PeaceMaker

Machinery of Death

2010-04-11T19:02:00.001-04:00

By Adel - PeaceMaker
April 11, 2010

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat” ~ General Stanley A. McChrystal

In Afghanistan and Iraq the American and NATO troops have committed numerous atrocities: shooting unarmed locals at check points, on the street, even while they're tilling fields. They've bombed wedding parties, raided homes at midnight and murdered occupants of all ages. They've stormed hospitals, used chemical weapons, left a trail of depleted uranium... They've flattened the offices of international news organizations, hid suspects from the International Red Cross and tortured prisoners to death... and it’s still happening, day after day, with Drones wiping out remote villages, shredding their families, assassinating anyone they choose.

The contents of a previously suppressed Pentagon video has come as a nasty shock to so many, from day one of the War on Terror, the slaughter of civilians depicted in the video released by WikiLeaks, Collateral Damage, has been a key feature of the conflict.

The video shows trigger-happy U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilots and U.S. Special Forces slaughtering Iraqi civilians in Baghdad at a street corner in July of 2007, then seeking to cover up their crimes, planted weapons LAPD style. Twelve civilians died, including a Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

The visual and audio record reveal the two Apache helicopter pilots and the US Army intelligence personnel monitoring the real-time footage that the civilians roughly a thousand feet below are armed insurgents and that one of them, peeking round a corner, was carrying an RPG.

The dialogue is chilling, gleeful pilots gloating over the effect of their initial machine-gun salvoes. “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” answers the other. Then, as a wounded man struggles in pain toward the curb, the pilots can't wait to finish him off. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says yearningly.

Then a civilian van, seeing the carnage, pulls up. A man jumps out, and starts dragging the wounded man around to load him in. A few moments later, another salvo finishes off the wounded man and his would-be rescuer, kills other civilians in the van and wounds two children in the front seat.

US ground troops arrive on the scene, report the presence of wounded children. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot tells the other. There are further sniggers as a US armored vehicle rolls up. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots cackles.

According to the US military’s statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine [sic] insurgents were killed. This version of events was cited by the New York Times under the headline “2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias”.

Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lens could be mistaken for an RPG. “A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded , is 3 feet long and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.”

Sprey’s second point is that an Apache helicopter makes a very loud “whomp, whomp” noise. “ Twelve guys are unconcerned, with loud helicopters right overhead. Imagine if they were planning an assault on American troops. They’d be crouched down and skulking along walls, spread out. They would not be walking casually down the middle of the street, totally ignoring the helicopters.”

A retired U.S. Marine in an email exchange:

“Not a good show at all. The group on the ground were banishing nothing that ‘looked’ or appeared as weapons, especially the voiced ‘RPG’ which is so obvious when loaded. And then again – they were told in advance by intelligence (I am sure by the tone in the flight) that these people were bad guys. The Apache crews were just stupid and the intelligence clowns pointing them and egging them on are guilty of murder – ‘you are clear to engage’. GMAFB.”

Another retired U.S. Army man, answering the email from the retired U.S. Marine quoted above:

“The damage this incident and its video evidence will do is immense… it will irrefutably confirm for many that large chunk of anti-American propaganda which insists the American flyers are just playing computer shoot-em-up games using real flesh and blood as a proxy for the digital figures they usually slaughter only in the arcades."

“How much is simulator training responsible for the disconnection from reality demonstrated in this incident? The crew was detached from reality… How [is] the Army… producing crews that, having the potential for such incompetence, cannot detect it among themselves. If anyone in that crew had paused and asked if the action being taken was correct, surely it would have been aborted… The Army has to find out why.”

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the US military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed. the US military’s cover-up story that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid.

The American Special Forces troops not only killed the women but had also gouged out their bollets from their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath before lying to their superiors about what happened.

In this first decade of the 21st Century, it is time to ask what kind of war machine the West has created? From the little we are able to know, it appears to be lawless, tech obsessed and sadistic. It is an army of Draculas sucking the blood from the throats of the dispossessed, the impoverished, fuelled by an annual US budget of over $600 billion on weapons of death.

Yes, an army marches on its stomach, and that may still be true, but these days you get the sense that the burgers are washed down with tumblers of blood. Often the blood of innocents. It becomes an addiction, perhaps, an insatiable desire that's part Gothic and part Surrealist, like a videogame played on a helicopter hovering over Transylvania.

Who Are The Real Terrorists These Days

2010-03-27T20:26:00.003-04:00

By Adel - PeaceMaker
March 27, 2010

John Patrick Bedell was angry at the U.S. federal government that had devastated public education, private property rights and monetary policy, so he shot two security guards at the Pentagon. He was not a terrorist.

Andrew Joseph Stack flew a small plane into the Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, killing one IRS worker and injuring 13 people. Earlier that day, Stack proclaimed on his Web page, “Violence not only is the answer,” he wrote, “it is the only answer.” Stack was not a terrorist.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist of Palestinian origin, opened fire on fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 and wounding 29. He strongly opposed U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a terrorist.

The first two violent attacks were carried out as political protests by American conservatives angry at the federal government for taking over their rights. The third was carried out by an Arab-American Muslim angry at the federal government for taking over other people’s rights.

America’s Mainstream Media quickly explained that the first two cases were deranged individuals not part of any wider conspiracy. Three days after the Pentagon attack, The New York Times wrote that Bedell had been living with his parents and “seemed to slide into a deep paranoia.” The paper reassured us that “federal authorities said there was no indication that Mr. Bedell had a connection to any domestic or international terrorist group.”

On the day of the attack against the IRS, The Wall Street Journal conveyed the comforting news that federal workers had not been victims of terrorism. “I consider this a criminal act by a lone individual,” said Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo.

Fox News labeled Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan action as a terrorist attack. As Sen. Joe Lieberman pointed out on Fox, “There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and therefore that this was a terrorist act.”

Lieberman conveying that extremism comes only from the Muslim world, not right-wing Americans with persecution complexes and semiautomatic weapons.

There seems to be similar confusion about international extremists. The extremists of al-Qaida intentionally kill civilians in an effort to win political goals. They are terrorists.

The US-funded Afghan mujahedeen fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s intentionally targeted university professors, movie theaters and cultural events. The US-trained Nicaraguan Contras intentionally killed teachers and health workers in order to overthrow the Sandinista government in the 1980s. Both these groups were freedom fighters.

Not long ago this country faced the communist menace. Remember when elementary school students hid under school desks to protect themselves from a Soviet nuclear attack and invasion? Today we face a far greater threat from Muslim terrorists. Thank goodness today’s children have much larger desks.

I hope this clears up the confusion about exactly who is a terrorist.

The New World Order Is Here

2010-03-20T14:28:00.005-04:00

How To Stop The New World Order from PuppetGov on Vimeo.

False Flags & Lies

2010-03-20T14:03:00.002-04:00

False Flags, Lies & Nuclear Bombs from PuppetGov on Vimeo.

Why Resistance Is Essential

2010-03-20T13:38:00.000-04:00

Long Live Palestine

2010-03-20T12:53:00.000-04:00

I am Israel...

2010-03-20T12:40:00.001-04:00

Iran Nabs Top US-NATO Sponsored Terrorist

2010-03-06T20:04:00.013-05:00

By Adel - PeaceMaker
March 06, 2010

Leader of the assassination/terrorist group, Jundallah, Abdul-Malek Rigi, was captured by Iran’s government on February 23, 2010. Iran televised Rigi making a statement that the US funds Jundallah, provides weapons, and assists with logistical management. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-NATO strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil.

The US overthrow of democracies and any other form of government has a long history. Important evidence corroborate the conclusion that the US is engaged in state-sponsored terrorism to overthrow Iran’s government. Consider these facts:

Jundallah’s history of killing people in various acts of terrorism and assassination is not refuted, yet the US does not list this group as “terrorist”.
The US passed the “Iran Freedom and Support Act” to fund groups like Jundallah working to overthrow Iran’s government.
The US Voice of America televised a phone interview with Rigi, introducing him as “leader of the Iranian people’s resistance movement”.
The US overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government in CIA Operation Ajax in 1953; installing the US-compliant dictator Shah Pahlavi who crushed democracy until he was deposed in 1979. The purpose of the US unlawful overthrow was Iran’s request to renegotiate existing oil contracts that provided Iran with only 15% of the profits.
The Iraq’s unlawful War of Aggression and invasion of Iran from 1980 to 1988 was supported by the US, which provided loans, intelligence, the US Navy destroyed Iranian oil platforms, and the US gave political approval of this grossly unlawful attack in the UN Security Council.
The US political-leaders and corporate media contrive that Iranian President Ahmadinejad threatened Israel. This is the same kind of lying propaganda that claimed to support the war with Iraq were not only false, but known to be false at the time they were told.
US policy allows first-strike use of nuclear weapons against countries that could possibly threaten the US and/or our allies in the future. This policy is tailored to fit the above lying rhetoric of Iran threatening Israel.
The US lies that Iran’s lawful and verified civilian nuclear program (guaranteed by its membership within the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) is a threat of being a nuclear weapons program. The US takes all available evidence and constructs rhetoric in complete contradiction, and with no supporting evidence.

The Jundullah organization has long infested the Iran-Pakistan border fomenting ethnic and religious civil war in both Iran and Pakistan, a key part of the US-NATO strategy. There is no doubt that Jundullah is on the US payroll. This fact has been confirmed by Brian Ross of ABC News, the London Daily Telegraph, and by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hersh, who broke the Mai Lai massacre story in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq, reports that the US dedicated $400 million to militant groups to overthrow Iran’s government, including Jundallah.

Jundullah functions as an arm of NATO, a kind of irregular warfare asset similar in some ways to the KLA of Kosovo. Rigi has been reported to have met with Jop de Hoop Scheffer when he was NATO Secretary General, met with various NATO generals operating in Afghanistan, and he may have met with McChrystal himself, a covert ops veteran from Iraq.

Now that Abdul-Malek Rigi has joined his brother Abdulhamed Rigi in Iranian jails, Jundullah has been decapitated, and the NATO strategy has consequently been undermined. Iran has bagged a dangerous terrorist foe. The coming Iranian trial of Rigi may go far towards exposing the real mechanism of terrorism in today’s world, with the US-NATO sitting in the dock next to Rigi.

Haiti Needs 12,000 Doctors, Obama Sent 12,000 Troops

2010-03-02T18:42:00.001-05:00

After the Earthquake, Haiti Can't Get a Break

By Ezili Danto, March 2010

I want the U.S. military invasion of Haiti to stop now. Soldiers are trained to kill, not provide humanitarian relief. And the U.S. military is about domination and conquest, as Haitians know too well.

We lived through a brutal U.S. military occupation from 1915 to 1934. We endured the U.S.-supported Duvalier dictatorships that followed. We saw the hands of the U.S. government in the regime changes of 1991 and 2004 that forced President Aristide from office.

The strong-arm tactics of the U.S. are on display again. Soldiers took over the airport the day after they arrived, over the objections of the Haitians working in the damaged control tower, who were pushed aside like trash.

The U.S. military is using the airport for important things, don’t you see? Those buried under the rubble—hundreds of thousands of homeless Haitians who have not eaten or found clean water to drink when the mountains crumbled on them—can wait.

First, the Americans, Canadians, and Europeans who have been stuck in Haiti for two interminable days must be rescued immediately. Haitians, with nowhere to go, can wait.

The United States has blocked lifesaving first responders from landing, including Haitian doctors and nurses and other rescue teams. It is exploiting this disaster to direct Haiti’s priorities and impose its own agenda.

Right now you need U.S. government clearance to land in Haiti. This is not independence. This is not self-rule.

Haitians are heartbroken and in unspeakable pain. But we are not idiots or under so much duress as to not object to the United States, Canada, and France speeding up their proxy U.N. occupation plans for taking Haitian lands and divvying up Haiti’s oil, gold, iridium, and other mineral resources behind the veil of this emergency relief. The earthquake’s depopulation of the coastal areas of Port-au-Prince may make that acquisition all the easier.

Haiti needs 12,000 doctors. Obama sent 12,000 troops to help us to death.

Haiti is not in conflict or at war with anyone. Haitians are not a violent people. In fact, there’s more violence in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia than there is in Haiti.

And as much as the U.S media and the Pentagon wanted footage of U.S. soldiers rescuing Haitians, the people that could get saved got saved mostly by Haitians frantically using their bare hands to dig through the rubble and lift pulverized concrete in the immediate forty-eight hours after the earthquake. They did what they could to save themselves, as they have been doing since 1503 when the white settlers’ “New World” began.

Go home, U.S. troops. Please.

Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda

2010-02-26T21:01:00.002-05:00

By Gideon Levy | 01.28.2010 | Haaretz

Zionists and government officials conjure a surreal world of spin, lies and propaganda. It makes one wonder if reality exists at all in this cruel and beautiful land...

Israel’s bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party’s Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn’t been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort - never have so many ministers deployed across the globe - is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.

It won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign.

On the eve of his departure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. “There is evil in the world,” he said. “Evil must be stamped out at the beginning.” Some people are “trying to deny the truth.” Lofty words, said by the same person who only the day before, not quite in the same breath, uttered very different words, words of true evil, evil that should be extinguished at the start, evil that Israel is trying to hide.

Netanyahu spoke of a new “migration policy,” one that is evil through and through. He malevolently lumped together migrant workers and wretched refugees - warning that they all endanger Israel, lower our wages, harm our security, make us into a third-world country and bring in drugs. He zealously supported our racist interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has spoken of the migrants as the spreaders of diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS and God knows what else.

No Holocaust speech will erase these words of incitement and slander against migrants. No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.

We have a prime minister who speaks about evil but is building a fence to prevent war refugees from knocking at Israel’s door. A prime minister who speaks about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade, now in its fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions. A prime minister in whose country settlers perpetrate pogroms against innocent Palestinians under the slogan “price tag,” which also has horrific historical connotations, but against whom the state does virtually nothing.

This is the prime minister of a state that arrests hundreds of left-wing protesters against the injustices of the occupation and the war in Gaza, while time grants mass pardons to the right-wingers who demonstrated against the disengagement. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu’s equating Nazi Germany with fundamentalist Iran was no more than cheap propaganda. Talk about “degrading the Holocaust.” Iran isn’t Germany, Ahmedinejad isn’t Hitler and equating them is no less spurious than equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis.

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

How beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask, for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped white-phosphorous bombs on Gaza. How beautiful it would have been if on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu had declared a new policy for integrating refugees instead of expulsion, or lifted the Gaza blockade.

A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.

Ending Unlawful Wars

2010-02-12T20:08:00.008-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker
February 12, 2010

We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the world. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

The Uprising! from PuppetGov on Vimeo.

All human beings are equal in value. God gave all human beings rights that no other person or group can remove. Inherent rights for all human beings include the right to not be killed, the right to political and civil freedom, and the right to do what one chooses as long as no harm is done to others. The purpose of government is to protect the above rights; no more no less.

Humanitarian Imperialism

2010-02-10T19:29:00.001-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker
February 10, 2010

There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil dries up.

Leaving aside the relevant questions of how well in advance the US knew the earthquake was about to occur or was it a HAARP operation carried out by the US, 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. Haiti 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.

In 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration 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 mapping geological data of the Caribbean Basins. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining 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. 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.

Evidence suggests the US Administration may well have more in mind than just earthquake relief for Haiti and the Haitian people. In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain’s Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced discovery of one of the world’s largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a ‘Super-giant’ field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also likely makes Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilization and other nasty operations.

The remarkable geography of Haiti and Cuba and the discovery of world-class oil reserves in the waters off Cuba lend credibility to accounts of major oil discoveries in several parts of Haitian territory. It also could explain why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGOs moved so quickly to remove-- twice-- the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic program for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.

In March 2004, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled ‘Oil in Haiti.’ In it, Michel wrote,

…[I]t has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters that there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. One knows not why they are still untapped. Since the early twentieth century, the physical and political map of the island of Haiti, erected in 1908 by Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo, Tributary Right Artibonite River, better known today as the River Thomonde.

Then in 2010 the financial news site Bloomberg News carried the following:

The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies that included the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said Monday in a telephone interview. ‘A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled,’ said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas-based company that's drilling in Israel.

In an interview with a Santo Domingo online paper, Leopoldo Espaillat Nanita, former head of the Dominican Petroleum Refinery (REFIDOMSA) stated, “There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people.” Haiti’s minerals include gold, the valuable strategic metal iridium and oil, apparently lots of it.

When Aristide was President -- up until his US-backed ouster during the Bush era in 2004 -- he had developed and published in book form his national development plans. The publication of the plan sparked a national debate over Haitian radio and in the media about the future of the country. Aristide’s plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti’s oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters.

Since the ouster of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.

Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, the United States military has taken control of Haiti’s four airports and presently has some 20,000 troops in the country. Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call “security,” than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.

According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control.

In the age of humanitarian imperialism, globalization, financial colonialism and neocolonial-violence obscured behind forced assimilation and cultural imperialism, what exactly the major ‘rescue’ players go shopping in Haiti for: to plunder Haiti’s natural resources and the exploitation of the Haitian people. It’s all hidden, of course, behind the mask of being good and noble humanitarians.

Myths of the Just Wars

2010-02-04T21:10:00.012-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker
February 4, 2010

Howard Zinn:
Myths of the Good Wars...

Myth of a benevolent America...

Myth of benevolent Western Civilization...

Myth of a good government...

The first and greatest heresy in the Christian faith occurred in the third century when Bishop of Hippo Regius, also known as Augustine or St. Austin penned the "Just War Theory" which gave the church's OK to violence perpetuated by the empire and our problems stem from our acceptance of this “mythical system”.

On December 10, 2009, in Oslo, Norway, President Obama espoused the first heresy of Christianity in his Nobel Peace Prize speech when he cited the concept of a "just war" furthering the fallacy "that war is justified”.

The late Historian, Author, Playwright: Howard Zinn Sponsored by Cape Codders for

Peace and Justice Filmed by Paul Hubbard at the Wellfleet Public Library on 9-13-09.

There also is a MYTH of western democracies, which make more wars and creates more elite power concentration within societies. Everywhere the unjust governmental power increases, expands more and more everyday, and so is the level of people voluntary obedience. If you call this trend democracy, be my guest. I suspect that we have been living in a myth of democracy fable up till now… It's slavery in disguise.

In Oslo, President Obama was mindful of Martin Luther King's Nobel speech, but he made no mention of what his peer stated regarding Vietnam, "The true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, is when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition."

War is never necessary, but is an expression of the violence within an individual's heart that inhabits a body with a mind that has failed to evolve and is thus blind to The Divine that indwells all beings and is within all of creation.

For decades, the military built a sense of solidarity out of a singular purpose, the Cold War struggle between free markets and state-planned economies – the shining city on a hill versus the evil empire… Communism… the dark alternative should we fail to unite. The end of the Cold War deprived militant evangelicals of that clarity [and] the emergence of “radical Islam” [became] the object of a new “Cold War."

The roots of American evangelism sprang from the original altar call for Christians to stand up against slavery. What has been passing for Christianity in our military today is the antithesis of what Jesus was all about.

"Everyone but Christians understands that Jesus was nonviolent." ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" King noted:

Too long has The Peace Process been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. We must come to see that justice too long delayed is justice denied.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever and if repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives in the world can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

…its lack of moral legitimacy

2010-02-03T20:33:00.002-05:00

Must-Read

An important story that is not being covered in the American press: Haaretz covers the delegitimization story, Israel’s mounting isolation in the world community. This is called honest reporting.

World isn't buying Israel's explanations anymore

By Aluf Benn

"Your situation isn't good," said a high-ranking European diplomat recently. "No one believes Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and we don't want any connection with [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman. Only a dramatic and surprising diplomatic move, like [former prime minister] Ariel Sharon's disengagement, will change the impression."

A few hours later, Time magazine published an interview with U.S. President Barack Obama, in which he expressed disappointment with Israel's unwillingness to make "bold gestures" toward the Palestinians.

In a speech at a conference not long ago, an Israeli diplomat serving in a European capital touted Israel's hoary PR line, distinguishing between "the only democracy in the Middle East" and its autocratic Arab neighbors. "We share common values," the Israeli told the Europeans. To his surprise, a member of the audience stood up and replied to him: "What common values? We have nothing in common with you."

In diplomatic conversations, Europeans are critical of Israel because of the Gaza blockade, the construction in the Jewish settlements, the home demolitions in East Jerusalem, the pervasive loathing of the right-wing government and even the social gaps and the way Israel is moving away from the European welfare-state model.

The Netanyahu-Lieberman government is nearly always described as "hard-line" in the foreign media. This is not entirely fair: The government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni went to war in Lebanon and Gaza and built thousands of apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement blocs - many more than did Netanyahu, who has refrained from employing military force and has declared a 10-month freeze on settlement construction. But they liked the Kadima government because Olmert and Livni made the right noises about their desire for peace and a final status agreement, whereas they don't believe Netanyahu when he talks about "two states for two peoples." The fact that Olmert and Livni achieved nothing in the negotiations makes no difference. It's the intentions that count.

Netanyahu and his aides have answers to the accusations against Israel. The blame for the Gaza blockade lies squarely with the Palestinians, who chose Hamas to reign over them and kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. "You are worrying about the humanitarian rights of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. You should be worrying about one Israeli who is being held there," Netanyahu's people tell UN representatives.

In East Jerusalem, the government is hiding behind Mayor Nir Barkat and the planning and construction institutions, which are approving building plans for Jews and home demolitions for Palestinians. And for the diplomatic stagnation, it is blaming Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is refusing to renew the talks.

There is one little problem: The world isn't buying Israel's explanations and it isn't prepared to condemn Palestinian obduracy. Obama has split the blame for the stagnation between the two sides and has also taken some of it upon himself ("We raised expectations").

American envoy George Mitchell's appeal to the members of the Quartet that they urge Abbas to return to talks, has gone unanswered. This week he completed another frustrating visit to the region, with zero results.

Obama's approach - to "park" the diplomatic process for lack of achievements and to concentrate on domestic issues - has not surprised Netanyahu. Three months ago, a senior Israeli official said the Obama administration would probably put off the Israeli-Palestinian problem to his second term, explaining: "Now they're weak, they have unemployment and the economic crisis, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, and they aren't emerging from that. They don't have the strength to complete an agreement. In the meantime, the maintenance will continue."

U.S. officials are hoping talks will be renewed within six months. The main thing is that there be some negotiations. They have no expectations of more than that.

Disturbing scenario

The Palestinian Authority is conducting a campaign to isolate Israel, based on the Goldstone report and the hatred for the Netanyahu government. Political scientists Shaul Mishal and Doron Mazza are calling it "the white intifada," which is aimed at enlisting international support for a unilateral declaration of independence in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. In a document they distributed last week, they warn of Israeli complaisance and present a disturbing scenario: The Palestinians declare independence, and Israel refuses to recognize it and is faced with a boycott. Regardless of whether it yields or reacts with force, Israel cannot win, and will also lose control of the process. Therefore the two scholars recommend a preemptive diplomatic move.

Diplomatic isolation can be costly. Former Foreign Ministry director general Gideon Rafael wrote in his memoirs that in the summer of 1973, he felt that the diplomatic stagnation, which was perceived as something taken for granted, and perhaps even desirable, was liable to become "a death trap."

Former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat cut Israel off from its friends in the Third World, proposed a peace initiative to the Americans and was rejected. He then raised the demand for the return of the Sinai Peninsula in the UN Security Council and came up against an American veto.

In his book, "Destination Peace: Three decades of Israeli Foreign Policy, a Personal Memoir" (published in English by Littlehampton Book Services, 1981), Rafael wrote that Israel rejoiced in the veto and did not realize that closing the diplomatic door left Egypt with only one option - war.

In the coming weeks Israel apparently will request an American veto in the Security Council again, in order to bury the Goldstone report. Netanyahu is planning a fourth meeting with Obama, concerning the nuclear security conference in Washington on April 12 and perhaps even before then. The agenda will center on Iran - or "the new Amalek," as Netanyahu called it in Auschwitz on Wednesday. The question is whether alongside his demand that Obama take action against Iran, Netanyahu will also tell him that in exchange, Israel will take some sort of initiative vis-a-vis the Palestinians. This would be in an attempt to persuade the world to believe him and ameliorate Israel's increasing diplomatic isolation.

Confessions

2010-02-01T21:28:00.003-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker
February 1, 2010

Confessions of Israeli and Zionist leaders makes very clear why the conflict started in Palestine over 60 years ago.

Over 700,000 Palestinians (more than half of the population at the time) were expelled in 1948, over 600 towns and villages were ethnically cleansed, and thousands were killed and maimed.

...the crimes continue to this day and so does the unjustified condoning attitude of the so called "civilized" governments of the world.

Below are some other quotes from influential Zionists and Israeli leaders that illustrate that Israel is a nation which was born in, expanded by and is maintained only by brutal and systematic policies of discrimination and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab people since before 1948:

"…spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried away discreetly and circumspectly." -- Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.

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

"It lies upon the people's shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire." Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), on February 12 1952. Radio Israel.

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

"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.

"We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own." -- Maurice Samuels (p.155) wrote in his book, You Gentiles.

"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." -- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin

Defamation

2010-01-30T19:40:00.001-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker

January 30, 2010

'Defamation' by Israeli director Yoav Shamir embarks on a provocative Quest to answer the questions – What is anti-Semitism today? Does it remain a dangerous and immediate threat? Or is it a scare tactic used by right-wing Zionists to discredit their critics? Speaking with an array of people (including the head of the Anti-Defamation League and its fiercest critic, author Norman Finkelstein) and traveling to places like Auschwitz (alongside Israeli school kids) and Brooklyn, (to explore reports of violence), Shamir discovers the realities of anti-Semitism today. His findings are shocking, enlightening and surprisingly often wryly funny.

Abe Foxman amplifies anti-Semitism by focusing so intently on even the most minor incidents, things which American minorities laugh about and shoot right back to bigots.

The general statement of Yoav is that Israelis concentrate far too much on their past persecutions and are actually trained to be fearful nearly everywhere they go, outside of Israel, which is perhaps the intent of such intense indoctrination regimes as are shown in the film. What is so fascinating is the comparison to these youth’s feelings and fears to Jewish youth in the USA, who seem oblivious to even their Jewishness.

If Israeli’s were to put themselves in Palestinians shoes and apply Abe Foxman's standards of anti-Semitism to the real Semites in Palestine, the list of anti-Semitic infractions would wrap around the planet a thousand times and Foxman would be salivating with vehement anger and threats of holocaust denial by Israeli and Americans.

Israel’s right-wing Zionist government is spending a fortune keeping the Israeli people afraid calling it anti-Semitism and inciting hatred around the world toward the Jewish people even more to prove their ideology.

Is there Anti-Semitism? Yes! Is it mostly self inflicted? I would have to say yes! Is it a control mechanism for the Zionists - absolutely! The trip that the kids took was a very expensive indoctrination exercise to instill hatred, and fear against non-Jewish global society.

Remembering Howard Zinn, the People’s Historian

2010-01-29T22:48:00.004-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker

January 29, 2010

I am deeply saddened to hear that an American Historian and activist Howard Zinn, passed away on Wednesday, January 27, 2010. It is a big Loss to all of humanity. Rest in peace Mr. Zinn, I will keep seeing history from the point of view of its victims.

The author of a bestseller, A People's History of the United States, which gave a social progressives view of American history, died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California, his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn told the Associated Press.

Zinn wrote more than 20 books and his plays have been produced around the world, but it is for A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980, which the historian is best known. The book provides a view of American history from the arrival of Christopher Columbus – who Zinn charges with genocide – to Bill Clinton's first term.

"My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality," wrote Zinn in the bestselling book. "But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) – that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

Zinn was a shipyard worker at age 18, later joining the air force during the Second World War. His experiences shaped his opposition to war. He received a host of honors, most recently the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award from New York University for embodying "a vision of peace, persistence in purpose, and inspirational action".

The Zinn Education Project posted on its website. "At 87, he continued to inform and inspire in his presentations across the country, radio interviews, essays, and film-making."

IDF on ‘War-path’ Again

2010-01-25T20:58:00.004-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker
January 25, 2010

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is on the war-path toward Syria and Lebanon once again, a Hezbollah representative warned Saturday in remarks carried by military radio and the Ynet news website. Hezbollah is part of a new coalition government formed in November by Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

"We are heading toward a new confrontation in the north but I don't know when it will happen, just as we did not know when the second Lebanon war would erupt," said Yossi Peled, an Israeli general and politician, and former Aluf of the Northern Command in the IDF.

He was referring to the devastating war Israel fought with Hezbollah in 2006, which killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Syria and Hezbollah have gone on high alert anticipating an attack, the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat daily reported. According to the report, Hezbollah has been monitoring with caution the reinforcement of IDF troops along the Lebanese border.

Hezbollah's deputy secretary general, Naeem Kassem, said the group was preparing to retaliate although it had no proof of any such Israeli plans.

Syria has meanwhile begun to call up reserves troops, including nationals residing in Lebanon.

The IDF responded to the report by denying any plans for renewing conflict against Lebanon.

Earthquake or HAARP

2010-01-24T19:50:00.005-05:00

By Adel – PeaceMaker

January 24, 2010

An unconfirmed report by the Russian Northern Fleets says the United States Navy test of one of its 'earthquake weapons' which was to be used in a series of deadly earthquakes in Iran to topple the current Islamic system in the country, went 'horribly wrong' and caused the catastrophic quake in Haiti, claiming more than 150,000 lives.

The report also says earlier this month the US carried out a similar test in the Pacific Ocean, which also caused another 6.5 magnitude earthquake in an area near the town of Eureka, California. The quake resulted in no deaths or serious injury, but left many buildings damaged.

Some sources have even linked the US military of employing such devices in Afghanistan to trigger the devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the country back in March, 2002, and the 7.8 magnitude quake that shook the Chinese city of Sichuan in May 12, 2008 with the program.

The report introduced the possibility that the US Navy may have had "full knowledge" of the damage that the test could cause. It also speculated that knowledge of the possible outcome was why the US military had pre-positioned the deputy commander of US Southern Command, General P. K. Keen, on the island so that he could oversee relief efforts if the need arose.

The tests are believed to be part of the United States' High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), has also been associated with weather anomalies that cause floods, droughts and hurricanes.

Since the late 1970's, the US has 'greatly advanced' the state of its earthquake weapons to the point where it is now utilizing devices that employ a Tesla Electromagnetic Pulse, Plasma and Sonic technology, along with 'shockwave bombs.'

In 1997, US Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed concern about activities that "can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."

In 1966, J.F. MacDonald, published papers on the use of environmental control technologies for military purposes. The most profound comment he made was, "the key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy."

The 1970 book, BETWEEN TWO AGES, by Zbigniew Brzezinski stated:

"Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised... TECHNIQUES OF WEATHER MODIFICATION COULD BE EMPLOYED TO PRODUCE PROLONGED PERIODS OF DROUGHT OR STORM"

The US military has been and still is still working on weather warfare methods, which it euphemistically calls weather modification. But the US government, however, stick to its position that HAARP is merely a program aimed at analyzing the Earth's ionosphere for the purpose of developing communications and surveillance technology.

We Are All Global Citizens

2010-01-20T19:52:00.003-05:00

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in…” (Matthew 25:35)

By Adel – PeaceMaker

January 20, 2010

The pursuit of "illegal aliens" has become a high government priority. The federal prosecutors convicted Walt Staton (A member of the group No Mas Muertes/No More Deaths) on June 4, 2009 of littering. His "littering" consisted of leaving jugs of fresh drinkable water in an area near the Mexican border for entering aliens who might otherwise have died from dehydration.

After Staton left a cache of water bottles in Arizona’s Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge in the hope they would come in handy to any sun-stricken illegal immigrants who might pass that way, the Federal prosecutors went after him and got him convicted of — littering.

The 27-year-old graduate student was sentenced to on year probation and 300 hours of community service, and banned from the Arizona’s Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge in which he had done his evil deeds.

”I’m not going to do any hours or pay any fine,” Staton said. “This is a matter of international human rights.”

“...my actions are better classified as ‘civil initiative.’ When a government fails to respect and protect basic human rights—or, worse, is itself a violator—it is the responsibility of citizens to act in defense of those rights,” Staton wrote.

The logic behind making it a criminal act to give someone a drink of water is deplorable. If “illegal aliens" die from thirst this will make crossing into the U.S. less attractive, and reduce the burden of policing the border.

It is clear what the next step might be: make it a criminal act to give or sell food to anybody who cannot document that they are a citizen or here with official government approval.

Where do we draw the line?

An alternative would be to regard every human being on the planet as a member of the human race and a citizen of the world. Inside the United States no matter what state we were born in, we automatically acquire state citizenship merely by moving there.

There is no reason why this system could not work at the world level.

Does anybody really want to live in a world where it is illegal to give a fellow human being a drink of water?

Might Without Morality

2010-01-18T20:12:00.002-05:00

… let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence

By Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

April 4, 1967. New York, N.Y.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don’t mix," they say. "Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?" they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren’t you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that "America will be" are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954, in 1945 rather, after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China—for whom the Vietnamese have no great love—but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954, they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, (Yes) for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ’tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Militarization of Emergency Relieve

2010-01-16T20:36:00.004-05:00

Excerpts from The Militarization of Emergency Aid to Haiti: Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?
By Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 15, 2010

The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country's predicament. Haiti has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Haiti's history, its colonial past has been erased.

The Haitian people have exhibited a high degree of solidarity, courage and social commitment.

Helping one another and acting with consciousness: under very difficult conditions, in the immediate wake of the disaster, citizens rescue teams were set up spontaneously.

The militarization of relief operations will weaken the organizational capabilities of Haitians to rebuild and reinstate the institutions of civilian government which have been destroyed. It will also encroach upon the efforts of the international medical teams and civilian relief organizations.

A Heritage Foundation report summarizes the substance of America's mission in Haiti: "The earthquake has both humanitarian and U.S. national security implications [requiring] a rapid response that is not only bold but decisive, mobilizing U.S. military, governmental, and civilian capabilities for both a short-term rescue and relief effort and a longer-term recovery and reform program in Haiti."

The main players in America's "humanitarian operation" are the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which it has also been entrusted in channeling food aid to Haiti, which is distributed by the World Food Program.

When presidents Obama and Préval spoke on the phone, there were no reports of negotiations between the two governments regarding the entry and deployment of US troops on Haitian soil. The decision was taken and imposed unilaterally by Washington. The total lack of a functioning government in Haiti was used to legitimize, on humanitarian grounds, the sending in of a powerful military force, which has de facto taken over several governmental functions.

In 1994, the US sponsored military interventions "was not intended to restore democracy in Haiti. Quite the contrary: it was carried out to prevent a popular insurrection against the military Junta and its neoliberal cohorts."

U.S. and allied troops remained in the country until 1999. The Haitian armed forces were disbanded and the US State Department hired a mercenary company DynCorp to provide "technical advice" in restructuring the Haitian National Police (HNP).

In the months leading up to the 2004 Coup d'Etat, US Special Forces and the CIA were training a paramilitary death squad unit composed of the former Tonton Macoute of the Duvalier era. It was a well armed, trained and equipped paramilitary unit integrated by former members of Le Front pour l'avancement et le progrès d'Haiti (FRAPH), the "plain clothes" death squads, involved in mass killings of civilians and political assassinations during the CIA sponsored 1991 military coup, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) was set up in the wake of the US sponsored coup d’état in February 2004 and the kidnapping and deportation of the democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide. The coup was instigated by the US with the support of France and Canada.

The unspoken mission of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with US military installations throughout Latin America is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes, namely US proxy governments, committed to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal policy agenda. While US military personnel will at the outset be actively involved in emergency and disaster relief, this renewed US military presence in Haiti will be used to establish a foothold in the country as well pursue America's strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, which are largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.

The objective is not to work towards the rehabilitation of the national government, the presidency, the parliament, all of which has been decimated by the earthquake. Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, America's design has been to gradually dismantle the Haitian State, restore colonial patterns and obstruct the functioning of a democratic government. In the present context, the objective is not only to do away with the government but also to revamp the mandate of the MINUSTAH, of which the headquarters have been destroyed.

Prior to the earthquake, there were, according to US military sources, some 60 US military personnel in Haiti. From one day to the next, an outright military surge has occurred: 10,000 troops, marines, Special Forces, intelligence operatives, etc., not to mention private mercenary forces on contract to the Pentagon.

The contingent of US forces under SOUTHCOM combined with those of MINUSTAH brings foreign military presence in Haiti to close to 20,000 in a country of 9 million people. In comparison in Afghanistan, prior to Obama's military surge, combined US and NATO forces were of the order of 70,000 for a population of 28 million. In other words, on a per capita basis there will be more troops in Haiti than in Afghanistan.

The first mission of SOUTHCOM will be to take control of what remains of the country's communications, transport and energy infrastructure. Already, the airport is under de facto US control. In all likelihood, the activities of MINUSTAH which from the outset in 2004 have served US foreign policy interests, will be coordinated with those of SOUTHCOM, namely the UN mission will be put under de facto control of the US military.

In all likelihood the humanitarian operation will be used as a pretext and justification to establish a more permanent US military presence in Haiti.

A Nation Cries Out

2010-01-14T19:33:00.008-05:00

“I want to extend my profoundest condolences and sympathy to the entire nation of Haiti in this most difficult of times.”

By Adel – PeaceMaker
January 14, 2010

Tuesday afternoon, January 12, 2010, the worst earthquake in 200 years - 7.0 in magnitude - struck less than ten miles from the Caribbean city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The initial quake was followed by twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0. Structures of all kinds were damaged or collapsed, from homes to national landmarks. Millions are displaced, and thousands are feared dead as rescue teams from all over the world are now descending on Haiti to help.

Indeed, for a country and a people who are no strangers to hardship and suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible. It is a tragedy that defies expression; a tragedy that compels all people to the highest levels of human compassion and solidarity.

America's Third World War

2010-01-11T20:27:00.004-05:00

How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against third world countries.

John Stockwell, ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. He spent 13 years in the agency, and was the highest level CIA officer to testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6 million people have died in CIA covert operations. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

When the United States doesn't like a government, they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of a country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the US's terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d’état, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

The United States CIA is responsible for doing these things, on a massive scale, to people of the world today. They are running more and more covert operations, destabilizing almost a third of the countries in the world today; all of this is being done in our name as Americans.

“The people of the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them” ~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower

From Conquest to Bloodbath

2010-01-08T20:26:00.001-05:00

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them…"

By Adel – PeaceMaker

January 8, 2010

When the additional troops President Obama sent (21,000 troops in March and 30,000 more in December) to Afghanistan, the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties.

On December 29th, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released figures indicating that Afghan civilian deaths had risen by 10% in the first ten months of 2009, from 1,838 during the same period a year earlier to 2,038.

On the same day the UNAMA report was made public, a U.S. air assault killed four Afghans in the northern province of Baghlan. A father and his three sons were among the casualties. The raid also wounded eight other innocent civilians.

The following day a NATO missile strike killed five to seven Afghan civilians in Helmand province, including three children. Later a spokesman for the governor of the province confirmed that seven innocent civilians had been killed and wounded.

Far more atrocious news broke the same day, December 30th, according to the next day's edition of The Times of London, "American-led troops were accused...of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead" in Kunar province near the Pakistani border. The victims were innocent children between the ages of 11 and 17.

A statement was later issued on the official website of the Afghan president that said in part: "That a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead."

In a telephone interview, the slain students' headmaster (of the local school), described the details of President Obama's and top U.S. and NATO military commander Stanley McChrystal's new special operations-led counterinsurgency approach as it was applied to his pupils:

“Seven students were in one room," said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building."

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq (the farmer) heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) attempted to evade responsibility for the murders by claiming "the raid was a joint operation and it was still under investigation," which was quickly exposed when Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zaher Azimy said, "Afghan troops had not taken part."

These raids which result in carnage follow a pattern that has become sadly familiar in Afghanistan over recent years. As is often the case, international forces insisted militants were killed, but the victims end up being civilians.

With the increase of U.S. and other NATO nations' troops to over 150,000 in the near future, the killing of Afghan civilians will grow exponentially.

On the other side of the border, Washington's and NATO's proclaimed Afghanistan and Pakistan (Af-Pak) war is no less murderous.

The Dawn Media Group, reported that Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal areas between January 1st and December 31st, 2009.

For each so-called-terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90% of those killed in missile strikes were civilians – On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12% every week and almost two people every day.

The U.S. launched deadly drone missile attacks in Pakistan's North Waziristan on both ends of the New Year. On December 31st "Five people were killed and at least two more injured" and on January 1st "A US pilotless aircraft fired a missile into Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal district" and "the attack destroyed a car and killed three people."

In the second case a regional security official was quoted by Reuters as stating "The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity."

On January 3rd five more people were killed in the same part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by American drone attacks. However much the U.S., NATO and the Western media attempt to sanitize these killings, the Pakistani government figure - that over 99 percent of the victims are civilians - is a damning indictment of what can only be characterized as wanton war crimes.

Over eight years of bombing villages, conducting deadly raids against civilian, and extending the war into Pakistan have produced nothing but death and destruction. Afghan and Pakistani civilian’s deaths have climbed equally. They will rise even more in 2010 as the war, in its 10th year, is broadened further and intensified.