In our current armed conflicts, there are two U.S. drone offensives. One is conducted by our armed forces, the other by the CIA. Every day, CIA agents and CIA contractors arm and pilot armed unmanned drones over combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including Pakistani tribal areas, to search out and kill Taliban and al-Qaeda [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, in which Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests have commercially [...]
Filed in Documents, Notable, Quotable
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Also tagged american empire, Anti-War, Authoritarianism, Civil War, Congress, Corporatism, Fascism, Gulf War, House, Imperialism, Interventionists, Iraq War, Korean War, Law, Liberty Bonds, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, Military, Nation-Building, Nationalism, Senate, Spanish-American War, USMC, Vietnam War, War, War Profiteers, WW1, WW2
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from [...]
Filed in Notable
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Also tagged Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Corporate Welfare, Corporatism, Democracy, Democrats, Despotism, Healthcare, Hedge Funds, Iraq War, Liberals, Media, Militarization, Military, Poverty, Reform, Republicans, Tea Party, Wall Street, Wealth
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The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee has issued a strong warning to the Defense Department over plans to award $1 billion in new contracts to the firm formerly known as Blackwater, accusing managers of the private security company of lying to win lucrative jobs in Afghanistan.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) also cited a history of [...]
Sunday, February 21, 2010
“They are screwing these two guys,” the first U.S. defense official said of the field commanders.
“They were looking for heads,” the second American defense official said. “It’s a travesty.”
Penalizing the pair is even more egregious, the U.S. defense officials and the former NATO official said, because their plans to close the outposts were consistent with [...]
Monday, February 15, 2010
KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your…
CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…
KARL: And you opposed the administration’s actions of doing away with waterboarding?
CHENEY: Yes.
He just admitted being an accomplice. To date approximately 100 detainees (at minimum), including CIA-held detainees, have died during [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged Caught on Tape, CIA, Crime, Detainees, Dick Cheney, Evidence, Guantanamo, Iraq War, JSOC, Military, Torture, War Crimes, Waterboarding
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Monday, February 15, 2010
Gregory asked the Vice President if the Iraq War was worth it.
“No I don’t think the war was worth it,” Biden replied. “We paid a horrible price not only in loss of life, the way the war was mishandled from the outset. But we took our eye off the ball putting us in a different [...]
Terrorists. They’re trying to kill Americans at home and our troops abroad. And who’s footing the bill for the attacks against us? Oil money. Filtered through secret organizations in the Middle East and countries like Iran. When oil money hands up in the hands of our enemies, Americans pay the ultimate price. We’ve got to [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A new investigation by journalist Anand Gopal reveals harrowing details about US secret prisons in Afghanistan, under both the Bush and Obama administrations. Gopal interviewed Afghans who were detained and abused at several disclosed and undisclosed sites at US and Afghan military bases across the country. He also reveals the existence of another secret prison [...]
The practice that Sher Khan describes here, first used in classical antiquity and later by American soldiers battling the Filipino insurgency around the turn of the last century, is called the “water cure.” One of the JAG School textbook cases of prosecution for torture involves this procedure. The case became notorious in the United States [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Anand Gopal, Detainees, DOD, DOJ, FOIA, Geneva Conventions, International Law, International Red Cross, JSOC, Law, Noor Agha Sher Khan, Robert Gates, Secret Prisons, Torture, Waterboarding
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The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast [...]
Filed in Film, Notable
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Also tagged Adam Curtis, Al Qaeda, Anwar Al Sadat, Ayman al-Zawahiri, BBC, Bill Clinton, CIA, Dick Cheney, Documentary, Donald Rumsfeld, Egypt, Extremists, Fear, Gamal Abdel Nasser, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Iraq War, Irving Kristol, Islam, Leo Strauss, Muslim Brotherhood, Muslims, Neo-Conservatives, Osama bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Power of Nightmares, Rendition, Ronald Reagan, Saudi Arabia, Sayyid Qutb, Taliban, Terrorism, Tony Blair, Torture
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As 2010 begins in turmoil, 10 questions to ask about U.S. military presence in distant lands.
Let’s peer into the future, and consider just what the American way of war might have in store for us in 2010. Here are 10 questions, the answers to which might offer reasonable hints as to just how much U.S. [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Al Qaeda, Budget, CIA, DOD, Economics, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq War, Israel, Pakistan, Palestian Authority, Pentagon, Taliban, War, Yemen
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The suicide bomber who killed eight people at a CIA compound in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian who had been recruited by that nation’s intelligence service to help U.S. spy agencies penetrate Al Qaeda, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official.
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The disclosure that the most deadly incident in recent CIA history may have [...]
Saturday, January 2, 2010
The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base’s security director.
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The story seems to corroborate a claim by the Taliban [...]
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Congressman Dennis Kucinich says President Barack Obama ought to fire the generals who publicly aired their views on the war in Afghanistan during this fall’s deliberations on a troop surge.
The Ohio Democrat known for his anti-war views said there is “no question” that the president was pressured by the military into approving a 30,000-troop surge.
“Some [...]
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