Obama, Afghanistan and Oil

In an address yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona, President Obama said that the United States “didn’t choose to fight in Afghanistan, but was forced to invade that country to stop future Sept. 11-type attacks at home”.

Really?

The fact of the matter is, as this article in The Debate published on August 18 reveals, that “America has wanted a new government in Afghanistan since at least 1998, three years before the attacks on 11 September 2001. The official report from a meeting of the U.S. Government’s foreign policy committee on 12 February 1998, available on the U.S. Government website, confirms that the need for a West-friendly government was recognised long before the War on Terror that followed September 11th”:

The U.S. Government’s position is that we support multiple pipelines… The Unocal pipeline is among those pipelines that would receive our support under that policy. I would caution that while we do support the project, the U.S. Government has not at this point recognized any governing regime of the transit country, one of the transit countries, Afghanistan, through which that pipeline would be routed. But we do support the project.” [ U.S. House of Reps., "U.S. Interests in the Central Asian Republics", 12 Feb 1998 ]

The only other possible route [for the desired oil pipeline] is across, Afghanistan which has of course its own unique challenges.” [ "U.S. Interests in the Central Asian Republics", 12 Feb 1998 ]

CentGas can not begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan Government is in place.” [ "U.S. Interests in the Central Asian Republics", 12 Feb 1998 ]

The Afghanistan oil pipeline project was finally able to proceed in May 2002. This could not have happened if America had not taken military action to replace the government in Afghanistan.

Secondly, as the TIMELINE in the same article shows, US military action in Afghanistan began long before the World Trade Center fell.

So, when Obama says that the US “didn’t choose to fight in Afghanistan, but was forced to invade that country to stop future Sept. 11-type attacks at home”, he is simply CHATTING SHIT.

The real reason why we are in Afghanistan is oil. As Jon Flanders writes in jonGas, Oil and Afghanistan:

Most of us know that the Middle East is a center of activity for world oil production. Some of us have heard about the Caspian Sea, and the touted possibilities for great oil resources there. But few would think that rocky, war torn Afghanistan might be part of this energy production picture.Yet it most certainly is. And the information about Afghanistan’s role is readily available on the World Wide Web to anyone who wants to investigate. Indeed, much of the information comes from US government sources like the Voice of America.

In an interview with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc., on May 28, 2001, Michael Klare, author of the book Resource Wars, and Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies based at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, says:

I think in this case this is a national security consideration that’s driving all of this. The United States has to get that oil from that region [Central Asia] and will make a deal with whatever governments are there in place that are willing to work with us [that is, the US], like the government[s] in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan that are far from ideal with respect to human rights and democratic procedure. And I think that’s a reflection of the view that I write about in my book — we [the US] view oil as a security consideration and we have to protect it by any means necessary, regardless of other considerations, other values.

Either President Obama has known this all along, and for reasons best known to himself (and his chums on the CFR) is keeping mum about it, or he is a singularly uninformed guy who knows nothing of the work of people like Michael Klare, which is difficult to believe.

President Obama: If Caspian oil is essential for our national security please say so openly and honestly and lets have an open and honest debate about whether this oil is worth the cost in lives, largesse and our international reputation or whether we should look into other sources of energy, such as hemp and alcohol, but please don’t insult our intelligence with this bullshit about 9/11.

Health Care Reform We Can Believe in?

There’s no doubt about it. Health Care (for those who can afford it), is better in America than it is here in the UK.

A very wise man once said:

In America, if you have cancer, chances are that you survive–and, if you have good medical insurance, you stay solvent, and if you don’t, you survive anyway, but you end up bankrupt.

In the UK, with its creaking at the seams National Health Service, chances are you die, but you stay solvent.

Obama arsing about with his "fixer" in the Blue Room in the White House. I like the French Empire style deco, but Obama's watered down Health Care Reforms are less to my taste.

I need your help to spread the word and rally the nation around true health care reform which covers everyone and maintains fiscal integrity without breaking our nation’s bank! Your contribution will empower our efforts to continue to fight for the single-payer, not-for-profit health care bill, HR676 “Medicare for All,” which I co-authored with Rep. John Conyers. The bill now has 85 sponsors in the House.” Rep. Dennis Kucinich

Every mistake made by the Obama White House in the pursuit of health care reform can be traced to the political style and ideological prejudices of Rahm Emanuel, who has repeatedly sought to intimidate progressives and empower conservatives.” Joe Conason

Health Care in America: The Masquerade is Over!

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Global Research, 2009-08-19

The masquerade is over! The “public option” is … dead.

Health care reform is now a private option: WHICH FOR PROFIT INSURANCE COMPANY DO YOU WANT?

You have to choose. And you have to pay. If you have a low income, under HR3200 government will subsidize the private insurance companies and you will still have to pay premiums, co-pays and deductibles.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Obama’s Enforcer: Not Really Tough Enough

Joe Conason, Truthdig, Aug 20, 2009

If the Democrats fail to pass real changes in the health care system this year—rather than a sham that mimics and mocks reform—they will have nobody to blame but themselves. Or at least nobody to blame but other Democrats, notably those in the White House who have never been committed to this most venerable and fundamental aspect of party policy.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

HELL CARE

Excerpted from Hush! Hush! Sweet Sarah!
“The Rant” by Tom Degan
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

“As an American who has been living in Europe for most of the last 20 years, one who has visited doctors numerous times in four different countries, whose two children were brought into this world in European hospitals (France and England), who has himself spent a week in a public British hospital, and who underwent an operation in a private British clinic, I think I can say a thing or two about health care in Europe.

The Secrets of China’s Economy: The Government Owns the Banks rather than the Reverse

How can China’s stimulus plan be working so well, when ours is barely working at all? The answer may be simple: China has not let its banking system run roughshod over its productive economy. Chinese banks work for the people rather than the reverse.” Ellen Brown

MASH dude Demarco slays the China Banks

Ellen Brown | Global Research | August 18, 2009

“The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place.” — U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Democratic Party Whip, April 30, 2009

While the U.S. spends trillions of dollars to bail out its banking system, leaving its economy to languish, China is being called a “miracle economy” that has decoupled from the rest of the world. As the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, China has maintained a phenomenal 8% annual growth rate. Those are the reports, but commentators are dubious. They ask how that growth is possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums. Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:

We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low — nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, at most a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Bank of China to ‘cherry-pick’ UK mortgage customers as lending drought persists

Telegraph.co.uk | 20 Aug 2009

Bank of China, the country’s third biggest bank, plans to ‘cherry-pick’ UK mortgage customers as the lending drought in Britain remains.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Xixu Sun, the head of Bank of China’s retail operations in the UK, said “before the financial crisis you didn’t have a choice, you couldn’t cherry-pick the good customers.

Now you have that choice, because there’s a drought in terms of mortgage loans provided by banks.”

Bank of China is looking to become a major household name in Britain’s mortgage market, which has seen lending slump as the recession drives up bad loans at many banks. Although house prices have showed signs of stabilisng in recent weeks, the volume of mortgages approved is still less than half the 108,000 monthly average seen between the boom years of 2003 and 2007.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove”

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
–Thomas Jefferson

A video by Project Save Justice

American Justice is At Risk. What Are You Doing About it?

by Rob Kall
OpEdNews
August 21, 2009

The health reform debate is roaring, as it should be, and we are engaged in pressing the spineless Dems – including Obama – to stand up to the insurance companies and rescue American health care. While we are enaged in this one noble battle, we are in danger of distracting ourselves from another urgent situation– the toxic US Attorneys appointed by Bush are still in place and their victims are in jail.

SOURCE

Lockerbie & Kafka’s Labyrinth by Michael Carmichael

Planetary Movement

In December 1988, I was living in the United Kingdom when the searing news of the Lockerbie bombing exploded into the global consciousness.

With 270 victims, Lockerbie was at once the worst act of terrorism on British soil and the most heinous act of terrorism yet perpetrated against Americans. Twelve years later, Lockerbie would produce one of the most expensive trials in world history (75 million pounds sterling, circa $120 million) and what has become a highly contentious verdict.

At the time of the tragedy, an extremist group of Palestinians backed by Iran was selected as the primary suspect, but two years later when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait the spotlight of suspicion shifted to Libya. Bush, Sr. needed Iranian support for the invasion of Kuwait – a nation courted assiduously by the Reagan-Bush administration through the notorious Iran-Contra Scandal and beyond.

Under the crushing weight of draconian sanctions, Libya eventually realized the wisdom of producing members of its own intelligence apparatus who could help them engineer the lifting of crippling trade restrictions. In the course of time, two hapless Libyans: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah would be extradited and sent to an obscure US military base called, Camp Zeist, where they would be placed on trial. On the 31st of January 2001 over twelve years after the tragedy shook the civilized world, a panel consisting of three Scottish judges convicted Megrahi and acquited Fhimah. Megrahi received a life sentence intended to compel him to serve at least 27 years in prison.

SOURCE

Murdering Palestinians for their organs: “All facts on the ground prove Swedish report correct”

By Saed Bannoura
Global Research, August 23, 2009

Former Palestinian detainee, researcher Abdul-Nasser Farwana, stated that all facts on the ground, since decades, prove that the Israeli occupation executed Palestinian detainees after they surrendered and refused to hand their bodies to their families. Hundreds of bodies were transferred to the families days, months or even years after the fact, and when the bodies were sent back, they were missing vital internal organs.

Link for the Aftonbladet report by Swedish journalist Donald Boström:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

Farwana added that the Swedish report, written by Donald Boström and published by Aftonbladet, Stockholm daily paper, regarding illegal trafficking of body parts of Palestinians is directly connected to the execution of Palestinians after they surrendered to the army, and is connected with the arrest of 40 well-known figures, including Rabbis in New Jersey for money laundering and corruption, in a scheme that involved sales of Israeli kidneys in the US and other corruption rackets.

Farwana added that one of the illegal acts carried out by Israel is having secret detention facilities in which dozens of detainees were imprisoned and never heard of anymore. This is in addition to the “Numbers Graveyard” in which “unknown” Palestinian and Arab fighters are buried.

MORE HERE

Israel wants Swedish apology over “organ trade”

A diplomatic row has erupted between Sweden and Israel over an allegedly anti-semitic newspaper article. Israel wants an apology after the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet repeated claims that Israeli troops stole and then sold the organs of Palestinians who died in custody in the early 1990s.

Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08192009.html

“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort.  We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.”  R.L. Bushman

“Rapidly you are dividing into two classes–extreme rich and extreme poor.”    “Brutus” 

Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections.  The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions.  Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

Have a look at economic policy.  It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs.  

It was the banks, not the millions of Americans who have lost homes, jobs, health insurance, and pensions, that received $700 billion in TARP funds.  The banks used this gift of capital to make more profits. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs announced record second quarter profits and large six-figure bonuses for every employee.  

The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy is another gift to the banks.  It lowers their cost of funds and increases their profits.  With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, banks became high-risk investment houses that trade financial instruments such as interest rate derivatives and mortgage backed securities. With abundant funds supplied virtually free by the Federal Reserve, banks are paying depositors virtually nothing on their savings.

WAR AND FUTURE CANNON FODDER

PEACE AND FUTURE CANNON FODDER is the title of a remarkably prescient cartoon created in 1920, two years after the end of World War I, showing the leaders of the victorious powers, Georges Clemenceau (France), Lloyd George (Great Britain), Woodrow Wilson (U.S.A.), and Orlando (Italy), leaving the Palace of Versailles, their hats apparently doffed out of respect for the future dead, while a small child weeps.

On the gound beside the child lies a copy of the Paris Peace Treaty, which was forced on a defeated Germany at Versailles, and whose terms, many believed, were so harsh, that it would sooner or later lead to a rerun of the conflict it was meant to end.

Above the child’s head is a comment “1940 CLASS”.

(In the European context, “1940 CLASS” refers to those who would be eligible for conscription in 1940, not to those who would graduate in that year. I am, nevertheless, reminded of the huge roster of names of Harvard men, undergraduates listed according to their class, including Patrick Joseph Kennedy Jr., Class of 1938, and those of the Classes of 1945, 1946, 1947, and 1948, who would never live to see Commencement Day in any of those years, and postgraduates according to their School, on a stone tablet on the south wall of Harvard’s Memorial Church.)

The caption reads: “The Tiger: Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!”

My attention this morning was caught by the headline of the following newspaper article, “Afghanistan conflict could last 40 years, says new head of British Army“, with the subtitle: “General Sir David Richards, the new head of the British Army believes the West’s mission to stabilise Afghanistan might take as long as 40 years.”

So Colonel Blimp, or whatever his name is, thinks it’ll take forty years to “stabilise” (his words) that unhappy country. A bit optimistic, don’t you think, when all other attempts to conquer, pacify, or otherwise control Afghanistan have failed.

And is it really our “mission” there to “stabilise Afghanistan”, or are there other reasons for our being there?

Long march to victory? These soliders grandchildren could be fighting in Afghanistan. Photo: REUTERS

To what savage god, or gods, are we really sacrificing so many young lives?

I am reminded of that remarkable passage in the chapter titled, “Snow”, in Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain, when its hero, the young Hans Castorp, whom we presume will later perish in World War 1, has a premonitory vision while lost in a snowstorm in the mountains above Davos, Switzerland. Written in 1924, this allegory of the Great War constitutes a remarkable statement on that terrible conflict, and indeed on all wars fought in the last and the current century.

If you read nothing else by Mann, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, read this passage.

Returning to the newspaper article, the caption beneath the photo says it all… .

Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!

READ ARTICLE

Hiroshima After Sixty [Four] Years: The Debate Continues

Color footage of 1945 showing the horrors in the Japanese city of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb dropped by the American airplane “Enola Gaye”

My thanks are due to Sudhan (Dr Nasir Khan) for posting the excerpt from Ralph Raico’s “Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution” in John V. Denson, ed., Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom on the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.

It was, of course, on this day, 64 years ago, that the bomb was dropped.

As a 14-year-old schoolboy, fascinated by History, I read Pulitzer prize-winning author, John Hersey’s, Hiroshima, which left me angry and deeply shocked and which led to a numer of heated arguments with fellow schoolboys at the boarding school I attended at the time.

Like many, my step-mother, who was 6 at the time, accepted at face value the story put about in 1945 that the dropping of the bomb was necessary to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of US and British soldiers who would perish in an invasion of the Japanese mainland, and it was from her that I imbibed this version of events, which I continued to accept for several years until I saw a TV interview with Denis Healey, former Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequor (UK counterpart to US Secretary of the Treasury), who said that the bomb had been used to bring the war to a swift end before the Russians muscled in and demanded their tid-bit of a supine Japan.

Then, a few years ago, I read the chapter, “Japanese Intentions in the Second World War”, in Gore Vidal’s, The Last Empire, which introduced me to the work of Gar Alperovitz, Cold War revisionist historian, whose book, The Decision to Use the Bomb, is frequently cited in the article posted by Sudhan.

(Vidal also reviews Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit, in which its author argues that President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and withheld intelligence of it from the US Navy commander in Hawaii in order to “bounce” American public opinion into entering the war against Japan, but that’s another story.)

Published on the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb in 2005 in Commondreams.org, Alperovitz’s article, Hiroshima After Sixty Years: The Debate Continues, constitutes a fitting and thought-provoking way of marking today’s anniversary:

Hiroshima After Sixty Years: The Debate Continues

by Gar Alperovitz, published on Wednesday, August 3, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. One might think that by now historians would agree on all the fundamental issues. The reality, however, is just the opposite: All the major issues involved in the decision are still very much a matter of dispute among experts. An obvious question is why this should be so after so many years.

Did the atomic bomb, in fact, cause Japan to surrender? Most Americans think the answer is self-evident. However, many historical studies–including new publications by two highly regarded scholars–challenge the conventional understanding. In a recently released Harvard University Press volume drawing upon the latest Japanese sources, for instance, Professor Tsuyohsi Hasegawa concludes that the traditional “myth cannot be supported by historical facts.” By far the most important factor forcing the decision, his research indicates, was the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on August 8, 1945, just after the Hiroshima bombing.

Similarly, Professor Herbert Bix–whose biography of Hirohito won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction–also writes in a recent article that “the Soviet factor carried greater weight in the eyes of the emperor and most military leaders.”

Original article

RELATED ARTICLES:

Doctor Atomic: Wartime Decisions and the Atomic Age

The Decision to Drop the Bomb

Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?

The Pearl Harbor Deception

Homage to Budd Schulberg

I still remember being enthralled by “On the Waterfront”, for which Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay, when I first saw it in my late teens on the small screen back in the 70s with its fine performances by Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and the delectable Eva Marie Saint.

The dilemma which Terry Malloy, the role played by Brando, faces on screen echos that which Schulberg himself faced when called upon to testify before the House Committee on Unamerican activities, itself a most unAmerican institution, and which he was able to justify in the face of accusations of betrayal — or “rationalise”, according to your point of view.

What makes Schulberg especially interesting for me is his relationship with the tragically doomed F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose “Tender is the Night” I am currently rereading, and the novel that that relationship engendered, “The Disenchanted”, which has been described as more Fitzgerald than Fitzgerald himself, and which is “the thinly disguised story of F. Scott Fitzgerald in his alcoholic decline, when life had overtaken him to the point that his genius could no longer be expressed in the only way he knew how: his writing”.

As W. Kaplan writes in his review of this book on Amazon.com:

Because of “The Disenchanted,” which I first read as a preteen, I turned to F. Scott Fitzgerald and read everything he had ever written. I believe that my understanding of his works and his life were and are rooted in Budd Schulberg’s moving and brilliant book, and if I could have thanked him in person, I would have done so, a thousand times over.

Schulberg will not be remembered by younger readers, but his life with its choices and dilemmas encapsulates so much of 20th century American History that it is worth being reviewed.

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95

TIM WEINER | NYT | August 5, 2009

Budd Schulberg, who wrote the award-winning screenplay for “On the Waterfront” and created a classic American archetype of naked ambition, Sammy Glick, in his novel “What Makes Sammy Run?,” died on Wednesday. He was 95 and lived in the Brookside section of Westhampton Beach, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Betsy.

Mr. Schulberg also wrote journalism, short stories, novels and biographies. He collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, arrested the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and named names before a Communist-hunting Congressional committee. But he was best known for writing some of the most famous lines in the history of the movies.

Some were delivered by Marlon Brando playing the longshoreman Terry Malloy in the 1954 film “On the Waterfront.” Malloy had lost a shot at a prizefighting title by taking a fall for easy money.

Click on link below to read rest of article and parts 2 and 3 of Hollywood Renegade

Budd Schulberg – Hollywood Renegade – 1 of 3

“I coulda been a contender,” Malloy tells his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger). “I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

“Hollywood Renegade” is the life story of novelist/screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who at 94-years-old, still faces the controversy surrounding his conscience-driven decisions to write a novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”, unearthing the moral corruption inside his hometown of Hollywood, and later denouncing the Communist Party in America, testifying at HUAC and naming names of people whom he once shared political ideals with. The son of film pioneer, B.P. Schulberg, Budd grew up a Hollywood prince, but was later branded a pariah for turning his back on his childhood home. He is the most prolific writer ever to come from Hollywood and this film will take you on his extraordinary journey, inextricably tied to the history of the 20th century.

“I coulda been a contender.”