“We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.”
“April 2017 was another month of mass slaughter and unimaginable terror for the people of Mosul in Iraq and the areas around Raqqa and Tabqa in Syria, as the heaviest, most sustained U.S.-led bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam entered its 33rd month.”
Read more: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/09/the-silent-slaughter-of-the-us-air-war/
“Not content with having a fleet of insecure surveillance drones, the state of Connecticut wants a fleet of insecure weaponized drones. What could possibly go wrong?”
Read more: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/04/soon_youll_be_a.html
“Economists estimate the Afghan war has already cost U.S. taxpayers around a trillion dollars. Now the U.S. military is re-escalating in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon requests more troops and drops more and bigger bombs, it’s important to assess the dangers of another surge. And to consider whether another U.S. escalation can turn around an unwinnable war. Will Surge 2.0 be consequential, relevant, sustainable? Or will it be another futile chapter in an unwinnable war?”
“In the wake of the terror attacks in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, can we finally admit that the war on terror is an utter and complete failure? So if the war on terror has failed, what should we do to stop terrorists?”
“It could cost about $60 million to replace the cruise missiles that the U.S. military rained on Syrian targets Thursday night. The missiles used on Thursday likely cost the U.S. military around $1 million, but the latest versions of the missile that would replace those could be more costly, depending on size of the order and other factors, said Loren Thompson, a consultant and chief operating officer of nonprofit Lexington Institute.”
“Week by week, country by country, the Pentagon is quietly seizing more control over warfighting decisions, sending hundreds more troops to war with little public debate and seeking greater authority to battle extremists across the Middle East and Africa. This week it was Somalia, where President Donald Trump gave the U.S. military more authority to conduct offensive airstrikes on al-Qaida-linked militants. Next week it could be Yemen, where military leaders want to provide more help for the United Arab Emirates’ battle against Iranian-backed rebels.”
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/under-trump-pentagon-seizing-more-control-over-warfighting-135021268.html
The Pentagon has admitted to an airstrike that is believed to have killed more than 200 civilians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, at the edge of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
In the 1980s, Kurdistan was targeted by Saddam Hussein, then-president of Iraq, because the Kurds supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. After his capture in the second Gulf War, Hussein was charged by the U.S. occupational government with genocide, convicted, and hung for his crimes.
What is lesser known is that at the same time, the U.S. government, still fuming after the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis (a populist reaction to the brutality of the U.S.-backed dictator Mohammad Reza Shah, and a major factor in Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election), was a major – and thoroughly documented – supporter of Hussein in the war:
Iraq began receiving support from the United States and west European countries as well. Saddam was given diplomatic, monetary, and military support by the US, including massive loans, political clout, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites. The Iraqis relied heavily on American satellite footage and radar planes to detect Iranian troop movements, and they enabled Iraq to move troops to the site before the battle.
With Iranian success on the battlefield, the US made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying intelligence, economic aid, and dual-use equipment and vehicles, as well as normalizing its intergovernmental relations (which had been broken during the 1967 Six-Day War). President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran”, and that the United States “would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran”. Reagan formalised this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive to this effect in June 1982.
In 1982, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of countries “supporting terrorism” and sold weapons such as howitzers to Iraq via Jordan and Israel. France sold Iraq millions of dollars worth of weapons, including Gazelle helicopters, Mirage F-1 fighters, and Exocet missiles. Both the United States and West Germany sold Iraq dual-use pesticides and poisons that would be used to create chemical and other weapons, such as Roland missiles.
Although the U.S. government began to play both sides a few years later in the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA nevertheless threw its support heavily to the Iraqi government utilizing internationally banned chemical weapons in its campaign against Iran.
Precursors to chemical weapons, as well as biological weapons, cluster bombs, and the loans to pay for them, were brokered to Iraq by pharmaceutical representative Donald Rumsfeld, who would later be appointed Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration would go on to invade Iraq in 2003 citing as a primary motivation its possession of such “weapons of mass destruction”.
By 2014 it became well known that many a true word was spoken in such jest: Iraq did in fact have WMDs, and they were obtained from the United States itself. (The truth, however, was revealed in the context of whipping up a new war against the terrorist organization ISIL, so the media still gets zero points for honesty.)
Until now, the Kurds have been major supporters of U.S. interests in the Middle East, perceiving the U.S. as a liberator and protector pursuant to their darkest hour in 1988.
Is the U.S. military going to burn one of its few remaining bridges in the Middle East by invoking the “collateral damage” doctrine in this instance? How will Kurds, tough fighters to the core, react to their family members being wiped out in reckless bombings?
“‘Snowden is a spy who should be executed,’ the President posted on Twitter in 2013, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has also suggested that Snowden should be put to death. The White House did not immediately comment on the NBC report, but the Justice Department told the network that it would welcome the return of Snowden. Trump himself, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, has questioned the economic restrictions and said in January, ‘If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things.'”
“All that Trump had to do is pull the troops out of the Middle East and Afghanistan and bring them home, immediately, without killing one more person, including 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki. That would have meant the end of anti-American terrorism, which would have meant no more war on terrorism, including Trump’s Muslim ban. But then again, that also would have meant a severe diminution in the power, influence, and taxpayer-funded resources of the U.S. national-security establishment, which is the undoubtedly the biggest reason why Trump has now chosen to travel the 16-year-old road of death and destruction, loss of liberty, and out-of-control federal spending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.”
Read more: http://www.fff.org/2017/01/31/four-years-bush-obama-maybe-worse/