The US "Peace Plan" For Syria

Former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen conspired with General David Petraeus to sabotage the Syria peace plan at the Geneva 1 Conference. President Barack Obama had him placed under surveillance and managed to prevent his appointment as head of NATO. However, he managed to stay in office despite the charges against him (while Petraeus was forced to resign from the leadership of the CIA). Become commander of the anti-Daesh Military Coalition, he supports the shenanigans that General Petraeus leads from the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Global Institute. He is director of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the think tank of "liberal hawks".

When, in 2001, President George W. Bush decided to place Syria on his list of targets to destroy, he had three objectives: 

 Breaking the "Axis of Resistance" and encouraging Israeli expansion;
 Laying hands on the huge gas reserves;
 Reshaping the "Broader Middle East".

Several months ago, I explained that the Daesh project corresponds with the new US map of the division of the Middle East, published by Robin Wright in The New York Times in 2013 [1]. In continuation of the Sykes-Picot, the US plan aimed to further drastically reduce Syria. Also, when the US - after having waited for Daesh to complete the ethnic cleansing in Iraq for which they had been created - began bombing the jihadists, the question arose as to whether the liberated areas of Daesh would or would not be returned to Baghdad and to Damascus.

As the United States has refused to coordinate its military action against Daesh with Syria, and in view of the fact that Russia is preparing a peace conference, "liberal hawks" in Washington have set new goals.

The "peace" plan of the "liberal hawks" consists therefore in achieving the original goals by dividing Syria in two: an area governed by Damascus and another by "moderate rebels" (read: the Pentagon). The Republic is to have the capital and the Mediterranean coast; the Pentagon: the Syrian desert and gas reserves (that is to say the Daesh zone liberated by the bomber raids of General John Allen). According to their own records, "liberal hawks" would leave only 30% of the territory to the Syrian People!

Remodelling map according Robin Wright

The principle is simple: at present, the Republic controls all major cities except Rakka and a small part of Aleppo, but no one can claim to control a vast desert, neither the government nor the jihadists. So the Pentagon suggests that what is not clearly governed by Damascus rightfully belongs to its mercenaries!

By Thierry Meyssan

Jihad Is Not Terrorism. Terrorism Is Not Jihad

In the polarized world that we currently live in, where sensational information travels faster than a tsunami, what “Jihad” really is has become lost in the storm since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The term Jihad is often defined as a “fight,” or a “holy war,” but it actually means a struggle, not just against others but against desire, ambition and human aspirations to follow what is preached by Islam. The Quran mentions “Jihad Fi Sabilillah,” or the “struggle towards the path of Allah.”

As Abul Ala Maududi, the political philosopher and scholar, explains the term in his book Jihad in Islam, which was first published in Urdu in the 1960s, “Jihad should be under guidance of the Quran and Prophet’s Hadith, otherwise it is not Jihad but violence.” [The Hadith, for those who don’t know, is a written record of the Prophet’s teachings].

Maududi explains: “Jihad in Islam is not merely a ‘struggle’. It is instead a ‘struggle’ for the ‘Cause of Allah’. The ‘Cause of Allah’ is essential for the term of ‘Jihad’ in Islam.

After all, the Holy Quran clearly says about Cain’s killing of Abel:

For that cause we decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah’s Sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth. (5:32).

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the last prophet according to Islamic belief, also said “A believer continues to guard his Faith (and thus hopes for Allah’s Mercy) so long as he does not shed blood unjustly.” (Source: Bukhari/ Riyad-us-Saliheen)

Terrorism, in fact, is completely the opposite of Jihad. Any act of violence that instills fear in the minds of innocent people is an act of terror, particularly because this fear is not a fear against anything wrong, like corruption or theft. Instead, it is a fear of the powerful who wish to become more so.

Those who terrorize have forgotten that “Islam” means “peace,” and that the Holy Quran teaches tolerance towards other faiths and guides:

“There is no compulsion in religion. The right direction is henceforth distinct from error. And he who rejecteth false deities and believeth in Allah hath grasped a firm handhold which will never break. Allah is Hearer, Knower.” (2:256)

Yes, Islam does provide guidelines for war. But in those guidelines, the killing of women, children, the old and the weak is expressly forbidden. Even destruction of a standing crop or a tree is not allowed, as Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, told Islamic armies:

“I instruct you in ten matters: Do not kill women, children, the old, or the infirm; do not cut down fruit-bearing trees; do not destroy any town . . . ” (Source: Imam Malik’s compilation of the Hadith “Kitab al-Jihad.”)

The Prophet also said that no non-combatant can be killed by a Muslim army in any circumstances:

“Do not kill any old person, any child or any woman” (Source: The collections of Abu Dawood, prominent Islamic scholar, and Maulana Wahiduzzaman, translated by the author).

By Abu Zafar

It’s Not the Koran, It’s Us

Image via: VeteransToday.com

The Corporate Media Chorus Willfully Ignores That U.S. Actions Fuels Jihad, Not Islam

For a brief time after the 9/11 terror attacks, Americans could be heard asking the reasonable question: Why do these men from Middle Eastern countries (back then, mostly Saudis) hate us so much that they would give their own lives to cause us pain? Within a few weeks, the official explanation became: They hate us for our freedom, end of story.

When you follow the money, it is easy to understand why the government avoided any honest discussion of the causes of terrorism. By one estimate, U.S. taxpayers have squandered $10 trillion over four decades to protect the flow of oil on behalf of multinational corporations. The result is an empire of U.S. military bases which have garrisoned the Greater Middle East. In the Persian Gulf alone, the United States has bases in every country save Iran. 

These bases support repressive, undemocratic regimes, and act as staging grounds to launch wars, interventions and drone strikes. And they generate tremendous profits for defense contractors.

The existence of these bases helps generate radicalism, anti-American sentiment and terrorist attacks. The drone attacks have incited even more hatred for us, which should come as little surprise. The U.S. uses drones to incinerate suspected militants (and anyone else in the vicinity) on secret evidence, but only if they are living in Muslim nations like Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq or Somalia. We don’t fly killer drones over dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit or Chicago, or in Iguala, Mexico, where 43 students were recently massacred by gang members aided by corrupt police.

The fact that our misguided foreign policy creates terrorism is almost never discussed in polite society. 

There is of course no justification for a terror attack on innocents. But if our leaders truly cared as much about protecting Americans from terror as they do about protecting corporate profits, they would have an honest discussion of what’s prompting the violence.

The truth is that nearly every terror attack or threat to America by an Islamic extremist can be directly linked to “blowback” from our ventures in the Middle East. 

Osama bin Laden cited the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi holy land as a motivation for the 9/11 attacks. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said the Boston marathon bombing was “retribution for the U.S. crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.” Faisal Shahzad said his attempted bombing in Times Square was “retaliation for U.S. drone attacks” in Pakistan, which he had personally witnessed. The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said that his attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit was revenge for U.S. attacks on Muslims. Last month in Chicago, a teenager was arrested attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS. He explained in a letter to his parents that he was upset that he was obligated to pay taxes that would be used to kill his Muslim brothers and sisters overseas. But when the Chicago Tribune told the story, it left this fact out, instead reporting that the teen had complained about the immorality of Western society.

And long before the Senate released its damning torture report, Al Qaeda and ISIS were using accounts of U.S. torture as a recruiting tool.

The truth about what is radicalizing Muslims to hate the West is rarely discussed in the mainstream press or in political debate. Instead, we are told by corporate-funded terror experts like the Brookings Institution’s William McCants and the Aspen Institute’s Frances Townsend that Islam is the origin of radical ideology. Anti-American jihadis supposedly learn to hate by reading the Koran and going to mosques. So one-sided is the discussion that even Bill Maher, a prominent liberal, has publicly described Islam as the “one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them.”

With the launch of our latest multi-billion-dollar war in Iraq and Syria, the United States has now bombed at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. 

A UN report suggests that Washington’s latest air campaign against ISIS has led foreign militants to join the movement on “an unprecedented scale.” 

This time, the terror experts haven’t bothered to pretend that we have a coherent plan or any chance of improving the dire situation in those countries. Still, they agree that ISIS militants’ anti-U.S. hatred originates with their Islamic faith and is unrelated to any U.S. actions.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Leonard C. Goodman

The Peacemaker and The Warmonger

Boxer Muhammad Ali went to jail rather than be drafted in the US Army to fight in Vietnam: 

“My conscious won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? …How can I shoot them poor people, Just take me to jail.”

What Muhammad Ali said about the Vietnam war could be applied just as much to the wars Barack Obama is fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The Truth About 911

It's September of 2014, the world is caught up in a whirlwind of terraranoia while global leaders posture and position themselves in preparation for the final stages in the agenda for a New World Order...with the 13th anniversary of 911 coming up right around the corner it is imperative now more than ever that we expose this event for what it was...a false flag operation designed to advance the agenda of the global elite 

The biggest threat to our freedoms is the state itself!

Wars Based On Lies

A short video editorial discussing America's war in the middle east. Featuring clips from the documentary "Why We Fight", along with footage of speeches made by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

Burn Frankenstein

Artist: Obsessive Gardeners

Ending Lives vs Saving Lives

Come on now, which one truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

The Invasion Of America

How The U.S. Took Over An Eighth Of The World 

See the rapid disappearance of Native American lands with this interactive map from eHistory.org.

In treaty discussions, US troops often intimidated the negotiators, federal agents misrepresented the terms of agreement, and land speculators bribed participants. In desperate times, Indians signed away their homes in order to feed themselves and their families. In the 1850s, US presidents began using a second legal instrument to secure land, the executive order, and this prerogative grew in importance after 1871, when the federal government unilaterally stopped making treaties with native peoples. The power of the president to seize land by executive order may appear contrary to the sanctity of private property, one of the great legacies of the American Revolution, but white Americans never set Indian land title on the same footing as their own. Nor did they recognize the irony of their presumptions.

From Pol Pot To ISIS and Our War Criminals

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. 

A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors 

"froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of Jihadism. Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "Jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. 

A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, 

"The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. 

Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. 

It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. 

Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. 

"Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. 

His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. 

"I was instructed," Halliday said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 "excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. 

An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, 

"[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live."  

When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. 

"I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will further "the imperative of a political solution". 

Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. 

This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. 

Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic. 

Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants "boots on the ground" now. 

There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. 



Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. 

"I am going to tell you something," he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this imperial maze.

Together with a truce, 

there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. 

The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. 

With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". 

Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  

Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

By John Pilger


Note: I included the above 2 videos, which were not part of John Pilger's article. 

There Is No War On Terror. There Is A War OF Terror

Statistically, the majority of terrorism is our terrorism, it is state terrorism. 

The greatest victims of terrorism are Muslims.

The whole understanding of terrorism is upside down.

Now there is as opposed to state terrorism,  privatized terrorism, it's very tiny. It's run by organizations like Al-Qaeda.

There is a study from the University of Chicago a study that found of this privatized terrorism in the last 30-odd years, something like 20,000 people had died,  a very tiny figure compared to the millions who have died as result of state terrorism. 

The attacks on 9/11 were appropriated by a clique in the U.S. establishment in order to further its aims around the world. 

There is no war on terror. There is a war of terror.

[John Pilger]

How Much Moral High Ground Does The US Have Over ISIS?

Warning: 72 virgin dating service. Apply here

The United States' war on sexual violence, mass murder and religious persecution should begin at home.

Without question, ISIS is an abomination. However, it is unclear whether America is the right agent to see this through. Part of the trouble relates to the Obama administration's strategy, which seems likely to empower ISIS even as it undermines the security and interests of the Unted States and its allies - but there is an ethical dimension as well.

While ISIS poses a serious (although likely overstated) threat to the governments of Iraq and Syria, over the last two administrations, the United States has itself forcibly overthrown the governments of Iraq and Libya - each time in defiance of international law. And along with ISIS, the United States has spent the last three years seeking to undermine the Syrian government. Additionally, it has sheltered Israel from meaningful accountability to the international community, allowing the crisis in Palestine to fester.

It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS - not least because US policies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have largely paved the way for ISIS's emergence as a major regional actor.

But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by US troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society. Until these problems are better addressed, United States' efforts to undermine ISIS will be akin to using a dirty rag to clean an infected wound.

Sexual Violence

The initial driver of US involvement was the outrage over ISIS' capture of thousands of Yazidi women and the sexual violence subsequently exercised against them - horrors which provided moral credence to the war against ISIS in much the same way that the 2001 US war against the Taliban was justified in part by highlighting the plight of Afghan women living under their rule.

However, over the course of that war, and the subsequent 2003 war in Iraq, US soldiers and contractors repeatedly used rape as a weapon of war, both against prisoners and the local civilian population. But perhaps more disturbing than the crimes committed by US personnel against Iraqis and Afghans were the atrocities committed by servicemen against their fellow soldiers.

As many as one out of three female soldiers are raped over the course of their military careers. Up to 80 percent of these assaults go unreported, in large part because reported cases rarely result in convictions or proportional punishment. In fact, the victims are frequently punished socially and professionally for reporting abuse, and they are barred from suing the government for reparations even when wrongdoing is proven.

The stats are not much better in the broader population. As many as one in five women who attend college in America are sexually assaulted over the course of their academic career, often with no justice even when the crimes are reported. This is commensurate with the broader trend in America - according to White House estimates, roughly a fifth of all American women are raped at some point in their lives.

As in the military, most of these crimes are not reported to the police, and most reported rapes are never prosecuted - let alone result in convictions for the perpetrators.

If the crimes against thousands of women in Iraq and Syria justify a US mobilization that costs nearly $10 million per day, how much more militant should Americans be about resolving the tens of thousands of cases of sexual violence that go unpunished and largely unnoticed in the United States each year?

Astonishing Cruelty

In addition to sexual violence, there was widespread outrage over ISIS's uncompromising brutality and the pornographic way they record and broadcast these acts - which include beheadings, crucifixions, and occasional incidences of cannibalism.

Of course, US soldiers and contractors have and continue to torture their enemies, often taking obscene photos to brag about and reminisce upon their acts. The contractors who were implicated in these abuses have never been prosecuted. Instead, one whistleblower who initially exposed these crimes, Chelsea Manning, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

There are further reports of US servicemen committing massacres, desecrating the corpses of their enemies, or even hunting the locals for sport while collecting photos, and even body parts, as trophies. And these are just a sampling of the acts which have been picked up by war correspondents and detailed in the media - many more crimes have never received exposure abroad, with crimes committed against Iraqis and Afghans by US servicemen going largely under-prosecuted or altogether unprosecuted.

Because these atrocities are not sufficiently dealt with by the United States, the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan have demanded the right to try Americans in their own courts. However, as protecting US politicians and soldiers from international accountability formed the basis of US opposition to establishing or joining the International Criminal Court, the Obama Administration refused to cede anything to these nascent states. 

As a result, concerns about accountability proved to be the main obstacle in the US reaching a security agreement with Afghanistan - and Iraq's refusal to grant US soldiers immunity was the reason the US ultimately abandoned the pursuit of a status of forces agreement there, contributing significantly to the security vacuum that allowed ISIS to rebuild in Iraq and expand into Syria. That is, ISIS's crimes were largely enabled by America's refusal to face up to its own.

Americans should bear this in mind as the Obama Administration loosens its already overly permissive standards vis à vis collateral damage and targeting civilians in its current campaign. The killing of innocents is not somehow morally superior if committed remotely by a drone or missile rather than the tools at ISIS' disposal.

Religious Persecution

Finally, many Westerners have been horrified by ISIS's persecution of religious minorities (especially crimes against Christians). However, the United States is complicit in this as well: US policies in Iraq helped spark this cycle of sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, its own armed forces were indoctrinated with anti-Muslim propaganda - complete with recommendations for servicemen to resort to "Hiroshima tactics," in a "total war against Islam," in which protections for civilians were "no longer relevant." 

Reflective of this mentality, the armed forces have been heavily infiltrated by white-supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups who believe and act as though they are engaged in a holy war to begin in the Middle East and then be carried back into America. This institutionalized misrepresentation of Islam and dehumanization of Muslims probably played a significant role in the aforementioned atrocities.

However, this is hardly just an issue in the Army. Anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes are pervasive in America, from the classroom to the boardroom. In the popular culture, Islamophobia transcends the political spectrum and is fairly mainstream - to the point where pundits and politicians can openly call for Muslim internment camps, or push for laws restricting or altogether banning Muslims from practicing their faith, even as many of these same people work to obliterate the lines between the (Christian) church and state.

Muslim voices which could unapologetically challenge these tropes are largely excluded from the public discourse in favor of "house-Muslims" who will nod their heads in condemnation of terrorism (emphasizing that most Muslims are "moderates") while uncritically calling for (liberal) reform and revolution in Muslim lands of which they are no longer residents (if they ever were) - and all without voicing much (if any) substantive criticism of the Western countries in which they reside, beyond the narrow concerns about discrimination and persecution.

And yet despite these compliant spokespeople, and the fact that only 6 percent of terror incidents in the United States have been carried out by Muslims over the last 30 years (and the threat of terrorism is itself overblown), Muslims are frequently subjected to arbitrary surveillance and detention, as well as legal entrapment. 

All of these practices are considered crimes against humanity according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US ostensibly champions everywhere else in the world . . . perhaps nowhere more than in Muslim-majority countries - seven of which the US has bombed in the last 6 years, almost always under the auspices of "humanitarian intervention."

Authentic Outrage, Authentic Patriotism

Criticisms like these invariably evoke charges of anti-Americanism among reactionary readers - unduly. If one were truly committed to defending America and promoting its values, if sincerely outraged by the sorts of atrocities committed by ISIS - rather than sanctioning condescending and counterproductive incursions abroad, Americans should dedicate much more time and energy to responding to these same problems within the United States and its institutions abroad. 

In this way, the United States could respond to the ISIS challenge by growing better and stronger, rather than undermining American's interests and freedoms in the name of "security." 

By Musa al-Gharbi

Lies Lies Lies

Gentlemen we have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government
Do you still think that jet fuel brought down the World Trade Center?

Does anybody else see a problem here?
If the government has nothing to hide why are they so afraid to answer a few questions?
This story does not add up

I'm on a mission to never forget
3,000 people that I've never met
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat

I'm on a mission to dig up the truth
You think we're stupid and there's no proof
Well let me tell you that the time has come
To pull the trigger on the smoking gun

America has been hijacked
Not by Al Qaeda, not by Bin Laden
But by a group of tyrants
That should be of great concern to all Americans

I'm on a mission to bring out the facts
You got your stories but they all have cracks
Misinformation, lies and deceit
What made you think that we were all asleep

Don't listen to me listen to your head
Don't listen to anything, they've said

Artist: Ministry

6 Million People Killed In CIA Wars Against 3rd World Countries

This is a 6:26 minute teaser

John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He 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.

The clip is showing parts of a lecture that Stockwell gave in 1987, explaining the CIA's secret war. A war he describes as 'The Third World War'. Not because it is the thermonuclear exchange that is commonly meant, but because it was mainly waged against people in the third world countries. In Stockwell's own words: 

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has mounted approximately 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations of this nature, every one of them illegal and many of them "bloody and gory beyond comprehension". 

Below is the complete lecture:

The War On Democracy

'The War On Democracy' (2007), It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

The film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. 

The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. 

He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

It also looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America lead by indigenous leaders intent on loosening the shackles of Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent's natural wealth.

John Pilger says: 

"[The film] is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us."

Mexican Drug Cartels Are Worse Than ISIL

Western Obsession With The Islamic State Is Fueled More By Bigotry Than Any Genuine Assessment Of Risk Or Atrocities

The horrific rampage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has captured the world’s attention. Many Western commentators have characterized ISIL’s crimes as unique, no longer practiced anywhere else in the civilized world. They argue that the group’s barbarism is intrinsically Islamic, a product of the aggressive and archaic worldview that dominates the Muslim world. The ignorance of these claims is stunning.

While there are other organized groups whose depravity and threat to the United States far surpasses that of ISIL, none has engendered the same kind of collective indignation and hysteria. This raises a question: Are Americans primarily concerned with ISIL’s atrocities or with the fact that Muslims are committing these crimes?

For example, even as the U.S. media and policymakers radically inflate ISIL’s threat to the Middle East and United States, most Americans appear to be unaware of the scale of the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels and the threat they pose to the United States.

Cartels versus ISIL

A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering. 

But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.

Statistics alone do not convey the depravity and threat of the cartels. 

They carry out hundreds of beheadings every year. In addition to decapitations, the cartels are known to dismember and otherwise mutilate the corpses of their victims — displaying piles of bodies prominently in towns to terrorize the public into compliance. They routinely target women and children to further intimidate communities. Like ISIL, the cartels use social media to post graphic images of their atrocious crimes.

The narcos also recruit child soldiers, molding boys as young as 11 into assassins or sending them on suicide missions during armed confrontations with Mexico’s army. They kidnap tens of thousands of children every year to use as drug mules or prostitutes or to simply kill and harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Those who dare to call for reforms often end up dead. 

In September, with the apparent assistance of local police, cartels kidnapped and massacred 43 students at a teaching college near the Mexican town ofIguala in response to student protests. A search in the area for the students has uncovered a number of mass graves containing mutilated bodies burned almost beyond recognition, but none of the remains have been confirmed to be of the students.

While the Islamic militants have killed a handful of journalists, the cartels murdered as many as 57 since 2006 for reporting on cartel crimes or exposing government complicity with the criminals. Many of Mexico’s media have been effectively silenced by intimidation or bribes. 

These censorship activities extend beyond professional media, with narcos tracking down and murdering ordinary citizens who criticize them on the Internet, leaving their naked and disemboweled corpses hanging in public squares. 

Yet American intellectuals such as Sam Harris appear to be more outraged when Muslims protest or issue threats in response to blasphemous or anti-Muslim hate speech than when cartels murder dozens of journalists and systematically co-opt an entire country’s media.

Similarly, Westerners across various political spectrums were outraged when ISIL seized 1,500 Yazidi women, committing sexual violence against the captives and using them as slaves. Here again, the cartels’ capture and trafficking of women dwarfs ISIL’s crimes. Narcos hold tens of thousands of Mexican citizens as slaves for their various enterprises and systematically use rape as a weapon of war.

U.S. media have especially hyped ISIL’s violence against Americans. This summer ISIL beheaded two Americans and has warned about executing a third; additionally, one U.S. Marine has died in efforts to combat the group. By contrast, the cartels killed 293 Americans in Mexico from 2007 to 2010 and have repeatedly attacked U.S. consulates in Mexico. While ISIL’s beheadings are no doubt outrageous, the cartels tortured, dismembered and then cooked one of the Americans they captured — possibly eating him or feeding him to dogs.

The US government cannot formulate an effective response to the narcos’ severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the US military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. 

The cartels’ atrocities are not restricted to the Mexican side of the border. From 2006 to 2010 as many as 5,700 Americans were killed in the U.S. by cartel-fueled drug violence. By contrast, 2,937 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Over the last decade, some 2,349 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, and 4,487 Americans died in Iraq. In four years the cartels have managed to cause the deaths of more Americans than during 9/11 or either of those wars.

Barack Obama’s administration claims ISIL poses a severe threat to U.S. interests and national security. However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the U.S. began targeting them. Even now, while they have called for lone wolves to carry out attacks on targets in the United States, so far those arrested in connection to ISIL have been trying to go and fight abroad rather than plotting domestic attacks. To the extent ISIL wants to kill Americans, its primary tactic has been to try to lure U.S. troops to its turf by publicly executing citizens they already hold hostage. 

In fact, several U.S. intelligence officials have asserted that ISIL poses no credible threat to the United States homeland. 

However, the same cannot be said of the cartels.

Narcos have infiltrated at least 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting many Americans, including U.S. troops and law enforcement officers, to their organizations. They have an increasingly sophisticated and robust foundation in the U.S., with Mexican cartels now controlling more than 80 percent of the illicit drug trade in the United States and their top agents deployed to virtually every major metropolitan area. There are no realistic assessments indicating that ISIL could achieve a similar level of penetration in the United States.

Explaining The Dissonance

It is clear that the anti-ISIL campaign is not driven by the group’s relative threat to the United States or the scale or inhumane nature of their atrocities. If these were the primary considerations, the public would be far more terrified of and outraged by the narcos. Perhaps the U.S. would be mobilizing 50 nations to purge Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel rather than shielding it from prosecution, helping it polish off its rivals or even move drugs into the United States.

Some may argue that despite the asymmetries, the cartels are less of a threat than ISIL because ISIL is unified around an ideology, which is antithetical to the prevailing international order, while the cartels are concerned primarily with money. This is not true.

A good deal of the cartels’ violence is perpetrated ritualistically as part of their religion, which is centered, quite literally, on the worship of death. The narcosbuild and support churches all across Mexico to perpetuate their eschatology. One of the cartels, the Knights Templar (whose name evokes religious warfare), even boasts about its leader’s death and resurrection. When cartel members are killed, they are buried in lavish mausoleums, regarded as martyrs and commemorated in popular songs glorifying their exploits in all their brutality. Many of their members view the “martyrs” as heroes who diedresisting an international order that exploits Latin America and fighting the feckless governments that enable it. The cartels see their role as compensating for state failures in governance. The narco gospel, which derives fromCatholicism, is swiftly making inroads in the United States and Central America. In short, the cartels’ ideological disposition is no less pronounced than ISIL’s, if not worse.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government cannot formulate an effective response to these much more severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the U.S. military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. One thing is certain: America’s obsession with ISIL is fueled by Islamophobia rather than any empirical realities. 

Musa al-Gharbi is an instructor in the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC).