War: Lies and Consequences


WAR (Photo credit: WeMeantDemocracy)

They tell lies, to excuse wars that are in any case against all conventions and constitutions. Then we call them out on their lies, but we get punished or silenced or ignored or fed new lies while the war mechanics do all in their power keep their machinery going. But where does their power come from? They represents us. We need a new system, a way to monitor use of our delegated power to prevent abuse of our mandate.



via OP-ED: Lies and Consequences in Our Past 15 Wars | Huntington News.


David Swanson

David Swanson





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News and Comments 7 Feb 2012


Syria crisis: Gulf Arab states expel Syrian ambassadors








Ambassadors recalled from Syria

  • United States (embassy closed)
  • Europe

  • France
  • UK
  • Italy
  • Spain
  • Netherlands
  • Belgium
  • Gulf Arab states

  • Saudi Arabia
  • Qatar
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Bahrain
  • Oman
  • Kuwait

via BBC


Court strikes down gay marriage ban in LA County



The ruling was narrow and likely to be limited to California.

via latimes.com.

Another President Quits – Mohamed Nasheed Steps Down after Maldives Protests

President Nasheed of the Maldives briefs repor...

Mohamed Nasheed





New Bruce Lee Film


In Hong Kong, teams visited the memorial statu...


~ Bruce Lee



Violence in northern Mali forces over 20,000 into exile

UNHCR report on Mali upheaval:

Malian Refugees in Mauritania

Malian Refugees in Mauritania







Human Rights Watch Warns of Lead Poisoning Crisis in Nigeria



Politics, Religion, Media – an Unholy Trinity


Behind The News: Yemen Times


Historian: “ArabSpring” & “Twitter revolutions” planned by US. Ironically funded by China


RT talks to author and historian William Engdahl on what – or who – is behind the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. My comments at the end of the report.

StateDept_Spring.mp4 Watch on Posterous

William Engdahl says the US does not want to admit its inevitable demise and current conflicts in the Middle East represent the existing plans “to keep this sole superpower not only intact and to spread its influence over the rest of the planet”.

He states that the Arab Spring and the Twitter revolutions “have been planned years back … by the US State Department”.

Also, Engdahl reveals that the Chinese, by buying the US Treasury bonds, ironically finance the wars “directed against Chinese national interest for energy security”.

Would you say that these conflicts that we are seeing today in terms of euro and the dollar situation and what is happening in Northern Africa and Middle East, do these conflicts feed off each other? Are they somehow related?

“Well what I see in all of these conflicts, the decision to bomb Libya, the crisis with the dollar, the crisis with the American economy and the conduct of American foreign policy in the last period is all part of a breakdown of entire superpower structure that was built up after the end of WWII and nobody in Washington wants to admit, just as nobody in Britain 100 years ago wanted to admit that the British empire was in terminal decline. So they push fast-forward with existing plans and they see that in one part of the world and another these agendas no longer have the effect they did 10 or 20 years ago. But very definitely, all of this is related to the attempt to keep this sole superpower not only intact, but to spread its influence over the rest of the planet and that, not surprising, much of the world is not too eager to see that.”

So would you say that what is happening in Middle East or Northern Africa is an attempt on behalf of the US to keep its game up? 

“Very much so, the plan was first announced by George W. Bush when he was President, just after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 at a G8 meeting and it was called the ‘Greater Middle East Project’ and that project, they published a map of what they had in mind, was the control and the democratization, as they called it, of the entire Islamic world from Afghanistan, Pakistan, down through Iran, Syria, the Persian Gulf area, the oil producing states there and across North Africa, all the way to Morocco. And the events, the so-called Arab Spring, have been planned years back and the instigators of those so-called spontaneous protests, those Twitter revolts, and Cairo, and Tunisia, and so forth over the last months have all been pre-organized assiduously. Some of the people, leaders of the protests, have been trained in Belgrade, in Serbia by activists financed by the US State Department. This thing has State Department and US intelligence all over it.”

On the US agenda:

Militarily, the places such as Libya and South Sudan, the so-called Republic of South Sudan, to militarize those oil sources that are directly strategic to China’s future economic growth. So this is all about controlling Eurasia, some things Zbigniew Brzezinski talked about back in 1997 in his famous book the ‘Grand Chess Game’ [The Grand Chessboard] and controlling especially Russia and China and any potential cohesion of the Eurasian countries economically and politically.”

Who would you say pays for wars waged by the US? 

“You have to go back to the role in the last 20 or 30 years, actually it began in the ‘80s, with the role of the dollar as world reserve currency. What that means, to strip away all the complicated economic jargon, is world trade, central banks and China or Japan or Russia and so, they have to have dollars because other nations only accept dollars as a universal currency. They shouldn’t anymore because US economy is on its knees, but they do. And China has an enormous trade surplus; Wall-Mart is essentially an outpost of Chinese manufacturing in America today. So the 300 billion plus of surplus dollars that the Central Bank of China amasses every year, what do you do with that? Well, there is few markets big enough to invest in. Supposedly they could buy gold for their central bank reserves, which they are doing by the way, but the place they could invest it, as they see it right now until very recently, is either in dollars or in the euro. They’ve got something like three trillion dollars of US dollar Treasury bonds or bills as their reserves today. So in effect, the US would not be able to finance the deficits that they are running to wage those wars in Afghanistan, or wage those wars in Iraq, or in Libya unless the Chinese were buying the US Treasury bonds. So ironically the Chinese [fund] wars directed against Chinese national interest for energy security.”


After the protests in Iran in 2009, there was considerable commentary posted about them being the result of deliberate action and part of a strategy designed to create social unrest and gather widedspread support on social media sites, especially Twitter. Many of us were aware and yet we made the choice to continue to support the protesters. That is not the same as being a part of some conspiracy. The two things are easily confused, and the genuine supporters, like genuine news reports, videos, images etc, are often hard to identfy or verify. But I have found that very little of this matters if you remain focussed on the humanitarian issues, rather than the politics. If you stick to the issues, you are less at risk of being sidetracked by petty disagreements.

One important thing that I have not seen written about, is that these theories, accusations, etc are not unknown to actual dissidents. There are real dissidents in Iran, just as there are in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, and so on across the Middle East, across the Arab world, across the world. They are there in South America, in Asia, in Europe, China, Australia. You get the picture? There are genuine dissidents all over the world. They might well be getting a gentle or even a brutal push from the US or any other global agency or state actor. But they are still genuine dissidents with genuine grievances, and very real desire for change of some sort. I’ve met a few of these people, I have personally communicated with hundreds of them. Some of them have told me they are aware of external meddling and interference, but they don’t care. They have a cause, a reason to resist and they continue to resist, because they must: they see no alternative. Therefore, I continue to support them: I see no alternative.

Report via RT