It is so rare to see any actual reporting come out of the mainstream media that I want to give props to CNN for this story:
The reporters did as good a job as the best bloggers, and used the resources of a mainstream outlet to create killer graphics … and to force the spokesman for a very powerful government agency to look ridiculous.
Kudos to CNN.
The Founding Fathers weren’t particularly anti-Islam.
But millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.
According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:
“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…
There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.
And British Prime Minister Tony Blair long-time mentor, advisor and confidante said:
“Tony’s Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better.”
Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair’s mentor, says that his religion gave him a “total belief in what’s right and what’s wrong”, leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as “a moral cause”…
Anti-war campaigners criticised remarks Mr Blair made in 2006, suggesting that the decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.
Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture. See this and this.
This all revolves around what is called Dispensationalism. So popular is Dispensationalism that Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series has sold 65 million copies.
Dispensationalists include the following mega-pastors and their churches:
They are supported by politicians such as:
Dr. Timothy Webber – an evangelical Christian who has served as a teacher of church history and the history of American religion at Denver Seminary and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Vice-President at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, IL, and President of Memphis Theological Seminary in Tennessee – notes:
In a recent Time/CNN poll, more than one-third of Americans said that since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, they have been thinking more about how current events might be leading to the end of the world.
While only 36 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible is God’s Word and should be taken literally, 59 percent say they believe that events predicted in the Book of Revelation will come to pass. Almost one out of four Americans believes that 9/11 was predicted in the Bible, and nearly one in five believes that he or she will live long enough to see the end of the world. Even more significant for this study, over one-third of those Americans who support Israel report that they do so because they believe the Bible teaches that the Jews must possess their own country in the Holy Land before Jesus can return.
Millions of Americans believe that the Bible predicts the future and that we are living in the last days. Their beliefs are rooted in dispensationalism, a particular way of understanding the Bible’s prophetic passages, especially those in Daniel and Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. They make up about one-third of America’s 40 or 50 million evangelical Christians and believe that the nation of Israel will play a central role in the unfolding of end-times events. In the last part of the 20th century, dispensationalist evangelicals become Israel’s best friends-an alliance that has made a serious geopolitical difference.
***
Starting in the 1970s, dispensationalists broke into the popular culture with runaway best-sellers, and a well-networked political campaign to promote and protect the interests of Israel. Since the mid-1990s, tens of millions of people who have never seen a prophetic chart or listened to a sermon on the second coming have read one or more novels in the Left Behind series, which has become the most effective disseminator of dispensationalist ideas ever.
***
During the early 1980s the Israeli Ministry of Tourism recruited evangelical religious leaders for free “familiarization” tours. In time, hundreds of evangelical pastors got free trips to the Holy Land. The purpose of such promotional tours was to enable people of even limited influence to experience Israel for themselves and be shown how they might bring their own tour group to Israel. The Ministry of Tourism was interested in more than tourist dollars: here was a way of building a solid corps of non-Jewish supporters for Israel in the United States by bringing large numbers of evangelicals to hear and see Israel’s story for themselves. The strategy caught on.
***
Shortly after the Six-Day War, elements within the Israeli government saw the potential power of the evangelical subculture and began to mobilize it as a base of support that could influence American foreign policy. The Israeli government sent Yona Malachy of its Department of Religious Affairs to the United States to study American fundamentalism and its potential as an ally of Israel. Malachy was warmly received by fundamentalists and was able to influence some of them to issue strong pro-Israeli manifestos. By the mid-1980s, there was a discernible shift in the Israeli political strategy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish state’s major lobbying group in Washington, D.C., started re-aligning itself with the American political right-wing, including Christian conservatives. Israel’s timing was perfect. It began working seriously with American dispensationalists at the precise moment that American fundamentalists and evangelicals were discovering their political voice.
***
Probably the largest pro-Israel organization of its kind is the National Unity Coalition for Israel, which was founded by a Jewish woman who learned how to get dispensationalist support. NUCI opposes “the establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of Israel.”
***
In their commitment to keep Israel strong and moving in directions prophesied by the Bible, dispensationalists are supporting some of the most dangerous elements in Israeli society. They do so because such political and religious elements seem to conform to dispensationalist beliefs about what is coming next for Israel. By lending their support-both financial and spiritual-to such groups, dispensationalists are helping the future they envision come to pass.
***
Dispensationalists believe that the Temple is coming too; and their convictions have led them to support the aims and actions of what most Israelis believe are the most dangerous right-wing elements in their society, people whose views make any compromise necessary for lasting peace impossible. Such sentiments do not matter to the believers in Bible prophecy, for whom the outcome of the quarrelsome issue of the Temple Mount has already been determined by God.
Since the end of the Six-Day War, then, dispensationalists have increasingly moved from observers to participant-observers. They have acted consistently with their convictions about the coming Last Days in ways that make their prophecies appear to be self-fulfilling.
***
As Paul Boyer has pointed out, dispensationalism has effectively conditioned millions of Americans to be somewhat passive about the future and provided them with lenses through which to understand world events. Thanks to the sometimes changing perspectives of their Bible teachers, dispensationalists are certain that trouble in the Middle East is inevitable, that nations will war against nations, and that the time is coming when millions of people will die as a result of nuclear war, the persecution of Antichrist, or as a result of divine judgment. Striving for peace in the Middle East is a hopeless pursuit with no chance of success.
***
For the dispensational community, the future is determined. The Bible’s prophecies are being fulfilled with amazing accuracy and rapidity. They do not believe that the Road Map will-or should-succeed. According to the prophetic texts, partitioning is not in Israel’s future, even if the creation of a Palestinian state is the best chance for peace in the region. Peace is nowhere prophesied for the Middle East, until Jesus comes and brings it himself. The worse thing that the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations can do is force Israel to give up land for a peace that will never materialize this side of the second coming. Anyone who pushes for peace in such a manner is ignoring or defying God’s plan for the end of the age.
***
It seems clear that dispensationalism is on a roll, that its followers feel they are riding the wave of history into the shore of God’s final plan. Why should they climb back into the stands when being on the field of play is so much more fun and apparently so beneficial to the game’s outcome? As [one dispensationalist group's] advertisement read, “Don’t just read about prophecy when you can be part of it.”
Most Americans confuse Zionism and Judaism.
But many devout Jews are against Zionism, and Zionists can be Christian.
Those who say that criticizing Zionism is anti-semitic are misleading people for their own ulterior motives which have nothing to do with ensuring the safety of the Jewish people.
Israeli Zionists are no more true to the cultural heritage of the Jewish people than Christian Zionists are.
Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.
Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.
Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli. Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that:
A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured
(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers).
Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:
“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer)
Moreover, Strauss said:
Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).
What does this have to do with religion?
Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.
As Wikipedia notes:
In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.
So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?
I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Israel. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.
They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, so as to promote war …
Postscript 1: While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s – actions.
University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out:
Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.
And the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
Postscript 2: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways. And because Neocons are not conservative, nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.
Postscript 3: Most evangelicals are not dispensionalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.
David Swanson (author of Day Break and War Is A Lie, who runs the websites DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org):
The war drums are growing very loud.
For example, the former head of Mossad – who has been strongly opposed to war against Iran – has now thrown in the towel, and more or less said that war is inevitable after the car bombs in India, Thailand and Georgia (even though it is not clear that Iran is guilty for those attacks).
But AP notes:
[Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Ronald] Burgess tells senators Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.
[Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper says it’s “technically feasible” that Tehran could produce a nuclear weapon in one or two years, if its leaders decide to build one, “but practically not likely.”
Indeed, Iran has not attacked another country in hundreds of years. (In the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was the initial aggressor.)
Moreover, American, Israeli and European leaders all say that Iran has not even decided whether or not to build a nuclear bomb.
And – as the Christian Science Monitor notes – even if Iran did build a bomb – it probably wouldn’t pose much of a danger:
Shrill warnings of war or imminent apocalypse over Iran’s nuclear program have never been so strident, or so ominous.
A window is closing fast, the narrative goes, to prevent a fanatical and suicidal religious regime from acquiring the ultimate tools of Armageddon: nuclear weapons. Within months, some politicians claim, either Israel, the United States, or both may have no choice but to attack Iran to remove this “existential threat” to the Jewish state.
The world is facing another Hitler, declares Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and this moment of decision is akin to the eve of World War II. Iran is a threat to Israel and “a real danger to humanity as a whole,” warns Israeli President Shimon Peres.
The tone on the US presidential campaign trail is no less dire.
***
In fact, say analysts and nonproliferation experts who have studied the effect of the bomb on countries, coexisting with a nuclear-armed Iran – or at least a nuclear-capable Iran – may well be possible, even inevitable, whether a military strike delays that outcome or not.
Analysts say Iran is not an irrational, suicidal actor that can’t be deterred. Nor do they believe it is determined to destroy Israel at all costs. A recent Israeli think tank simulation of “the day after” an Iranian nuclear test came to the same conclusion: that nuclear annihilation will not automatically result.
***
If Iran were to become a nuclear power, the most immediate question would be what it means for Israel, where warnings have reached histrionic heights.
“Absolutely nothing will happen,” says Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli historian and author of some 20 books on military strategy. “Israel has what it takes to deter Iran, and the Iranians know it.”
Mr. Van Creveld is implying that Israel’s own nuclear arsenal of an estimated 200 warheads would prevent any Iranian first strike. Israel has the only such arsenal in the Middle East, and – unlike Iran’s program – it has never been subject to UN inspection or safeguards.
“Say they build one bomb – it’s not good enough. They need how many – 2, 3, 5, 10, 20? And that will take them a long time, so it’s all nonsense,” says Van Creveld. Iran is “not going to commit suicide by dropping the bomb – or even threatening to drop the bomb – on us.”
***
In Israel, even talking about living with a nuclear-armed Iran has long been taboo because it might appear to concede that what the US, Israel, and Europe have declared “unacceptable” is, in fact, acceptable. Yet that was the scenario of a simulation last October by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an Israeli think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, that gave insights into what might happen across the region if Iran became a nuclear state.
The surprising result, the day after a hypothetical Iranian nuclear test, was not war. Instead, all the main players – from Washington to Moscow to Tel Aviv – adjusted rather easily to the new reality, with few dramatic changes in behavior.
Even Iran, rather than wielding its handful of new atomic bombs as a sword of Damocles over a fearful region, attempted “to use them to reach an agreement with the major powers to improve its strategic standing,” according to the INSS report on the simulation published in January.
“The sky won’t fall the day after,” says Yoel Guzansky, a research fellow at INSS who shaped the simulation and was an Iran specialist in the Israeli prime minister’s office for four years until 2009.
***
NATO says it is “unlikely” that Iran would pledge nuclear protection of its proxies like Hezbollah – and makes no mention of sharing such hard-won nuclear technology with them, which is a frequent refrain of hawks and doomsday politicians.
[Geneva-based Iran specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Shahram] Chubin states in his book on Iran’s nuclear ambitions that “there is no reason to believe that Iran today, any more than Saddam Hussein earlier, would transfer WMD [weapons of mass destruction] technology to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or Hezbollah.”
Likewise, proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione, in his 2007 book “Bomb Scare,” points out that nations like Iran and North Korea are “not the most likely sources for terrorists since their stockpiles, if any, are small and exceedingly precious, and hence well guarded.”
“Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.–Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
- Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838.
This is part 2 of the following 4-part series:
Part 1: Why Occupy? A government/economics teacher explains
Part 2: How a government teacher easily proves Occupy’s claim of US War Crimes (you’re reading it)
Part 3: How an economics teacher presents Occupy’s economic argument, victory
Part 4: Open proposal for US revolution: expose corporate media as propaganda (a previous version until I update it)
Important history that makes crimes in the present easy to see and understand:
Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now (6-part series)
Occupy is a leaderless movement. Conversations evolve and develop main interests. That said, I’m confident a main interest is for the 99% to recognize and end crimes that center in war and money, remove the criminals from authority/power to harm, and enact policies that benefit 100% of Earth’s inhabitants.
This article explains and documents US crimes of war. At stake are millions of lives, billions who will be helped or harmed, and trillions of our dollars.
Let’s look at the evidence through 6 sections: war law, recognized facts of US wars, expert testimony, expert historical testimony, lying rhetoric for war on Iran, US media propaganda.
Summary: US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “emperor has no clothes” unlawful because they are in Orwellian opposition to war law. The US engages in further criminal war on Libya, and criminal drone wars on Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Current US war rhetoric for more criminal wars on Syria and Iran mirrors earlier lying propaganda, but now darkly includes use of nuclear weapons in official first-strike policy.
These obvious US War Crimes are thinly veiled by corporate media propaganda; six mega-media corporations that control ~90% of US “reporting.” As you learned in high school history, all historical empires and aggressors used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. The US of today joins their company.
The obvious solution is for the 99% to recognize US wars as criminal, demand and accomplish the arrests of the criminals, and build a brighter future.
War law: The one law of when war is lawful or criminal is crystal-clear in letter and intent, and easily understood with just a few moments of attention. This is a summary; follow this link for the detailed documentation. Only by understanding the law can you definitively see the Orwellian condition of unlawful US wars that these experts claim.
After two world wars, the US led the creation of an international treaty to forever end war as a foreign policy option: the UN Charter. The US Constitution states under Article 6 that treaties are “supreme law;” that is, an explicit Constitutional requirement for US government. Importantly, all US military and government are sworn by their Oaths to support and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The UN is not “global government” because it has only one area of legal authority: to prevent unlawful Wars of Aggression. War law allows for a nation’s armed attack only for self-defense when under attack by another nation’s government. Of course, domestic law enforcement and military can be used to stop domestic violent crimes.
If another nation’s government has not used armed attacks, it is illegal to attack them.
That’s war law. Again, US war laws explained has the documentation, as well as for parts of the next section of facts of US wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Additional documentation for the following summary is here: Are US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan well-intended mistakes? What we now know from the evidence.
Recognized facts of US wars: No nation’s government attacked the US on 9/11. The US acknowledges the Afghanistan government had nothing to do with 9/11. The UN Security Council issued two Resolutions after 9/11 (1368 and 1373) for international cooperation for factual discovery, arrests, and prosecutions of the 9/11 criminals. The Afghan government said they would arrest any suspect upon presentation of evidence of criminal involvement. The US rejected these Resolutions, and violated the letter and intent of the UN Charter by armed attack and invasion of Afghanistan.
The US government acknowledges Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The UN Security Council issued a standing cease fire that no single nation could violate by resuming armed attacks. The UN Security Council also resolved for weapons inspections that were nearly complete when the US violated the cease fire, weapons inspections, and letter and intent of the UN Charter with armed attack.
In addition to the illegality of US wars that the evidence so far definitively proves, we know from the disclosed evidence of our own government that all claims for current US wars were known to be lies as they were told to the American public and not “mistaken intelligence.” Read this to verify; here’s the summary:
There were four basic claims of fact presented by political “leadership” to invade Iraq:
1. Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), a scary-sounding name for specific chemical and biological weapons.
2. The US intercepted aluminum tubes that could only be used to refine nuclear material; irrefutable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear weapons program.
3. Saddam had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger; more evidence that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons development.
4. Saddam had links to Al Qaeda, the alleged terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11.
Here’s what we know about the evidence from which those claims were made. For my complete briefing with additional helpful information, read here, here, and browse here.
1. George Tenet, Director of the CIA, acknowledged that all US intelligence agency reports “never said there was an imminent threat.” This was based on a long history of intelligence reports, the facts that the chemical and biological weapons under consideration were relatively weak without a delivery system, and that Iraq was highly motivated NOT to use them against the US given their understanding such use would provoke war with the world’s most powerful military.
2. The Bush administration claim of aluminum tubes that could only be used as centrifuges to refine fissionable material for nuclear weapons is directly refuted by the best expert witnesses available, the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Their conclusion is that the tubes in question had diameters too small, the tubes were too thick, using aluminum as the material would be “a huge step backwards,” and the surface was anodized that made them impossible to serve this purpose. They also found that the tubes were easily explained for conventional use, as the specifications perfectly matched tubing for other purposes. The Senate Committee on Intelligence agreed that this claim had no basis from any available evidence. See also here.
3. This claim, repeated by President Bush in the 2003 State of the Union Address, was based on the “Niger documents.” These papers were written in grammatically poor French, had a “childlike” forgery of the Niger President’s signature, and had a document signed by a foreign minister who had been out of office for 14 years prior to the date on the document. The forgeries showed-up shortly after the Niger embassy in Rome was robbed, with the only missing items being stationery and Niger government stamps. The same stationery and stamps were used for the forged documents. The CIA warned President Bush on at least three occasions to not make the claim due to the ridiculous evidence. In addition, if Saddam really was making an illegal uranium purchase, it’s likely that both Saddam and the Niger government officials would insist on not having a written record that would document the crime. Republican US Ambassador to Niger, Joseph Wilson, confirmed this information and reported in detail to Vice President Cheney’s office and the CIA.
4. As to the claim of a relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, all US intelligence agencies reported that no such relationship existed (and here).
Some war liars argue that UN Security Council Resolution 687 from 1991 authorizes resumption of force from the previous Gulf War. This resolution declared a formal cease-fire; which means exactly what it says: stop the use of force. The resolution was declared by UNSC and held in their jurisdiction; that is, no individual nation has authority to supersede UNSC’s power to continue or change the status of the cease-fire (further explanation here). The idea that the US and/or UK can authorize use of force under a UNSC cease-fire is as criminal as your neighbor shooting one of your family members and claiming that because police have authority to shoot dangerous people he can do it.
As for Afghanistan, after the attacks of 9/11, the US government requested the cooperation of the Afghanistan government for extradition of Osama bid Laden to be charged with the 9/11 attacks. The Afghan government agreed, as per usual cooperative international law, as soon as the US government provided evidence of bin Laden’s involvement.The US government refused to provide any evidence. The Afghan government refused US troops entering their country and extradition until evidence was provided, and made their argument to the world press for the rule of law to apply to the US extradition request. The US invaded Afghanistan without providing evidence and without UN Security Council approval. President Bush stated, “There’s no need to discuss evidence of innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”
Expert testimony: International law professor Francis Boyle from his 2002 article, Is Bush’s War Illegal? Let us Count the Ways:
“The precedent again goes back to the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 when the lawyers for the Nazi defendants argued that we, the Nazi government had a right to go to war in self-defense as we saw it, and no one could tell us any differently. Of course that preposterous argument was rejected by Nuremberg. It is very distressing to see some of the highest level of officials of our country making legal arguments that were rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal.”
Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton:
“An objective observer would reach the conclusion that this Iraq war is a War of Aggression, and as such, that it amounts to a Crime against Peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted and punished at the Nuremberg trials conducted shortly after the Second World War.”
Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan responding to the direct question whether the Iraq War is illegal:
“I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter… from the charter point of view, it was illegal.”
In the January 2010 UK Chilcot Inquiry, testimony revealed that all 27 UK Foreign Affairs lawyers were in agreement that the US/UK war on Iraq was an unlawful War of Aggression. Their unanimous professional legal assessment before the war began was rejected without public disclosure of their work and public debate.
Please let this last one penetrate: among 27 professional lawyers with expertise in international law, not one could find a reasonable argument that US/UK war on Iraq was lawful. Not one. Not one argument. And the US 1% in politics and media lie in omission to never mention it.
Daniel Ellsberg was the top whistle-blower of unlawful US acts in the Vietnam War, including the government-created lies to initiate, continue, and expand the war into neighboring countries. He writes and lectures that current US wars are also all founded upon obvious lies, unlawful, and in direct violation of the US Constitution.
Expert historical testimony: President Kennedy warned of the need of public awareness that political leaders will lie on the world stage:
“No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion.”
President George Washington’s Farewell Address, the culmination of his 45 years of political experience, warned of the primary threat to America as “the impostures of pretended patriotism” from people within our own government who would destroy Constitutional limits in order to obtain tyrannical power:
“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.”
Young Abraham Lincoln wrote eloquently to defend the US Constitution from unlawful tyrants within our own government. In Congress, he spoke powerfully and truthfully that the President’s claims for armed attack and invasion of a foreign country were lies. Although war-mongers slurred Lincoln’s name at the time and he lost re-election, history proved his powerful and unpopular words correct in asserting the President of the US was a war-mongering liar:
“I carefully examined the President’s messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point. The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him… Now I propose to try to show, that the whole of this, — issue and evidence — is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.”
Lincoln also wrote that “pre-emptive” wars, such as the US engages in now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and threatens for Iran, were lies and “war at pleasure.” Indeed, many of the Founding Fathers’ strongest admonitions were to guard against usurpation of power from within our own government.
General Smedley Butler (and here) was the most honored man in Marine Corps history upon his retirement after 34 years of service around the world, and privy to top secret war planning conversations. He wrote and publicly spoke that the purpose of US wars is never for democracy or national defense, but for political and economic control for millions and billions in profits for America’s leading “bankers, industrialists, and speculators.” General Butler asserted that all US wars is a “racket:” a deception whereby blood money from American taxpayers to “insiders” is always disguised as noble and necessary ventures. Americans are propagandized into paying again and again, and succeeding generations of loyal and gullible men unwittingly serve as the muscle for oligarchic profits. His recommendation to end war was to end its profit motive:
“Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers – yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
…Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.”
It’s important to distinguish General Butler’s expert testimony concerning a subjective analysis of motive from the objective fact of current unlawful US wars proved by the crystal-clear letter of the laws. The strength of my proposal for Revolution to end unlawful wars is based upon the independently verifiable evidence that is as “emperor has no clothes” obvious as a pitch ten feet over the batter’s head is nowhere close to a strike, and as obvious as Jim Crow laws being in violation of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
My point in briefly reviewing testimony of Presidents Kennedy, Washington, Lincoln and General Butler is to communicate that the Revolution to end unlawful wars is not only founded in current law, but among the most important concerns throughout US history to safeguard the nation from propaganda-facilitated unconstitutional acts for oligarchic power and profit.
Lying rhetoric for war on Iran: In irony of our history and law, there is no end in sight to current US propagandized unlawful wars. Fear-mongers’ use of “national security” rhetoric to attack and invade resource-rich and weaker nations continues. For example, in April 2010, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell officially stated attacking Iran is “always an option,” in Orwellian repudiation to the UN Charter and his Oath of Office to defend the US Constitution that recognizes the UN Charter as having equal force as Constitutional law. You’ve probably heard and read many reputations of “all options on the table;” meaning that the US claims dictatorial power outside of any law. As Princeton Professor Frankfurt properly assesses in his best-seller: this is bullshi*. We cannot be proud of American government without revolutionizing this condition of official lies that the US can attack, destroy, and kill with our dollars under our American flag upon the dictate (dictatorship) of the leader rather than under rule of law.
Upon examination, the war-mongering to attack Iran is composed of Orwellian and “emperor has no clothes” obvious lies. The titles tell the stories, the articles have full documentation:
US overthrew Iran’s democracy 1953-1979, helped Iraq invade 1980-1988, now lies for more war (and an analogy if the US were the victim of empire)
What Iran’s president said about Israel, and how US War Criminal 1% lie for war
What IAEA reports on Iran’s nuclear energy/medicine, how US War Criminal 1% lie
US constantly violates war law: arrest Obama before ‘false flag’ war on Iran
Analogy: US wars on Iraq, Iran as US criminal gangster “business”
If the US was attacked by a criminal empire: analogy to confront US-Iran history
US media propaganda: Once you confirm the above facts as “emperor has no clothes” obvious upon a few minutes attention, it also becomes clear that such transparent lies are being protected by lies of commission and omission from the six mega corporations that account for ~90% of US “reporting.” I will address further evidence of corporate media lies of commission and omission in the last section of this 4-part series.
Americans sense these facts even if many cannot articulate them: just as only one in five Americans report trust and satisfaction with their government (and here), Americans also perceive corporate media disinformation and are rejecting their “reporting.” According to a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center, the majority of the American public see the US major media news organizations as politically biased, inaccurate, and uncaring. Among those who use the Internet, two-thirds report that major media news do not care about the people they report on, 59% say the news is inaccurate, 64% see bias, and 53% summarize their view on major media news as, “failing to stand up for America.” In their latest poll, “just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate.”
A June 2010 Rasmussen poll found 66% of voters “angry” at the media, with 33% “very angry.” Rasmussen also found 70% “angry” at current federal government policies.
Americans are ready to support the arrests of the 1% US War and economic criminals upon factual confirmation of what they already suspect.
Occupy’s call can harness America’s passion for justice under the law, and constructively build a brighter future of peace and unleashing literally trillions of dollars for constructive creativity.
AP reports:
Top U.S. intelligence officials told Congress Thursday that al-Qaida of Iraq was likely behind a series of bombings against the Syrian regime in recent months.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said bombings against security and intelligence targets in Damascus and Aleppo bear “all the earmarks of an al-Qaida-like attack”, leading the U.S. intelligence community to believe the Iraqi militant branch is extending its reach into Syria.
(this corroborates the Arab League’s findings.)
This is interesting for two reasons.
First, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq until the U.S. invaded in 2003:
(Despite the repeated attempts by the U.S. to link Saddam to 9/11.)
Second, the U.S., Israel and its allies are fighting on the same side as Al Qaeda: against the Syrian government.
As I noted yesterday, Syria will hold elections and enact a new Constitution in less than two weeks.
But the U.N passed a resolution today calling for Syrian president (Bashar al-Assad) to resign. The U.S. and Israel will try to use this as a proclamation of “international backing” for an invasion of Syria.
Russia said today it does not support regime change:
The deputy minister also said that Russia does not intend to persuade Syrian President Bashar Assad to accept the Arab League’s proposal on sending a joint LAS and UN peacekeeping force to Damascus.
Russia opposes any regime change, or removal of President Assad. In addition, Moscow insists on recognizing the role of the opposition in the current violence.
An as I noted last week:
Russia has sent a large naval force to Syria in a show of support for the Syrian government, and a high-level Russian general and former member of the Russian joint chiefs of staff has said that Russia will defend Iran. Iran and Syria have had a mutual defense pact for years, and Iran is purportedly directly assisting the Syrian military in its fight with the rebels … sending 15,000 troops of its own. And China has warned against an attack on Syria.
I guess when a country has been planning regime change in Syria for decades – little things like working on the same side as our mortal enemies, having a government agree to elections and a new constitution, or potentially provoking nuclear powers like China or Russia are ignored.
Car bomb attacks which occurred this week in India, Georgia and Thailand are being blamed on Iran by the U.S., Israel and their allies.
If Iran, in fact, carried out the attacks, it will provide a justification for war against Iran.
But did Iran actually carry out the attacks?
Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that the U.S. and Israel support the terrorists which have assassinated several Iranian scientists (and see this).
And put aside for a moment the following facts:
It would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be.Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)
India has become one of Iran’s most important trading partners, and has been increasing its ties to Iran since sanctions have been imposed by the West. Indeed, India has agreed to use creative payment methods for Iranian oil. See this, this, this and this.
Why would Iran carry out a terror attack on one of its most important trading partners … one which has agreed to help help Iran escape from sanctions?
As Finnian Cunninham notes:
What would Iran gain from such action, only grief and trouble?
This is especially true with regard to India and Thailand. Both Asian countries have become major trading partners with Tehran in recent years. India, along with China, is Iran’s biggest customer for its vital oil industry.
Thailand is of growing importance as a trading partner with Iran for oil, mining, heavy industry, services, technology and agriculture especially after both countries set up a joint business council five years ago.
For Iran to carry out such attacks, as is being claimed, would be like shooting itself in the foot, particularly because both Asian countries have refused to join in the US-led campaign to isolate Iran economically and diplomatically.
Put the other way round, it is much more in the interest of Washington and Israel to destabilize relations between Iran and its Asian partners. The repercussions from the blasts in India would appear to be having that desired effect.
Take this Reuters reports: Up to now India has not gone along with new financial sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union to punish Iran over its disputed nuclear programme. Instead, New Delhi has come up with elaborate trade and barter arrangements to pay for oil supplies. However, the president of the All India Rice Exporters’ Association said Monday’s attack on the wife of an Israeli diplomat in the Indian capital will damage trade with Iran and may complicate efforts to resolve an impasse over Iranian defaults on payments for rice imports worth around $150 million. “The attack and its political fallout have clearly vitiated the atmosphere. Traders who were already losing money due to payment defaults will be extremely wary of continuing their trade with buyers in Iran,” Vijay Setia told Reuters.
So add it up. Bomb teams with proven US/Israeli assassination expertise and methodology; target countries that are major Iranian partners; desired effect of further isolating Iran internationally; and, to cap it all, a long sought-after pretext for Israel to attack Iran with America’s blessing.
When logic and facts coincide like this, it’s usually more prudent to engage in reason than to indulge in lurid claims.
Simiarly, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam writes in the Guardian:
Let’s assume that sections of the military and security apparatus in Iran are responsible for the string of bombings in Georgia, Thailand and India. What would be the motive? The argument that Iran is retaliating for the murder of five civilian nuclear scientists in Iran is not plausible. If Iran wanted to target Israeli interests, it has other means at its disposal. It is hard to imagine that the Iranian government would send Iranian operatives to friendly countries, completely equipped with Iranian money and passports – making the case against them as obvious as possible.
If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are as professional, highly trained and politically savvy as we have been told repeatedly by Israeli politicians themselves, if they have successfully trained and equipped the cadres of Hezbollah and other movements with paramilitary wings in the region, then why would they launch such a clumsy and self-defeating operation?
And why India, Georgia and Thailand, three countries that Iran has had cordial relations with during a period when Iran is facing increasing sanctions spearheaded by the United States? A few days ago, India agreed a rupee-based oil and gas deal with Iran and resisted US pressures to join the western boycott of the Iranian energy sector. As a net importer of 12% of Iranian oil, India’s total trade with Iran amounted to $13.67bn in 2010-2011. What would be the motive for damaging relations with one of Iran’s major trading partners and regional heavyweights?
For Iran it doesn’t make sense to risk alienating India by launching an assassination attempt in the capital of the country. Similarly, Iran has good economic and political relations with Georgia and Thailand. Why would the leadership in Tehran risk a major crisis with these countries during this sensitive period when IAEA inspectors are moving in and out of Iran to investigate the country’s nuclear programme?
And Juan Cole points out:
India has suffered from both Hindu and Muslim terrorist groups. So the attack on an automobile outside the Israeli embassy in New Delhi could easily have been carried out by an Indian group. Israel’s government, a master of spin and propaganda, immediately blamed the bombing on Iran and Hizbullah. But there is no evidence for this cynical allegation, which makes no sense. India is Iran’s economic lifeline, and Tehran would not likely risk such an operation at this time.
India gets 12% of its oil from Iran and sees an $8 billion annual export opportunity in filling the trade vacuum left by unilateral US and European boycotts of Iran. Contrary to a bad Reuters article, Indian officials denied Tuesday that the bombing would affect trade ties. (Logical because no evidence points to Iran.)
Indian investigators are first rate. Based on the modus operandi, their initial thesis is that the attack was the work of the “Indian Mujahidin” group. [Cole is right.] It had used a similar remote controlled sticky bomb, placed by a motorcyclist, in an attack on Taiwanese tourists outside the Jama Masjid cathedral mosque in 2010. IM is a Sunni group, not connected to Iran, and doesn’t like Shiite Muslims (Iranians are Shiites). IM like other Sunni radicals support the Palestinians and they are unhappy with increasingly close ties between India and Israel.
American media that just parrot notorious thug, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in this unlikely allegation are allowing themselves to be used for propaganda. Why not interview Indian authorities on this matter? They are on the ground and have excellent forensic (“CSI”) abilities. Stop being so lazy and blinkered; that isn’t journalism.
We have extensively documented the fact that engineers knew that Fukushima was built in an area which was highly-susceptible to giant earthquakes, and that it would fail in a large earthquake.
Unfortunately, Pandora’s Box may now have been opened.
Specifically, Japanese scientists have published a scientific paper in European Geosciences Union’s journal Solid Earth saying that the 9.0 earthquake last March has apparently “awakened” the Fukushima earthquake fault, making it likely that a large earthquake will occur this year right near the stricken nuclear complex.
Scientists studying readings from Japanese seismic sensors have determined that there have been 20 times more quakes in the 6 months after March 2011 than in previous 9 years.
As AFP notes:
The picture points to a low-activity fault that was jolted furiously into life by the big quake.
***
The seismic tomography also says that after March 11, the Iwaki fault suffered a dramatic change in the direction of stress from the overriding Okhotsk plate.
A shock change in horizontal thrust, helped by the weakening effect of the ascending fluids [which act like a lubricant], are what made this previously untroublesome fault to rip open, they theorise.
The worry is that something similar could happen at Fukushima because it shares a similar subterranean topography, although such an event is impossible to pinpoint in time, they say.
“There are a few active faults in the nuclear power plant area, and our results show the existence of similar structural anomalies under both the Iwaki and the Fukushima Daiichi areas,” Zhao said in a press release.
“Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to happen in Fukushima.”
Here is a graphic from the report:
The study area is indicated by a black box. The purple star shows the epicenter of the March 2011 earthquake, the red star the epicenter of the recent 7.0 Iwaki earthquake, the red square shows the Fukushima nuclear complex, and the black triangles indicate active volcanoes.
Scientists say that there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hitting Fukushima this year, and a 98% chance within the next 3 years.
Given that nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen says that an earthquake of 7.0 or larger could cause the entire fuel pool structure collapse, it is urgent that everything humanly possible is done to stabilize the structure housing the fuel pools at reactor number 4.
Tepco is doing some construction at the building … it is a race against time under very difficult circumstances, and hopefully Tepco will win.
As AP points out:
The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns.
See this for background on why the fuel pools are so dangerous.
Gundersen (who used to build spent fuel pools) explains that there is no protection surrounding the radioactive fuel in the pools. He warns that – if the fuel pools at reactor 4 collapse due to an earthquake – people should get out of Japan, and residents of the West Coast of America and Canada should shut all of their windows and stay inside for a while.
The fuel pool number 4 is apparently not in great shape, and there have already been countless earthquakes near the Fukushima region since the 9.0 earthquake last March.
Agence France-Presse reports:
Syria’s president decreed a vote this month on a new constitution that would effectively end nearly 50 years of single party rule, state media said, as troops reportedly stormed centres of dissent.
***
Bashar al-Assad called the ballot for February 26, in a move clearly aimed at placating growing global outrage over the bloodshed.
Under the newly proposed charter, freedom is “a sacred right” and “the people will govern the people” in a multi-party democratic system, state television said.
***
The new constitution also … prohibits parties based on religion.
Assad, who in April lifted a state of emergency in force since 1963, when his Baath Party took power, has made repeated promises of reforms that have failed to materialise since a popular uprising erupted on March 15.
The embattled president, who succeeded his late father Hafez in 2000, has said the constitution would usher in a “new era” for Syria, SANA state news agency reported.
This is what the U.S. and its allies have said that they want.
But – given that the U.S. government has been consistently planning regime change in Syria for 20 years (and dreamed of regime change for 50 years), and that the U.S., Britain, Qatar and other countries have already started a covert war in Syria – it is uncertain whether democratic elections and a new constitution can avoid a Syrian war involving the West.
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