Military
A tip from a CIA spy to authorities in apartheid-era South Africa led to Nelson Mandela’s arrest, beginning the leader’s 27 years behind bars, a report said on Sunday.
Donald Rickard, a former US vice-consul in Durban and CIA operative, told British film director John Irvin that he had been involved in Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which was seen as necessary because the Americans believed he was “completely under the control of the Soviet Union”, according to a report in the Sunday Times newspaper. “He could have incited a war in South Africa, the United States would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell,” Rickard said. “We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.”
The foreign interactions between the USA (under the Obama administration) and the Saudis has resulted in the creation of Isis, the maltreatment of Iran, the war in Syria, and of course 9-11. Read the total entanglement of the United States in creating the problems in the middle East and the endless wars.
By Michaela Whitton | Activist Post A tribal elder from Pakistan is in the U.K. this week in an attempt to get Britain to persuade the United States to stop trying to kill him. Malik Jalil, from the village of Waziristan on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, has a role as an intermediary in settling disputes. […]
Malik Jalil has a role as an intermediary in settling disputes. He is a member of a community devoted to trying to keep the peace in the region, and he is sanctioned by the Pakistani government. Malik claims he is on a ‘kill list’ and has been targeted at least four times by U.S. drone strikes for his role in attempting to prevent violence between the local Taliban and the authorities.
Wilkerson: “Is there a penchant on behalf of the Congress to bless the use of force more often than not because of the constituencies they have and the money they get from the defense contractors? You bet.”
As far as the Brussels attacks are concerned, if we assume that ISIS was responsible, the whole scenario is turned upside down after analyzing the basis of ISIS.
During the address, Clinton vowed to take the U.S.-Israel relationship to “the next level”—a level which seemingly includes more war and imperialism, few, if any, rights for Palestinians, and definitely no economic boycotts of Israel.
The family of two U.S. drone victims is refusing to keep their pain silent as they seek an official apology by U.S. President Barack Obama for the deaths of their kin.
There is a consistent contradiction between the stated objectives of the War on Terrorism and the outcomes. Therefore we know the assumptions are wrong. Freedom has never been the goal. Continuous war is directly out of the Orwell dystopian novel: 1984. We are living that now.
Fourteen years ago, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States government initiated its “war on terror,” with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, which expanded into Pakistan, and of Iraq in 2003. While the corporate media has occasionally acknowledged the 6,800 American soldiers, and the 7,000 contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, they consistently ignore Iraqi and Afghani deaths, which exceed one million, giving the western public no context to understand the attacks lead by the Islamic State in Syria and Levant (ISIL).
Since President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, an estimated 2,464 people have been killed by drone strikes targeted outside of the United States’ declared war zones; this figure was posted in February 2015 by Jack Serle and the team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who maintain a database of all known strikes—based on fieldwork, media reports, and leaked documents—which provides a clearer picture of the scale and impact of the US drone program than the episodic reporting provided by corporate media.
By September 2012, after almost a decade at the task, the U.S. had allocated and spent nearly $25 billion on “training, equipping, and sustaining” the Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. In the end, the U.S. claimed to have trained roughly 950,000 members of the “steady,” “solid,” and well-trained Iraqi security forces.
And yet just two and a half years after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, that same force collapsed in spectacular fashion to less than 31,000 ISIS militants (according to CIA estimates) and these forces reportedly were so frightened by 800 ISIS militants that they went running, leaving equipment and even their uniforms behind, thus handing over the second largest city in the country, Mosul.
We’ve all heard this one: if a politician wants to disarm the public, he should give up his own security protection. See how he likes it. What is it about politicians that gives them a special right to have armed professionals stalk their perimeter and mumble into their collars?
After Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States begin carpet bombing ISIS, politicians and papers around him wrote it off as “bluster and bigotry,” “foolish”, and “…just silly.” By almost any standard, Cruz’s proposal was laughable [not to mention pathological & inhumane], and his rivals and the media called him on it. Yet, his poll numbers actually crept up, from 15 % to 18 percent, & one poll even had at 24 %.
Last year, under the auspices of a Nobel Peace Prize-Winning President, the U.S. dropped over 23,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries.
