism of US policy, insisting “the Americans can’t gag me in my own country.”

Though Ambassador Patterson’s specific objections have not been made public, and she told The News not to publish her letter of complaint, it is widely assumed that Dr. Mazari’s references to Blackwater contractors being used on Pakistani soil was the source of the most vociferous objections.

A member of the opposition Tehreek-e Insaf party, Mazari was the director of a top foreign policy think-tank funded by the Pakistani government, though she was eventually removed from the position after what many in the Pakistani media believe was growing US pressure and warnings from the embassy that so long as she held the position they would treat her comments as official policy.

Following the furore over Dr. Mazari’s column, the Pakistani government officially denied that any Blackwater personnel were in the country, and insisted rules were in place to prevent such a thing happening. The US embassy declined comment, but last month former CIA officials revealed that the company had in fact been providing security on a Pakistani air base from which CIA drones were flown.


September 7, 2009 -- US Ambassador Accuses Pakistan’s Jang Media Group of Endangering Americans
August 21, 2009 -- CIA’s Ties With Blackwater Run Deep
September 24, 2009 -- US Mulls Increasing Drone Strikes in Pakistan

Breaking: Obama accuses Iran of having secret nuclear facility

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jDR_ihLnnBYMREe8ymldMGO9E27QD9AUASDO0
President Barack Obama and the leaders of France and Britain will demand Friday that Iran open to international inspectors a secret nuclear facility it has tried to hide from the world for years, a senior White House official told The Associated Press.

The three leaders — Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy — will open the G-20 economic summit with their demand that Tehran allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the facility for producing nuclear fuel, officials said.

Iran has kept the facility, 100 miles southwest of Tehran, hidden from weapons inspectors, but the U.S. has long known of its existence, the official said. Obama decided to go public with the revelation after Iran learned that Western intelligence agencies were aware of the project.


MORE DISCUSSION AT POLITICAL SOUL:
http://politicalsouls.multiply.com/links/item/280/BREAKING_Obama_accuses_Iran_of_having_secret_nuclear_facility

Petition : Tell Gordon Brown We Don't Want Our Money Spent on Nuclear Submarines, Especially During A Recession

http://38degrees.org.uk/page/s/rethinktridfb3
Say NO to Trident

Please sign


Pic: David Miliband, Cabinet Minister (I can't remember if it's Foreign or Defence Secretary)

Which Bank Could Implode Next?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-21/which-bank-will-implode-next/?cid=hp:mainpromo5
The G-20 leaders will meet in Pittsburgh Thursday to discuss slashing banker bonuses, but they’re focusing on the wrong threat.

The G-20 leaders will descend on Pittsburgh Thursday for a two-day financial summit, just as they did in London this past April. Exactly nothing of note followed that meeting, and the assembled figureheads are already focused on the wrong thing for this one. E.U. leaders, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have been adamant about the global need to address bankers’ pay. Sarkozy even threatened to walk out of the meetings if no agreement is reached on the topic of compensation. (President Barack Obama has said that he hopes the banks will curb bonuses before being compelled to—as if that will happen.)

Nomi Prins argues that they should be more worried about which bank "too big to fail" will go under next.

LINK: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-21/which-bank-will-implode-next/?cid=hp:mainpromo5

CIA Says Holder's Investigation Hurts US Counter-Terrorism Effort

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cia-holders-investigation-hurts-us-counter-terrorism-effort/story?id=8614065
Seven former CIA directors have asked President Obama to use his authority to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to re-open the criminal investigation into the CIA's post 9/11 interrogations of suspected terrorists.

Over-ruling an attorney general on a criminal investigation would be an extraordinary move, but the former directors contend Holder's investigation will ultimately "help Al Qaeda elude U.S. intelligence and plan future operations."

The letter sent to the president on Friday was signed by CIA directors who served under Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43.

The letter warns that the investigation will hinder the CIA's counter-terrorism efforts by discouraging risk-taking by agents now in the field, publicly revealing more information about the CIA's operations, and hindering relations with foreign intelligence agencies.

The former directors contend that Holder's investigation could "help Al Qaeda."

The Middle East Conflict: Zionist Quotes

David Ben Gurion
Prime Minister of Israel
1949-1954, 1955-1963
"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

"There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
- Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121-122.

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99.

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

"If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."
- David Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

Golda Meir
Prime Minister of Israel
1969-1974
"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."
- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.

"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
- Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

"Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen."
- Golda Meir, 1961, in a speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner, October 1961

"This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy."
- Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971

Yitzhak Rabin
Prime Minister of Israel
1974-1977, 1992-1995
"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

"[Israel will] create in the course of the next 10 or 20 years conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the west Bank to Jordan. To achieve this we have to come to agreement with King Hussein and not with Yasser Arafat."
- Yitzhak Rabin (a "Prince of Peace" by Clinton's standards), explaining his method of ethnically cleansing the occupied land without stirring a world outcry. (Quoted in David Shipler in the New York Times, 04/04/1983 citing Meir Cohen's remarks to the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee on March 16.)

Menachem Begin
Prime Minister of Israel
1977-1983"[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs."
- Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the 'Beasts,"' New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

"The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized .... Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for Ever."
- Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

Yizhak Shamir
Prime Minister of Israel
1983-1984, 1986-1992
"The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the River Jordan for future generations, for the mass aliya (=Jewish immigration), and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."
- Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."
- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

"(The Palestinians) would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
- Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) Yitzhak Shamir in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988

Benjamin Netanyahu
Prime Minister of Israel
1996-1999
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.

Ehud Barak
Prime Minister of Israel
1999-2001
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more"....
- Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000

"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force...."
- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.

"I would have joined a terrorist organization."
- Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Ha'aretz newspaper, when Barak was asked what he would have done if he had been born a Palestinian.

Ariel Sharon
Prime Minister of Israel
2001-2006
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online

The Modern African Slave Trade

Why do people love chocolate so much? Is it the smell, the taste, the texture or something more?

• The word Chocolate comes from the Aztecs of Mexico .. who associated Chocolate with the Goddess of fertility.

• Chocolate melts below body temperature ... melts in the mouth ... and releases Serotonin in the brain... which produces feelings of pleasure & increased heart rate ( almost same as the pleasure of kissing but last four time as long )

• It also triggers dopamine release similar to the rush of cocaine ...

• The Aztecs and their neighbors, the Mayans, believed chocolate transmitted knowledge and power to those who consumed it

Ok many more pluses for eating chocolate , but how far will you go for the pleasure ?

Chocolate is a sweet business with disgusting ingredients – like child slavery. Attempts are being made to change the industry by pressing consumers, but Interpol says – free the children, prosecute the criminals.

Fifty-four children of seven different nationalities were rescued from plantations, and eight people were arrested in connection with the illegal recruitment of children during a two-day operation in Cote d’Ivoire, codenamed “BIA”.

Pure greed has driven large corporates, to source the cheapest raw ingredients to produce the cheapest product to enable them to buy market share, and what’s cheaper than paying workers nothing?

The Major choclate companies are still usung child labour

thousands of Africa’s children, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire, are forced to labour in the production of cocoa. They are modern-day slaves, bonded to their employers and forced against their will to work in hazardous and heartbreaking conditions. Denied access to basic education, medical care, and in many cases, the comfort and reassurance of their own families, these children have no voice and little hope for the future

Many chocolate companies, including Hershey (the largest in North America), use cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast to make their products. The Ivory Coast of Africa is the largest cocoa-producing area in the world, but unfortunately it is so at the extent of child labor exploitation.


Young boys whose ages range from 12 to 16 have been sold into slave labor and are forced to work in cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse.


Slave traders are trafficking boys ranging from the age of 12 to 16 from their home countries and are selling them to cocoa farmers in Cote d'Ivoire. They work on small farms across the country, harvesting the cocoa beans day and night, under inhumane conditions. Most of the boys come from neighboring Mali, where agents hang around bus stations looking for children that are alone or are begging for food. They lure the kids to travel to Cote d'Ivoire with them, and then the traffickers sell the children to farmers in need of cheap labor


Many of these kids live and work in horrendous conditions for the pleasure
others  which illustrate that the existence of misery in one part of the world and joy in another part are no longer divorced as nations are connected together in a globalized web of trad3




Approximately 290 000 kids are slaves in WestAfrica helping to produce 70% of the world's chocolate!   They toil in abusive labor conditions in West Africa’s cocoa fields

Cocoa companies pay prices so low that many cocoa farmers cannot meet their families’ basic needs


The secret ingredient in that creamy, delicious chocolate bar? The swear and labor  in West Africa, forced to work long hours for no pay and little food. Doesn't taste so sweet anymore, does it? Like chocolate, child slavery comes in many colours. But usually brown. Its victims are poor, desperate kids - the most marginalized of society


Nestles , Hersheys , M&M Mars, Cadbury, Nestle and other famous names,guilty as charged

More aricles of interest

http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/is_hersheys_secret_ingredient_child_slavery

http://socyberty.com/history/chocolateby-slave-labour/

http://ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=159

http://wspus.org/2007/04/child-slavery-and-the-chocolate-factory/

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~kbranson/stopchocolateslavery/newsandinformation.html

Slave-free chocolate brands:

• Equal Exchange (Whole Foods, New Seasons)
• Endangered Species (Whole Foods, Target, New Seasons)
• Rapunzel (Whole Foods)
• Dagoba (at most Oregon grocery stores)
• Green and Black’s (available at Target!)
• Newman’s Own (New Seasons, Whole Foods)
• Cloud Nine
• Tropical Source (New Season’s, Whole Foods)
• Shaman
• Any fair-trade certified brands (look for the black and white Transfair logo
  

Eat chocolate responsibly

Video: ‘Disrespectful’ US Troops in Philippines ‘Treat Us Like Dogs’

http://www.bulatlat.com/main/2009/08/26/video-disrespectful-american-troops-in-philippines-treat-us-like-dogs-says-ex-navy-officer/
Is it time America retreated a little farther back within her own shores?

Isolationism? Intervention(ism)? For and against?

China?

What do you think of US military bases where you live?

♠THE QUESTION REMAINS♠

Is Pen Really mightier than the sword?

Sadly not to Often - The Pen Should Always be tried First Though

 

 3

The Pen is mightier than the sword

 

 4

This post pisses me off big time!

 

 3

"The pen is mightier than the sword" is a metonymic adage coined by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu

Is Pen Really mightier than the sword?  Really?  I think the unfortunate reality is just the opposite.  If you really want change more often than not you need to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve your means!

History has shown us this!




The Creation of the United States - It took War

The End of Slavery in the South - It took War

Stopping Adolf Hitler - War

The Soviet Union - The Threat of War

The Removal of Saddam Hussein - War

The Removal of Mullah Omar - War

Genocide in Darfur - ?

Iran's nuke Program - ?

A Palestinian State - ? (not that I give a crap but just pointing it out)

Has the Pen really solved anything - ever?

It Seems to me that Caesar's Chariots, Washington's Calvary, Lincoln's Cannon's, Churchill's Tanks, Reagan's Defense build up and George W. Bush's Laser Guided Missile's have accomplished more than the PEN ever has.

Sadly - I don't think this will ever change.  Just look at history.


It seems to me that in order to accomplish anything in the name of peace you at least need to keep WAR on the table as an option;

“If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”

 Julius Caesar quote

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong --

~Ronald Reagan

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

~ Sir Winston Churchill

After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers.
~ George W. Bush

In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the government, whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.

~ Abraham Lincoln

A response to the charge of anti-Americanism

A few days ago, as the majority of you probably are aware, I wrote a blog post on the anniversary of the 11/9 attacks and I was promptly accused in certain quarters of being anti-American. Basically, I was accused of tarring all Americans with the same brush with which I painted the US government of the time and those who support it to this day.

I believe this calls for a response.

First: I, personally, do not subscribe to any idea which says the citizens of any country are responsible for the actions of their government; as anyone who’s read me for a while knows, I am of the view that no government can or will adequately reflect the will of the average citizen even if it presumes to speak in his or her name. Governments have only one agenda, in the final analysis – to perpetuate themselves, and to do this they ally themselves with those forces which will help them to perpetuate themselves.

For instance, the government in this country is one which allegedly – since voted to power in a democratic election – speaks for the people; yet it’s not a government for which I voted and its policies go against virtually everything in which I believe. It is anti-egalitarian, pro-Big Business, utterly disregarding of the environment and of social realities in its domestic agenda; and in its foreign policy it is abjectly subservient to the dictates of the US. Therefore what this government, which is not my government, does is not in my name, and I refuse to be associated with its policies and be blamed for what it does and has done. In 2003, the government of the time came perilously close to sending troops to help in the imperial occupation of Iraq, backing off only because of political compulsions, and if it had sent those troops that would not have been in my name either.  

Similarly, I do not blame all Americans for the actions of their government of the time; it would be moronic of me to blame them all even if one single individual American had opposed those actions, and, as we all know, there were literally millions of Americans who opposed them and continue to do so today. Even those Americans who were brainwashed by the pliant media into supporting those actions were not to blame – if, that is, they have woken to realities now and repudiated their former stance. Millions more have done this and they are not to blame.

Second: When I speak against those who supported that response of the American government, I do not restrict my criticism to American citizens: there were millions of Indians who supported those actions (the actions of a “tough government”) and continue to do so today, when ultra-pro-American rhetoric is welcome in the media, which it wasn’t eight or even five years ago. Those Indians, Filipinos, Canadians, or whoever who continue to support the Imperial agenda are as much to blame as the Americans who continue to do so, or even more because they have less excuse, as those actions are not of the country they live in.

Third: I believe that an Imperial government is harmful, above all, to its own citizens in the passage of time. The Empire’s own people become its worst victims, even though they may live through a Golden Age during the peak of its powers. When the crash comes, it is they who suffer the most. While there may be a soupcon of justifiable Schadenfreude in their plight, it doesn’t hide the fact that they’re as much the victims of the Empire as the people the Empire rules over; and so they are not people I can hate. The current plight of Americans who lose jobs and homes as the government pours money into lost wars and even more weaponry will illustrate my point.

Fourth: I believe the events of 11/9 were used by the US government of the time to begin two major wars which would have led, if successful, to at least two more major wars (against Iran and Syria) and whose ultimate aim was to secure profits for giant US corporations, including oil and “reconstruction” producers, mercenary groups, and the military-industrial complex. These profits would only benefit the super-rich and would do nothing for the ordinary American who would do the actual fighting and dying (and continues to die in ever-increasing numbers). Therefore if I were to be anti-American I’d be blaming them, the poverty draftees and other sacrificial victims, for the actions of those doing the actual sacrifice.

Fifth: I have, over the years, blasted just about every country I can think of. At a conservative estimate, I’ve criticised, in no particular order, the governments of:

India, Pakistan, China, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Ethiopia, Germany, Japan, Russia, Georgia, “Israel”, Britain, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and frankly I forget who else.

So if I’m anti-American I’m anti-nation-in-general as well, which I don’t really think is a bad thing to be.

A note: I’ve been deleted by a couple of contacts, at least in one of those two cases because of that blog post. (I should make it clear that another person and I had issues about the post which we resolved in an exchange of personal messages, and that this lady is not among those two contacts I mentioned.)

Now I believe that anyone is free to delete me anytime and I won’t make an issue of it; I don’t measure myself by the number of my contacts. But if you imagine that by criticising your government’s policies I am attacking you, personally, you probably should not be engaging with anyone who doesn’t live in your immediate social milieu, let alone someone halfway across the planet, anyway.

                                                                                     Bill.

Holodomor

This is an extract from Wikipedia - its' neutrality is disputed.

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор; translation: death by starvation) refers to the famine of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death due to Soviet policies. There were no natural causes for starvation and in fact, Ukraine - unlike other Soviet Republics - enjoyed a bumper wheat crop in 1932.[1][2] The Holodomor is considered one of the greatest calamities to affect the Ukrainian nation in modern history. Millions of inhabitants of Ukraine died of starvation in an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe.[1][3][4][5] Estimates on the total number of casualties within Soviet Ukraine range mostly from 2.6 million[6][7] to 10 million.[8]

The root cause of the Holodomor is a subject of scholarly debate.[9] Some scholars have argued that the Soviet policies that caused the famine may have been designed as an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore fall under the legal definition of genocide.[10][11][12][13][14] Therefore the Holodomor is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine"[15][16] and "famine-genocide in Ukraine".[17] Others, however, conclude that the Holodomor was a consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization.[11][12][18][19]

As of March 2008, the Ukraine and nineteen other governments[20] have recognized the actions of the Soviet government as an act of genocide. The joint statement at the United Nations in 2003 has defined the famine as the result of cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs and other nationalities in the USSR[21]. On 23 October 2008 the European Parliament adopted a resolution[22] that recognized the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.[23]


See also http://www.holodomoreducation.org

The City of Deformed Babies

WELCOME TO FALLUJAH
We will never know what was done in Fallujah in our name.

I watched a report on Fallujah last week on Sky News by Lisa Holland for which she deserves our gratitude and a top television award. It featured a quietly spoken Iraqi neo-natal specialist, Dr Muntaha Hashim, who is finding that in that town, bombed and collectively punished by the allies, there has been a massive increase in the number of deformed babies. Dr Hashim sees children with two heads – one, a young girl with bountiful hair was curled up on a bed – and others limbless, or born without vital organs. The number has doubled since the days of Saddam.

Some unidentified chemical weaponry is responsible. Pro-war politicians, dodgy spooks, spin doctors and unrepentant media warriors such as Christopher Hitchens still claim triumphantly the war was a victory of good over evil. Their own offspring will not be born with two heads and, 

At least 2.4 million pounds of depleted uranium were Used to bomb Fallujah causing beyond alarming numbers of deformed babies, miscarriages, and cancer in a place where there are scant medical supplies and no new hospitals since 1986. Some U.S. soldiers who served in Fallujah also reportedly having deformed infants THIS IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-it-is-now-impossible-to-trust-any-official-inquiry-into-iraq-1657061.html

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20090901/twl-the-truth-of-iraq-s-city-of-deformed-3fd0ae9.html

FALLUJAH, Jun 12 (IPS) - Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.

"We saw all the colours of the rainbow coming out of the exploding American shells and missiles," Ali Sarhan, a 50-year-old teacher who lived through the two U.S. sieges of 2004 told IPS. "I saw bodies that turned into bones and coal right after they were exposed to bombs that we learned later to be phosphorus.

"The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations."

"I had two children who had brain damage from birth," 28-year-old Hayfa' Shukur told IPS. "My husband has been detained by the Americans since November 2004 and so I had to take the children around by myself to hospitals and private clinics. They died. I spent all our savings and borrowed a considerable amount of money."

Shukur said doctors told her that it was use of the restricted weapons that caused her children's brain damage and subsequent deaths, "but none of them had the courage to give me a written report."

"Many babies were born with major congenital malformations," a paediatric doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "These infants include many with heart defects, cleft lip or palate, Down's syndrome, and limb defects."

The doctor added, "I can say all kinds of problems related to toxic pollution took place in Fallujah after the November 2004 massacre."

Many doctors speak of similar cases and a similar pattern. The indications remain anecdotal, in the absence of either a study, or any available official records.

The Fallujah General Hospital administration was unwilling to give any statistics on deformed babies, but one doctor volunteered to speak on condition of anonymity - for fear of reprisals if seen to be critical of the administration.

"Maternal exposure to toxins and radioactive material can lead to miscarriage and frequent abortions, still birth, and congenital malformation," the doctor told IPS. There have been many such cases, and the government "did not move to contain the damage, or present any assistance to the hospital whatsoever.

"These cases need intensive international efforts that provide the highest and most recent technologies that we will not have here in a hundred years," he added.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern Mar. 31 about the lack of medical supplies in hospitals in Baghdad and Basra.



"Hospitals have used up stocks of vital medical items, and require further supplies to cope with the influx of wounded patients. Access to water remains a matter of concern in certain areas," the ICRC said in a statement.

A senior Iraqi health ministry official was quoted as saying Feb. 26 that the health sector is under "great pressure", with scores of doctors killed, an exodus of medical personnel, poor medical infrastructure, and shortage of medicines.

"We are experiencing a big shortage of everything," said the official, "We don't have enough specialist doctors and medicines, and most of the medical equipment is outdated.

"We used to get many spinal and head injures, but were unable to do anything as we didn't have enough specialists and medicines," he added. "Intravenous fluid, which is a simple thing, is not available all the time." He said no new hospitals had been built since 1986.

Iraqi Health Minister Salih al-Hassnawi highlighted the shortage of medicines at a press conference in Arbil in the Kurdistan region in the north Feb. 22. "The Iraqi Health Ministry is suffering from an acute shortage of medicines...We have decided to import medicines immediately to meet the needs."



The people of Fallujah want to know how many more deformed babies there will be before someone sits up and takes notice of them.

The Day The Earth Stood Still: Eight Years Later

Eight years ago, on this day, the world stopped turning.

Or so we are assured.

Eight years ago, when on “9/11” (sic; 11/9; 9/11 is 9 November) alleged Arab terrorists allegedly hijacked four American commercial airliners (it bears repeating that they were American; a year later, in the days before 11/9/2002, the US would try to ban foreign airliners from flying in its airspace, until self-respecting nations threatened a counter-ban on American aeroplanes) and crashed two of them into the two towers of the World Trade Center (sic), causing their collapse, and hit the Pentagon with another, causing some relatively limited damage, we were informed that we were all (in the words of the German magazine Stern) Americans. Our duty, it was said, was to rally to the support of the American Cause, worldwide. Our governments fell over each other begging to express their solidarity. The then “President” (later President) of the US, George W Bush, told us that we were either for him or we were for the terrorists, who were, naturally, evildoers who hated America’s freedoms and who had to be smoked out of their holes.

I assume all of you remember that. Far too many of you have been inundating us with blog posts detailing your memories of that day not to remember.

I assume, therefore, that you also know the aftermath of that little episode: the invasion of Afghanistan, which continues to this day and which has successfully returned that unhappy land from the control of religious zealots to the partial control of warlords and drug kings; and to the invasion of Iraq, where a functioning nation was destroyed, a civil war ignited, a million or more people killed as a result, and a secular Muslim nation given over to fundamentalist mullahs of various stripes. I assume you know all that.

The world stopped turning. The world changed forever. America was targeted; terrorism suddenly came into existence; and Islamic Terror had to be fought. Yeah.

Before I go on any further, I’d like to repeat what some of you already know: unlike 99.9% of you, I have lived through an insurgency. I’ve personally met terrorists and seen them in action. I was less than a hundred metres away from a terror strike, in 2001, in which five people were killed. For my first novel I interviewed a former terrorist leader (Chakra Gohain of the United Liberation Front of Asom). In other words, when I use the word “terrorist”, I know, from personal experience, what I’m talking about.

Therefore, I am very, very far from accepting any notion that the world stopped on 11 September 2001. I do not believe that terrorism had to target America before being recognised as such; and I am very, very far from accepting any notion that terrorists target anyone out of “hatred”. As I’ve said repeatedly, terrorism is a tactic of war, and like any other tactic it is meant to produce a definite result, whatever that result might be. Nobody has to be a genius to decide that rhetoric saying “We’re good, so if they target us, they must be evil” is anything more than puerile. If any individual therefore believes, or pretends to believe, that 11/9 was caused entirely by blind hatred (for instance, the very right-wing Indian magazine India Today had declared it to be a “Jihad Against The World” in its cover story, equating America with the world, something I’d only come across Americans doing before that) or that the victim was entirely blameless, he or she is being at the very least wilfully blind.

There are a couple of other things I believe need repeating: first, I am not necessarily a believer in conspiracy theories. I am not discounting the possibility that the Bush Administration engineered the attacks in some fashion and blew down the two towers of the World Trade Center (sic) with explosives. That’s why, up above, I wrote that the 11/9 attacks involved alleged Arab terrorists allegedly hijacking aeroplanes. “President” (as he then was) Bush’s men may have been behind the attacks; but I do not think it is very likely. Considering the complexity of the operation and the number of people it must have involved, a cover-up of an operation of such magnitude would have been so difficult that there would have been hard evidence long before now. Far too many people would’ve talked.

However, there is a different way in which the talk of a conspiracy theory may be right after all, and this lies in the oft-repeated phrase “Pearl Harbor (sic) Moment.” As scholars of the Second World War strongly suspect, the attack on Pearl Harbor (sic) on 6 December 1941 was anything but unanticipated and anything but a strike out of the blue. Back in 1941, the US was in a race with Japan for resources in Asia and was desperately trying to find a back door to enter the war in Europe. Japan was squeezed (by repeated ultimatums to quit China and SE Asia) into beginning a war it could not possibly win in the long run, and there’s good reason to believe (among other things, the US had long since broken the Japanese naval code) that the actual Japanese attack was anticipated and allowed to happen so that the American people could be filled with righteous rage against the perfidious evildoer Japanese.

Similarly, in the late nineties, the US was desperately trying to find a route to the natural gas fields of Central Asia and longed to control the oil of Iraq. As late as 1998, Washington was still trying to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Taliban (which was still in the US’ good books at the time, as it had been from the moment it was first set up by the Pakistanis; vide Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords) and hoping for UN-imposed mass starvation to set off a coup in Iraq. A colonised Iraq would be a permanent source of oil to the US; it would be a permanent military base from which to threaten other Arab nations and Iran; and, not the least, it would remove one of the few genuine opponents of the Zionazi pseudostate of “Israel”.

But the coup never materialised, and the Afghan pipeline deal collapsed when the Taliban decided to award the contract to Argentina’s BRIDAS instead of America’s UNOCAL. Only a series of major wars could set things right, but even the American people couldn’t be persuaded to begin a series of major wars without a lot of manufacturing of consent. And it would be so very convenient to let a spectacular terrorist strike happen so that the people could be carried away on a flood of patriotic emotion...

You see where this is leading? No need to arrange this or do that; just allow a terror strike that was already in the planning go through, lie about the origins of the terrorists, keep saying that you’re innocent defenders of freedom attacked by evildoers, and you can be sure that most of the people, the majority of whom – perhaps coincidentally – also happen to believe that there is no such thing as evolution, will go right along with you.

So, just as I do not believe that the aeroplanes which hit Pearl Harbor (sic) on 6/12/41 were American planes launched from the US Navy aircraft carriers which were mysteriously absent from the anchorage that day, I do not believe that the attacks on the World Trade Center (sic) on 11/9/01 were made by aeroplanes controlled by the US government; but in both cases, the use the US administrations of the time made to the respective attacks were such that there’s little doubt that they came extremely in handy, so much so that there would have been little actual difference had they been set up. After all, just five hours the attack, Donald Rumsfeld was already holding meetings discussing how to blame Saddam Hussein, someone who was absolutely opposed to Al Qaeda, the alleged culprits.

Also, it should be obvious that I don’t buy the “innocent victim” line; a nation that has been involved in more wars abroad than the rest of the world put together in the last sixty years, a nation that has propped up brutal dictators across the globe, a nation that treats the planet as its personal property, and has been complicit in the creation of the same demons it is now allegedly fighting, has no right to the epithet “innocent victim”. Yes, there were innocent victims – in the aeroplanes and in the buildings – but they were, in the final analysis, collateral damage at best and sacrificial pawns at worst. Certainly they had no more right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness than some Afghan in a village near Kandahar or an Iraqi in a Baghdad souk who has been turned into roadkill on the way to Imperial glory. Why should this photo,



or this,



be any less iconic than this?



Wearing an Armani suit and earning US dollars doesn’t make you a superior being.

But, all right, let me – for the sake of argument – concede the point. Let me say that you’re right: the US was an innocent, freedom-loving, honest nation brutally subjected to an unprovoked attack by Islamofascist terrorists leading to the death of thousands of freedom-loving innocent honest Americans, and that the appropriate response to these attacks was to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which had nothing to do with the attacks, as even "President" (as he then was) George W Bush was to admit. Let’s say you’re right in all that.

Assuming you are right, what is the result, eight years on, of the appropriate response that you’ve made to these dastardly and unprovoked attacks?

Even if we’re to ignore the deaths and injuries, the loss of property and livelihood, among the Afghans and Iraqis who are lesser beings than you, the Lords of the Universe, as inconsequential, what have you, actually, achieved?

You have taken a functioning secular Muslim nation, which had kept the fundamentalists at bay, and converted it into a hub of international terror, a society fractured by civil war and sectarian divisions, and you haven’t even succeeded in your objectives of either exploiting its oil or using it as a military base to intimidate or attack its neighbours.

Also, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out in the past, the Taliban in 2001 were on the verge of collapse from their internal divisions and essential inability to rule. You’ve taken on a doddering and incompetent grouping of mullahs and succeeded in turning them into a lethal and determined enemy who now can claim, with justification, to be nationalists, and whose final victory is only a matter of time.

You’ve managed to revive opium cultivation, which the Taliban had almost eradicated, and made it Afghanistan’s most important crop, and the heroin made from that opium is making its way right back to contaminate your own society.

You’ve, by your meddling, allowed the Taliban to make deep penetrations of Pakistan, a country which is of immensely more significance to the jihadist cause than Afghanistan, and not only because Pakistan has the Islamic world’s only declared arsenal of nuclear bombs.

You’ve turned what was never really a united terrorist organisation, Al Qaeda, into a loose franchise of terror cells scattered throughout the globe, without central direction and control and therefore a more difficult target than it ever was.

You’ve, while we’re on the subject, managed to make more people than ever before hate you, and with greater cause than ever before. If we were “all Americans” on 12/9, we’re now going to sympathise with your victims instead, and a reprise of 11/9 will, I predict, be greeted with wild cheers the world over, not with sorrow.

You’ve managed to get far more of your soldiers killed and maimed than your civilians were ever killed in the attacks of 11/9. A cure which causes more damage than the original disease isn’t usually thought to be a worthwhile cure.

You’ve managed to damage your international alliances to the extent that your “allies” will have second, third and fifteenth thoughts about being ever again associated with any war instigated by you.

You’ve proved to the world that men with AK47s, landmines and RPGs can, with sufficient determination, take on your tanks and fighters and UAVs and warships and fight you to a stalemate. You’ve, in fact, demonstrated that your super-soldiers can be beaten by village hicks. Is it a wonder that the world has begun defying you?

You’ve managed to run your own economy into the ground, while pouring more and more of your increasingly scarce funds into the black hole of your neverending wars, and your only flourishing industry is that concerned with military production, essentially an industry which needs even more wars to justify its continued existence.

Oh, and you haven’t even got those pipelines, and your puppet in Kabul has recently promulgated laws that validate marital rape and make the Taliban look liberal.

Do you still think, oh brave warriors of freedom, that it’s all worth it?

From my point of view, there are a few positives to the whole damned mess, though:

It has publicly demonstrated the hollowness of the US claim to be a bastion of freedom, and exposed it for what many of us had always known it was: an aggressive right wing militaristic dictatorship with fake “elections” whose results changed nothing, a nation ruled by and for the super-rich with no thought for the rest of the world, including the less well-off of American citizens.

It has exposed “Great” Britain for what it manifestly has been since the end of the Second World War: a pathetic appendage to the Americans, without even the independence to utter a pro forma protest, a colony so abject that it is unworthy even of contempt.

It has weakened the US and made the decline of the American Empire a real and present thing, instead of something we all knew was coming but not precisely when. This decline and subsequent fall will perhaps result in the break-up of the US, but even if it does not, a much weaker and humbler America can only be a good thing for the world as a whole.

Think about it while you keep shouting to the skies about the Day The World Stood Still.