Bring on the 'Natural Guard'

The Times Record
Brunswick, Maine
Op-Ed

A March 18 article in The Times Record, “Vietnam facing severe drought,” caught my attention. The AP reported, “Vietnam’s southern Mekong Delta, the country’s main rice growing region, is experiencing the worst drought and saline intrusion in recent history that has affected more than half a million people.”

Here in Maine we had little winter this year with temperatures warming to record levels. There have been 10 straight months of record setting temperature rises worldwide. Our weather is changing — and unless something is done now our children and the future generations will suffer terribly. What are we willing to change in order that they have a future?

The Pentagon occupies 6,000 bases in the US and 1,000 bases in 150 foreign countries (See David Vine’s new book, “Base Nation”). The Pentagon has admitted to burning 350,000 barrels of oil a day and that doesn’t include oil burned by contractors and weapons suppliers.

Yet, despite having the planet’s single largest carbon bootprint, the Pentagon has been granted a unique exemption from reducing — or even reporting — its pollution. The U.S. won this prize during the 1998 Kyoto Protocol negotiations

(COP4) after the Pentagon insisted on a “national security provision” that would place its operations beyond global scrutiny or control. As former Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat recalled: “Every requirement the Defense Department and uniformed military who were at Kyoto by my side said they wanted, they got.” ( Also exempted from pollution regulation: all Pentagon weapons testing, military exercises, NATO operations and “peacekeeping” missions.)

How do we move away from this toxic industrial way of life we have today here in the U.S.? How do we begin to quickly move to a different kind of industrial footprint? Rather than polluting cars, endless dirty wars, and a crumbling national infrastructure is it possible we could quickly make a shift to a sustainable future?

Germany is helping to show the way by lessening fossil fuel use and moving toward solar and wind power. Residential power prices are at their lowest levels in more than a decade. Coal-fired, gas- fired and nuclear power plants are being shut down throughout Germany — no longer needed. Why couldn’t we do that in the US? We know this direction creates more jobs and gives our kids a chance for a real future.

Around the world we are almost daily hearing about more severe weather like in Vietnam where drought will surely impact its ability to feed people. Stronger hurricanes and typhoons will intensify the already tragic global refugee crisis. Rising sea levels are already impacting some small Pacific islands. Where will those people go?

In the U.S. we are told there is no money to create a national emergency program to jump start a sustainable transition. Few, if any, politicians are willing to call out the elephant in the middle of the room – the Pentagon which today rakes in 54 percent of every federal discretionary tax dollar [National Priorities Project]. Are Sens. Collins and King, and Rep. Pingree, willing to call for the conversion of military production at places like BIW to build commuter rail systems, off- shore wind farms, tidal power and more?

When a nation moves toward a sustainable future the need to go to war for oil is dramatically reduced. Obviously the oil corporations, and the military industrial complex that former President Eisenhower warned us about, won’t like this plan but immediate profits and our children’s future don’t go hand-in-hand.

What if we converted the US war machine? When you add up all the various ‘national security’ pots of gold our annual taxpayer appropriation for the military costs right at $1 trillion?

Why not turn the Pentagon into the “Natural Guard” and build rescue hospital ships at BIW and send them to places around the world to help people who will be suffering as our Mother Earth’s body convulses in toxic shock.

Instead of killing people around the world to secure “our oil,” why not rely on the sun and the wind for power and turn global enemies into friends?

It takes vision, and a little light, to see the needed direction for our nation during this very Dark Age we are currently living in. Each of us must take some level of responsibility for this predicament but more importantly each of us must help do whatever we can to bring on the Natural Guard.

What is the most important job of a human being on Earth today? Make lots of money, buy lots of stuff, or protect the future generations? To me it is a no-brainer.

~ Bruce K. Gagnon is a member of PeaceWorks and lives in Bath. 

Japan Poised to Serve as Agent for U.S. Military Interventions

Thousands of anti-war protesters rallied outside the parliament building in Tokyo on Tuesday, railing against the Japanese government's new so-called security law which marks a historic departure from the country's decades-long pacifism.

The controversial "war legislation," a package of bills that passed parliament in September and took effect on Tuesday, reinterprets Article 9 of the country's Constitution, which renounced war as a means to settle international disputes following World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed for the revisions which "expand the activities of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) overseas, even in situations when Japan is not under direct attack," The Asahi Shimbun reports. "The laws call for the SDF to provide greater support to the militaries of the United States and other nations anywhere in the world."  

Nukes are Still Bad

For info about divesting from nuclear weapons companies, go to http://responsibleinvest.org/

Trump and Clinton: Censoring the Unpalatable

By John Pilger

A virulent if familiar censorship is about to descend on the US election campaign. As the cartoon brute, Donald Trump, seems almost certain to win the Republican Party's nomination, Hillary Clinton is being ordained both as the "women's candidate" and the champion of American liberalism in its heroic struggle with the Evil One.

This is drivel, of course; Hillary Clinton leaves a trail of blood and suffering around the world and a clear record of exploitation and greed in her own country. To say so, however, is becoming intolerable in the land of free speech.

The 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama should have alerted even the most dewy-eyed. Obama based his "hope" campaign almost entirely on the fact of an African-American aspiring to lead the land of slavery. He was also "antiwar".

Obama was never antiwar. On the contrary, like all American presidents, he was pro-war. He had voted for George W. Bush's funding of the slaughter in Iraq and he was planning to escalate the invasion of Afghanistan. In the weeks before he took the presidential oath, he secretly approved an Israeli assault on Gaza, the massacre known as Operation Cast Lead. He promised to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo and did not. He pledged to help make the world "free from nuclear weapons" and did the opposite.

As a new kind of marketing manager for the status quo, the unctuous Obama was an inspired choice. Even at the end of his blood-spattered presidency, with his signature drones spreading infinitely more terror and death around the world than that ignited by jihadists in Paris and Brussels, Obama is fawned on as "cool" (the Guardian).

On March 23, my article, "A World War has Begun: Break the Silence", was published across the web. As has been my practice for years, I had syndicated it to an international network, including Truthout.com, the liberal American website. Truthout publishes some important journalism, not least Dahr Jamail's outstanding corporate exposes.

Truthout rejected the piece because, said an editor, it had appeared on Counterpunch and had broken "guidelines". I replied that this had never been a problem over many years and I knew of no guidelines.

My recalcitrance was then given another meaning. The article was reprieved provided I submitted to a "review" and agreed to changes and deletions made by Truthout's "editorial committee". The result was the softening and censoring of my criticism of Hillary Clinton, and the distancing of her from Trump. The following was cut:

"Trump is a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism. Trump's views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama... The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system... As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies - just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about hope."

The "editorial committee" clearly wanted me to water down my argument that Clinton represented a proven extreme danger to the world. Like all censorship, this was unacceptable. Maya Schenwar, who runs Truthout, wrote to me that my unwillingness to submit my work to a "process of revision" meant she had to take it off her "publication docket". Such is the gatekeeper's way with words.

At the root of this episode is an enduring unsayable. This is the need, the compulsion, of many liberals in the United States to embrace a leader from within a system that is demonstrably imperial and violent. Like Obama's "hope", Clinton's gender is no more than a suitable facade.

This is an historical urge. In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals seem to pay unflagging homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians," he wrote, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." The "barbarians" were large sections of humanity of whom "implicit obedience" was required.

"It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the British historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open ended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] self righteous fanaticism."

He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". The carnage of a million dead in Iraq was the result.

Blair's crimes are not unusual. Since 1945, some 69 countries - more than a third of the membership of the United Nations - have suffered some or all of the following. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted and their people bombed. The historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. With the demise of the European empires, this has been the project of the liberal flame carrier, the "exceptional" United States, whose celebrated "progressive" president, John F Kennedy, according to new research, authorised the bombing of Moscow during the Cuban crisis in 1962.

"If we have to use force," said Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state in the liberal administration of Bill Clinton and today a passionate campaigner for his wife, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."

One of Hillary Clinton's most searing crimes was the destruction of Libya in 2011. At her urging, and with American logistical support, NATO, launched 9,700 "strike sorties" against Libya, according to its own records, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. See the photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves identified by the Red Cross. Read the UNICEF report on the children killed, "most [of them] under the age of ten".

In Anglo-American scholarship, followed slavishly by the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic, influential theorists known as "liberal realists" have long taught that liberal imperialists - a term they never use - are the world's peace brokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified "failed states" (nations difficult to exploit) and "rogue states" (nations resistant to western dominance).

Whether or not the targeted regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. In the Middle East, western liberalism's collaborators have long been extremist Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while cynical notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest and mayhem - as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Haiti, Honduras. See the public record of those good liberals Bill and Hillary Clinton. Theirs is a standard to which Trump can only aspire.

~ Journalist, film-maker and author, John Pilger is one of two to win British journalism’s highest award twice. For his documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award, a BAFTA. Among numerous other awards, he has won a Royal Television Society Best Documentary Award. His epic 1979 Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the ten most important documentaries of the 20th century. 

America - Land of the 'Exceptional Democracy'.....

Extreme Voter Outrage In ArizonaWay beyond mad, voters were extremely outraged at the Arizona Election Fraud Hearing.
Posted by Let The Madness Begin on Monday, March 28, 2016

Voter reaction in Arizona.....

It's a Failure

 

The Pentagon fights the CIA...in Syria! 

 

Different militias backed by the two U.S. war-making departments have apparently started fighting each other...all at the American taxpayer's expense.

 

For more on this RT is joined by former CIA officer Ray McGovern

Remember Odessa Crimes by Neo-Nazis Supported by U.S.

A Ukrainian 'Maidan' Nazi activist confesses to mass murder in Odessa at the Trades Union Hall on May 2, 2014.  On that day over 50 unarmed and innocent citizens (including a pregnant woman) were burned alive, shot, and clubbed to death by marauding nationalists from the Right Sector. 

Journalists of the website "Golos Pravdy" have published this video in which one of the activists of the Maidan, Vitalij Ustimenko confessed to intentionally burning the inhabitants of Odessa on May 2, 2014.

The confession video was sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine but there has been no response.  Up to this date no one has been prosecuted for these crimes even though there is massive video evidence of those responsible for the killings of innocent victims.

Soon after the Maidan (Coup d'état) in Kiev which was a US project, one of the first things that the new right-wing government did was to ban the speaking of Russian inside of Ukraine.  Russian speaking citizens, particularly in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, began to collect signatures and hold referendums demanding 'local autonomy' in order to protect their culture and their civil rights. 

Under the direction of the US Embassy the Kiev government sent Nazi's from the western parts of Ukraine to the east and they attacked Russian speaking citizens who were holding peaceful rallies and marches.  Soon after that the US directed Kiev puppet regime began sending their Army to shell communities in the east.  Schools, churches, hospitals, airports, day care centers, apartment blocks, rail stations, and other places were regularly bombed - all in violation of international law that clearly makes it illegal to target civilian infrastructure.

The people in eastern Ukraine formed citizen militias in order to defend themselves.  Men and women from all walks of life fought back against the US-NATO directed war against the people of eastern Ukraine.  The US-NATO responded by sending more military aid to their Kiev project and US Army Special Forces began holding training operations in western Ukraine for the Nazi battalions that have been merged into the official Ukrainian Army.

Russia shipped military hardware to the eastern self-defense forces along with regular convoys of humanitarian aid to the people in the Donbass who were cut off from electricity, food, medical care and more.  As the self-defense forces in the Donbass began to have success by pushing back against the Nazi forces controlled by Kiev the US and the Ukrainian government were forced to negotiate a ceasefire (the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements).  The fragile ceasefire remains in effect but Kiev's military daily continues to probe for advantage against the self defense forces. 

As we approach the second anniversary of the May 2 massacre in Odessa we should all find ways to stand with the people of eastern Ukraine who remain under siege from the US-NATO war project.

The goal of the US-NATO in Ukraine has always been about trying to create instability and chaos along the Russian border.  The US wants regime change in Moscow. Turning Ukraine and Georgia into US-NATO military bases coupled with the destruction of Syria and the destabilization of Iran are key steps toward this ultimate devious plan.

Former CIA Agent: Yugoslavia Take Down Was Staged and False

 WebTribune published their interview with former CIA agent Robert Baer during his promotion tour in Quebec for his book “Secrets of the White House” in late 2015.

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, has authored many books which disclosed the secrets of both the CIA and the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He has been arrested and detained several times. Mitt Waspurh, a personal friend who worked at the Senate and shared information was killed at gunpoint. As a senior CIA operative, Baer worked in Yugoslavia during the 1991-94 period and in the Middle East. He has worked on several documentaries on National Geographic, accusing the Bush administration of waging war for oil.

The interview was conducted live in Canada.

Where and when was your first job in Yugoslavia?

I arrived by helicopter with three agents. We landed on 12 January 1991 in Sarajevo. Our job was to keep an eye on alleged terrorists of Serbian nationality, who were expected to attack Sarajevo.

Who were the terrorists in question and why were they supposed to carry out these attacks?

They gave us files about a group called “Supreme Serbia” detailing plans to conduct a series of bomb attacks on key buildings in Sarajevo in opposition to Bosnia’s ambition to leave former Yugoslavia.

Did that group ever exist and what exactly you were doing in Sarajevo under CIA command?

No such group ever existed! Our headquarters lied to us. Our mission was to alarm and spread panic among politicians in Bosnia, simply to fill their heads with the idea that Serbs would attack. To begin with, we accepted the story, but after a while we started to wonder. Why were we raising such hysteria when the group clearly did not exist?

How and when did the mission end and did it have a name?

For me it ended after two weeks, I landed a new job in Slovenia. The operation lasted a month and had the name “Istina” (i.e. “truth”) although it was anything but!

Why did you go to Slovenia?

I received instructions that Slovenia was ready to declare independence. We were given money, a few million dollars, to fund various NGOs, opposition parties and various politicians who have inflamed hatred.

Did you have an opinion about the CIA propaganda and did your colleagues think?

Of course, no one turns down a CIA mission, especially when we were all nervous and prone to paranoia! Many CIA agents and senior officers disappeared simply because they refused to conduct propaganda against the Serbs in Yugoslavia. Personally I was shocked at the dose of lies being fed from our agencies and politicians! Many CIA agents were directed propaganda without being aware of what they are doing. Everyone knew just a fraction of the story and only the one who create the whole story knew the background – they are politicians.

So there was only propaganda against the Serbs?

Yes and no. The aim of the propaganda was to divide the republics so they would break away from the motherland Yugoslavia. We had to choose a scapegoat who would be blamed for everything. Someone who would be responsible for the war and violence. Serbia was chosen because in some ways it is a successor to Yugoslavia.

Can you name the politicians in the former Yugoslavia were paid by the CIA?

Yes, although it is somewhat delicate. Stipe Mesic, Franjo Tudjman, Alija Izetbegovic, many counselors and members of the government of Yugoslavia, were paid as were Serbian generals, journalists and even some military units. Radovan Karadzic was being paid for a while but stopped accepting help when he realized he would be sacrificed and charged with war crimes committed in Bosnia. It was directed by the American administration.

You mentioned that the media was controlled and funded, how exactly did that happen?

This is already known, some CIA agents were responsible for writing the official statement that the announcers read on the news. Of course the news presenters were oblivious to it, they got the news from their boss and he got it from our man. Everyone had the same mission: to spread hatred, nationalism and the differences between people through television.

We all know of Srebrenica, can you say about it?

Yes! In 1992 I was in Bosnia again, but this time we were supposed to train military units to represent Bosnia, a new state that had just declared independence. Srebrenica is an exaggerated story and unfortunately many people are being manipulated. The number of victims is the same as the number of Serbs and others killed but Srebrenica is political marketing. My boss, who was formerly a US Senator, stressed repeatedly that some kind of scam would go down in Bosnia. A month before the alleged genocide in Srebrenica, he told me that the town would be headline news around the world and ordered us to call the media. When I asked why, he said you’ll see. The new Bosnian army got the order to attack homes and civilians. These were of course citizens of Srebrenica. At the same moment, the Serbs attacked from the other side. Probably someone had paid to incite them!

Then who is guilty of genocide in Srebrenica?

Srebrenica should be blamed on Bosnians, Serbs and Americans – that is us! But in fact everything has been blamed on the Serbs. Unfortunately, many of the victims buried as Muslims were Serbs and other nationalities. A few years ago a friend of mine, a former CIA agent and now at the IMF, said that Srebrenica is the product of agreement between the US government and politicians in Bosnia. The town of Srebrenica was sacrificed to give America a motive to attack the Serbs for their alleged crimes.

Ultimately why do you think Yugoslavia collapsed and why did your government want to do it?

It is all very clear, the people who incited the war and dictated the terms of the peace now own the companies that exploit various mineral resources and the like! They simply made slaves of you, your people work for nothing and that produce goes to Germany and America…they are the winners! You will eventually have to purchase and import what you have created yourself, and since you have no money, you have to borrow, that’s the whole story with the whole of the Balkans!

You were never in Kosovo as a CIA agent, but did you feel any pressure from America?

Of course! Kosovo has taken for two reasons, first because of mineral and natural resources, and secondly, Kosovo is a military base of NATO! In the heart of Europe is their largest military base.

Do you have a message for the people of the former Yugoslavia?

I have. Forget the past, it was staged and false. They manipulated you, they got what they wanted and it is stupid that you still hate one another, you must show that you are stronger and you realize who has created this! I sincerely apologize! That’s why I have for a long time disclosed the secrets of the CIA and the White House!

U.S. Spies in North Korea

Reporter Matthew Cole discusses his piece for The Intercept headlined The Pentagon’s Missionary Spies: U.S. Military Used Christian NGO as Front for North Korea Espionage.

The article looks into U.S. efforts to penetrate North Korea by NGO's like the Humanitarian International Services Group which was funded through a highly classified Defense Department program.

This is Theft - Wag the Dog Politics!

 I like her outrage - about time folks had higher expectations about how this country runs elections.

Sunday Song

 

 

The Hypocrites in El Norte

Who has the largest prison population on Earth composed of the poor and those entrapped for petty drug crimes?  The enslaved now work for corporations from the jail house making peanuts per hour. 

Yes, tell us Obama who locks up these political and economic prisoners?  Which nation should pull the log out of their own eye before they cast aspersions on others?