World Anti-militarism Newswire Archive

In slightly over a month, on October 7, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan will enter its tenth year.

The conflict represents the longest continuous combat operations in the history of the United States and Afghanistan alike. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the only time in its existence activating its Article 5 mutual military assistance clause in September 2001 and thus entering the Afghan fray, European nations that had not been at war since the Second World War are now engaged in an endless combat mission.

There are 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 of them under the command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Military personnel from over a quarter of the 192 members of the United Nations. They include soldiers from almost every European country, several Asia-Pacific states, and nations in the Americas and the Middle East.

If American whites practiced what many of them preach to Muslims, they would ban themselves from building cultural institutions of any kind in much of the United States, since so many places are sites of depraved atrocities and mass killings of people of color by whites. Or, are only white folks’ “sensitivities” to be respected? Where is “hallowed ground” for descendants of Black slaves and Native Americans?

"The fact that the 9/11 attacks were not instigated by Muslims has rarely been acknowledged by the Muslim community. Al Qaeda's ongoing relationship to the CIA, its role as a US sponsored "intelligence asset" going back to to the Soviet-Afghan war is not mentioned. (Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism" Global Research, Montreal, 2005)
Since the early 1980s, Washington has covertly supported the most conservative and fundamentalist factions of Islam, largely with a view to weakening secular, nationalist and progressive movements in the Middle East and Central Asia. Known and documented, the fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi missions from Saudi Arabia, dispatched not only to Afghanistan but also to the Balkans and to the Muslim republics of the former Soviet republics were covertly supported by US intelligence. (Ibid) What is often referred to as "Political Islam" is in large part a creation of the US intelligence apparatus (with the support of Britain's MI6 and Israel's Mossad)."

The CIA Red Cell memorandum released by WikiLeaks speaks volumes about the doublethink, paranoia, deception, and delusion of the CIA itself.

A new report released by a think tank called Demos warns of the hazardous effects of conspiracy theories on society and recommends strategies for governments to mitigate these effects, including the infiltration of websites.

The report, called The Power of Unreason: Conspiracy Theories, Extremism and Counterterrorism, says "most notoriously and influentially, the ‘9/11 truth movement’ has questioned the official accounts of 9/11 and has become a large and growing political force."

The report notes that the 9/11 truth movement is "peaceful", but makes no distinction between the legitimate questioning of the official account of 9/11 and any number of unrelated, and often racist, conspiracy theories.

"Iraq and Afghanistan are U.S. imperial wars. Imperialism means simply invading other people’s homelands and killing them in order to secure something that our rulers want. This is how they are “removed,” or otherwise encouraged to get the hell out of the way. This is the “mission” of the troops. Forget “Democracy,” liberation, “nation building,” bravery, heroes, anything you hear from the talking head “experts” you may have heard on some NPR talk show, or any other pretty words on the subject."

A senior US advisor has threatened Lebanese army commander, Jean Qahwaji that should his army initiate additional fire exchanges with Israel, the Israeli army "would completely destroy the Lebanese army’s bases, centers and offices within four hours".

Demonstration September 23rd 2010, Ghent (Belgium), to oppose war preparation:
Protest against the informal EU Defence Summit 2010.
More info: www.vrede.be

London newspaper Evening Standard reports [Thursday 26 August 2010] that Oona King, Neil Kinnock's challenge to Ken Livingstone, has got hold of private details of Labour Party members. This should worry even those who despise Ken Livingstone. The availability of Labour Party members' details to Oona King shows that she is being backed by secretive forces. Very worrying.

Akbayan (Citizens Action Party) on the the Ill-fated Hostage Taking Incident at the Quirino Grandstand and the Necessary Reformation of the Police Force

 http://wri-irg.org/epublish/19/394

After years of lobbying by NGO's, the United Nations decided to start negotiations for a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The objective of this treaty is to create a legal mechanism to prevent 'unethical' arms trade. Arms should not be exported when there is a serious risk that they might be used in human rights violations, in war crimes, organised crime or terrorism. They should also not be sold to unstable regions, poor countries or corrupt regimes. Reading this, one cannot conclude anything else than that that this treaty is meant to end all arms trade.

"Heated arguments have exploded around religion, tolerance, democracy, etc.---everything except the only fact that matters: 9/11 was a false flag operation, courtesy of the Bush-Cheney administration, carried out by an elite consensus, in order to justify the “war on terrorism”, and everything that came with it. Mass murder. Unending resource conquest. A police state within US borders. Open criminality.

The perpetual threat posed by a fabricated outside enemy, and a militarized, fearful populace, remain the centerpieces of elite policy, and they have been consistently maintained by both Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations. The demonization of Muslims continues to facilitate pillage."

n the modern era, humor has worked again and again to dehumanize target countries as a standard part of war propaganda. In a democracy, where support of the population at large is supposedly a prerequisite for attacking another country, jokes are a common means of dehumanizing, demonizing and generally placing the population of the targets of the attack into the category of Other. Empathy plummets; and civilians in the aggressor state find it increasingly difficult to put themselves in the (Islam-approved) shoes of those on the receiving ends of the bombs. Most troubling is that liberals and progressives – those you might expect, ostensibly, to oppose a U.S. attack on Iran – are just as likely to laugh the country to war as hawks.

"Assange, however, quickly laid the blame on the Pentagon. He stated that he had been warned by Australian intelligence to be on guard against “honey traps”—the time-honored ploys that intelligence services use to lure a target into a sexual encounter with someone who then uses the encounter to damage the target’s reputation. Earlier today, however, Assange reversed course on these charges, telling the Sydney Morning Herald, “We don’t have direct evidence that this is coming from a U.S. or other intelligence service, but we can have some suspicions about who will benefit, but without direct evidence I won’t be making direct allegations.”
The Pentagon quickly denounced the charges as “absurd.” But there is no doubt that the Pentagon is seeking to gain from them in its information war with WikiLeaks: when the case first emerged, the accusations were aggressively spread by the Pentagon via Twitter.
As I wrote in “WikiLeaks: The National-Security State Strikes Back,” a highly classified Army Counterintelligence Center 32-page memorandum noted that to eliminate the threat presented by WikiLeaks, the United States would have to strike not simply servers and databases, but against the individuals who were critical to the operation of WikiLeaks. It repeatedly identifies Assange as a target, describes the leaks as criminal acts and advocates “successful prosecutions” to “destroy the center of gravity” of WikiLeaks. The suspicions raised by Assange are thus hardly unwarranted—they match the Pentagon’s own plan to take WikiLeaks out of action. However, there is as yet no direct evidence for the claim that the accusations leveled at Assange were the work of some intelligence service, and even if there were, Assange has plenty of governments anxious to shut him down aside from the United States. But as this incident makes clear, the war on WikiLeaks will be fought with unconventional tools and those following the story are advised to accept nothing at face value."

Countdown to Zero is now playing in a theater near you, at least if you live in a very “blue state” or a “blue neighborhood,” for example, Cambridge, MA, my hometown, or San Francisco. The movie is aimed squarely at the antiwar, anti-nuclear pro-Obama audience, which dwells therein and is all too susceptible to the “humanitarian” streak of imperialism. It is a very shrewd propaganda flick, as Darwin Bond-Graham demonstrated in his superb review, a film which in fact helps to pry open a little bit further the door to a war on Iran.

Ex-Prime Minister and post-Downing Street millionaire Tony Blair, to celebrate the publication of his book A Journey, is holding a ‘signing’ session at Waterstones, Piccadilly on 8 September. That this man, responsible for taking us into an illegal war, playing his part in the ruination of an ancient country because he ‘believed he was right’, should advertise himself in this way has caused outrage. Time, I think, to look at where we, and Blair, actually stand in terms of what we can and cannot do to call him to account.

In order to have an understanding of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, It's important to have a sense of its history.

examples of ancient and modern empire

More than a dozen pro-Palestinian activists gathered outside the BBC in Newcastle today in a lively protest against the biased reporting of the Panorama programme in it’s recent documentary ‘Death on the Med’ about the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010. The demonstration was supported in Newcastle by the Palestine Action Group and other independent activists.

This week's show looks at the manipulation necessary to create wars from 3 different angles, the brainwashing of recruits, the political manipulation of public opinion, and tailoring of Hollywood's depiction of war.