World Analysis Newswire Archive

The announcement by Washington today that it is appointing an ambassador to Syria – after an absence of five years – is being hailed in the western media as another example of the Obama administration’s “policy of engagement” for regional peace.

The seeming US hand of friendship towards Syria is more accurately understood as the further clenching of Washington’s fist towards Iran.

A secure, stable and democratic Iraq will have first to wait for an end to the raging power struggle over Iraq between the United States and Iran inside and outside the occupied Arab country.

Artwork originally produced for Greek newspaper DROMOS:  http://www.edromos.gr

In the past year, in response to emerging independent science on the 9/11 attacks, nine corporate, seven public, and two independent media outlets aired analytic programs investigating the official account.

Increasingly, the issue is treated as a scientific controversy worthy of debate, rather than as a "conspiracy theory" ignoring science and common sense.

"Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." [13]

The Time piece of December 2, then, points out that the continued presence of U.S. nuclear warheads in Europe is "more than an anachronism or historical oddity. They [the weapons] are a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)...."

"Because 'nuclear burden-sharing,' as the dispersion of B61s in Europe is called, was set up before the NPT came into force, it is technically legal. But as signatories to the NPT, the four European countries and the U.S. have pledged 'not to receive the transfer...of nuclear weapons or control over such weapons directly, or indirectly.' That, of course, is precisely what the long-standing NATO arrangement entails."

When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that U.S. rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defense or for humanitarian rescue operations or to overthrow tyranny, fight terrorism, and propagate democracy.

There has been much hype, supported by scanty evidence, that Iran might at some future date become a nuclear weapons state. And, therefore, a pre-emptive defensive nuclear attack on Iran to annihilate its non-existent nuclear weapons program should be seriously contemplated "to make the World a safer place". The mainstream media abounds with makeshift opinion on the Iran nuclear threat.

But what about the five European "undeclared nuclear states" including Belgium, Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands and Italy.

One can't rule the world without keeping one's own nation under control, and this is an essential prerequisite for empire maintenance abroad.

Obama and Sarah Palin BOTH exalt the same military leadership that gives them both the OKay. They are two loyal representatives of wealthy and influential investors in war industry and the industry's laterally connected high military officials. Yet media conglomerates intend for the public to see them as two political stars in confrontation. They both go along with and play out this hoax, which cleaves the national constituency conveniently in two making it easier to manage.

"But we do not know what to do with the civilization attained. Human beings have equipped themselves with nuclear weapons of unbelievable accuracy and annihilation potency while, from the moral and political point of view, they have ignominiously retrogressed. Politically and socially, we are more underdeveloped than ever. Automatons are replacing soldiers; the mass media, educators, and governments are beginning to be overtaken by events without knowing what to do. In the desperation of many international political leaders one can appreciate an impotency in the face of the problems that are accumulating in their offices and steadily more frequent international meetings.

In those circumstances, an unprecedented disaster is taking place in Haiti, while on the other side of the planet, three wars and an arms race are continuing their development, in the midst of the economic crisis and growing conflicts, which is consuming more than 2.5% of the global GDP, a figure with which all the Third World countries could be developed in a short period of time and possibly evade climate change by devoting the economic and scientific resources that are essential to that objective."

In my view, the prima facie “Truth about US justice” is that “truth” is in the service of empire! The madam Ambassador of the United States to Pakistan has only executed the core purpose of her diplomatic post rather faithfully in the service of her empire. “Truth” in these times, like everything else, including science, politics, history, literature, cinema, and of course political-science, is continually put in the diabolical service of empire. And perhaps the Brits might actually know this better than the rest of the world put together!

"The profit system has hit an historic dead-end and this gridlock is a result of deep trends to do with the decline in capitalism as a mode of social production (falling wages and profits and the concomitant explosion in financial speculation and debts).
Widespread poverty and human misery is now seen on a massive scale in the so-called developed world. Some 40 million Americans, for example, are subsisting on food stamps. The distinction between “developed” and “developing” economies (always a myth anyway) is blurred. The ranks of the world’s long-suffering poor are swelled with dispossessed blue and white-collar workers and their families from across the US and Europe. Together more than ever, they stand shut out from those gated havens of obscene wealth for a global minority."

The chain is being tightened around Iran from every direction and NATO is supplying several of the key links.

It is too early to tell whether the false accusations levered against Iran are a pretext for NATO’s further deployment or whether its deployment constitutes the premise for a new war.

Millions of dollars are being filtered from Washington to political parties, NGOs, student organizations and movements that promote US agenda worldwide.

Wherever a coup d'etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its flow of dollars is there.

The islands of Socotra are at the crossroads of the strategic naval waterways of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (See map below). It is of crucial importance to the US military.

Among Washington's strategic objectives is the militarization of major sea ways. This strategic waterway links the Mediterranean to South Asia and the Far East, through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

On the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers.

By the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,” so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation.

The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan.

In our time, war, it seems, has already begun. The US oligarchy and its NATO allies are waging a veritable war on the world: killing, disappearing and incarcerating millions of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – a war that is expanding into Yemen, Somalia and the rest of the Horn of Africa, with the militarisation of sea lanes and oceans and the setting up of “forward projecting” military and missile bases in every continent.

On top of ordinary poverty and misery, the world is truly seeing another historic descent into barbarism. Given this war-mongering dynamic, the growing US antagonism with Iran, Russia and China is far from an idle threat. It is the logical next step for a deeply illogical economic system.

BBC has all morning been saying the Crown Prosecution Service will make an announcement about the six MPs and peers

Here is a full copy of the now-censored blog of a Daily Mail employee. It was taken down after management uncovered it earlier today.

As 20 million Americans struggle with unemployment and 40 million depend on food stamps, President Obama’s exhortation for “America to make painful choices” and to “live within its means”, must sound rather sickening. The president’s budget announcement calls for “austerity” in “discretionary spending” such as education and healthcare, but this frugality is not extended to the American military.

"A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster ‘relief’ would give Washington and private business interests tied to it a geopolitical prize of the first order. Prior to the January 12 quake, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince was the fifth largest US embassy in the world, comparable to its embassies in such geopolitically strategic places as Berlin and Beijing.[17] With huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium, with Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela as a neighbor to the south of Haiti, a return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, -- the poorest nation in the Americas -- would constitute a devastating blow to the world’s sole Superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy Bill Clinton joined forces with Aristide foe George W. Bush to create something called the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund ought to give everyone pause.

According to Marguerite Laurent ('Ezili Dantò') of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network, under the guise of emergency relief work, the US, France and Canada are engaged in a balkanization of the island for future mineral control. She reports rumors that Canada wants the North of Haiti where Canadian mining interests are already present. The US wants Port-au-Prince and the island of La Gonaive just offshore – an area identified in Aristide’s development book as having vast oil resources, and which is bitterly contested by France. She further states that China, with UN veto power over the de facto UN-occupied country, may have something to say against such a US-France-Canada carve up of the vast wealth of the nation."