World Terror War Newswire Archive

Why exactly is the Pentagon warning us about “al-Qaeda” terrorists that “probably could not attack the U.S. homeland”?

As usual, the answer is simple and predictable enough. “The U.S. focus on the group comes as the Bush administration finalizes plans to create a new military command in Africa, called AFRICOM,” part and parcel of the neocon vision of Pax Americana.

“Resisting the Empire”: Documentary Filmmaker John Pilger on Struggles for Freedom in Israel-Palestine, Diego Garcia, Latin America and South Africa.

The renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger has spent the better part of his life documenting American empire and the resistance it has met. Pilger has made over fifty documentaries and is the author, most recently, of "Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire," which looks at ongoing struggles in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, India, Palestine, and South Africa. Pilger joins us for the hour to play excerpts of his documentaries and speak of the struggles he has covered.

John Pilger joins the show 11:44 mins into the show.

Copyleft artwork by Brazilian cartoonist Latuff.

The U.S. is secretly supporting the same group that helped facilitate a plan to blow up multiple airliners and murder hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians.

Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is a book that, to use the overwrought (but in this case true) rhetoric of book blurbs, should be read by anyone concerned with rebuilding the left, stopping the Iraq war, or with the future of humanity in general. The subject of his book is the human rights ideology which insists that the US/the West is morally obligated to military intervene to protect the political and civil rights of various peoples around the world. He argues that this line of thought has been absorbed by most of the left in Europe (and, we would add, in the US), and that it helps account for the listlessness of the struggle against the Iraq occupation. Not a timid writer, Bricmont expends no energy deconstructing the discourse of human rights, or expounding on its intellectual genealogy. Instead, he focuses directly on the argument itself, and its multiple variants (such as the use of dubious historical backdrops, including the failure of the left to be sufficiently critical of Stalin, and the example of World War II). He further keeps things simply by avoiding philosophical questions of cultural relativism, instead simply trying to answer whether the military interventionist strategy in fact promotes the human rights it claims to. One wonders how the many defenders of humanitarian imperialism would respond to the arguments laid out in the book. Of course, they will simply ignore it, or perhaps slander the author (defender of Saddam/Stalin, etc.).

Last weekend’s scare headlines and breathless broadcast reports about the unspeakable horrors that were supposedly foiled with the uncovering of the “JFK plot” have largely faded from view as evidence mounts that the alleged threat was grossly hyped—if not totally invented—by US authorities.

Nine of ten candidates for the Republican presidential nomination explicitly or tacitly supported a US attack on Iran using nuclear weapons, in response to a question at Tuesday night’s nationally televised debate in New Hampshire.

Unsubtly titled "The Case for Bombing Iran: I hope and pray that President Bush will do it,", Norman Podhoretz's op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal is a work of eloquently simplistic and hysterical propaganda, truly a model of the genre. I recommend it as a seminal document of the Bush era, prior to what may well be its crowning disaster. It's lengthy but worth reading closely as a concentrated statement of the argument we will probably hear in ever shriller pitch in the coming months.

The neocons think that by bombing Iran the US will provoke Iran to arm the Shiite militias in Iraq with armor-piercing rocket propelled grenades and with surface to air missiles and unleash the militias against US troops. These weapons would neutralize US tanks and helicopter gunships and destroy the US military edge, leaving divided and isolated US forces subject to being cut off from supplies and retreat routes. With America on the verge of losing most of its troops in Iraq, the cry would go up to “save the troops” by nuking Iran.

From mission statement to mission accomplished, the slam dunk cakewalks continue. But from Baghdad to Beirut, the forgery looks the same.

Unlike Iraq, there is no “weapons of mass destruction threat” to facilitate toppling the Syrian regime. This time, a United Nations Tribunal could provide the means, deploying Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri's murder as the weapon. But like the US show trial to convict Saddam Hussein, the show trial to convict Syria for Hariri's murder, built by the United Nation's International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC), has a history of problems.

In other words, we can assume Fatah al-Islam, linked to the Shin Bet compromised PFLP through the splinter group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, is yet another covert operation, designed to go up against Hezbollah, never mind the futility of such an operation. It appears to be a collaborative black op intelligence effort between the Israelis, the Saudis, and the neocons—with the cooperation of the Senora government in Lebanon—all interested in taking down Hezbollah a peg or two, especially considering the disturbing fact the Islamic organization is now capable of fending off Israeli predation.

Let me light a lantern in a bell tower for my fellow Americans. You must awake. There are PR armies of the night with shiny media kits and Dick-Cheneyfied “intelligence” reports quietly at work right now, building momentum for a strike on Iran and a vast broadening of this too costly—and let’s just say it—too crazy war on terror.

The weekend’s news in the US was dominated by screaming headlines and sensationalist broadcast coverage of an alleged plot in New York to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport’s jet fuel tanks and supply lines. The attack would have been, according to many accounts, “more devastating than September 11.”

Four men were charged in an indictment [ http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nye/pr/2007/Defreitas.complaint.pdf] unveiled Sunday that included features that have become almost invariable in every such “terror” case brought by the government in recent years. First, the suspects had not only carried out no acts of terror, but they apparently lacked any means to realize such an attack. Second, a central figure in the alleged plot was a paid undercover informant of the FBI.

Russell Defreitas, the elderly and hapless patsy ensnared by the FBI for the crime of dreaming up a fantastical plot to blow up Kennedy Airport, “may have been inspired by Osama bin Laden,” however “was not an al-Qaida wannabe, according to authorities.

According to the corporate media, Defreitas may prove to be a convenient link to Jamaat al-Muslimeen and Hugo Chávez, as the former is basically insignificant beyond the realm of kidnapping and drug smuggling, while the latter is a big fish with a lot of oil at his disposal and the neocons would love to demonize him as a terrorist, thus working toward his overthrow.

Springing up across London.

The truth is out there......... in Istanbul this weekend.

The raid on the Finance Ministry in Baghdad by 40 policemen in 19 vehicles who calmly cordoned off the street in front of the building before abducting five Britons shows how little has changed in the Iraqi capital despite US reinforcements and a new security plan.

An estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. and Coalition air strikes from the start of the war through June of last year, an article in "The Nation" magazine says.

The current imperial slaughter in the Middle East, justified by the "Global War on Terror", that has resulted in at least 600,000 deaths in Iraq, is nothing new — the U.S. Empire has a long and sordid history of genocidal mass murder.

The history of the US imperialism and Empire is the subject of a series of ten monthly seminars from Dr John Marciano, "Empire as a Way of Life". Attached is a recording of the eighth of these seminars and the text upon which it was based. The first 9 of these seminars have taken place and the intention is to have the whole series published on this site; the last one will take place on 19th June.

This seminar, recorded on 17th April 2007 by the L.A. Sound Posse, runs for 39 minutes and includes the discussion following. It has been made available under a Creative Commons license. If this recording is broadcast please let the L.A. Sound Posse know. This recording was originally made available on the A-Infos Radio Project site.

The following text has been reproduced here with the kind permission of Dr John Marciano and he can be contacted at johnmarciano@mac.com. He introduced this series of seminars in the following way:

A fundamental purpose of our meetings is to understand the systemic nature of the U.S. Empire and the economic and military imperialism that is its lifeblood. The historian William Appleman Williams argues that empire became "a way of life" in the U.S., a "combination of patterns of thought and action that, as it becomes habitual and institutionalized, defines the thrust and character of a culture and society." This "way of life" has convinced many U.S. "Americans" they have a right or "manifest destiny" to impose their political and economic policies upon others.

Dr John Marciano is Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Cortland, where he taught courses on social and historical foundations of education and class, gender and race.

Previous parts of this series:

• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 1 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 2 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 3 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 4 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 5 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 6 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 7 | mp3 | doc

A response to yesterday's WTC7 hit piece in the NY Times (see 'A Notion From 9/11 Is Kept Alive' by Jim Dwyer). Why do we bother? Because someone has to keep the concepts of truth and global justice alive as we descend into Rockefeller's 'dream' of a one-world feudal state, that's why!