George Washington Named Britain’s Greatest Foe
Reports Jasper Copping in the Telegraph:
The American was voted the winner in a contest run by the National Army Museum to identify the country’s most outstanding military opponent.
He was one of a shortlist of five leaders who topped a public poll and on Saturday was selected as the ultimate winner by an audience of around 70 guests at a special event at the museum, in Chelsea, west London.
In second place was Michael Collins, the Irish leader, ahead of Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. At the event, each contender had their case made by a historian giving a 40 minute presentation. The audience, who had paid to attend the day, then voted in a secret ballot after all five presentations had been made.
Dr Stephen Brumwell, who had championed Washington, said: “As British officers conceded, he was a worthy opponent.”
The Stealth Geography Of America: A Map
Via Domus, a map of the United States, in the form of its 259 most crucial infrastructural sites as revealed by a 2010 WikiLeaks release:
We might say with only slight exaggeration that the United States exists in its current state of economic and military well-being due to a peripheral constellation of sites found all over the world.
These far-flung locations—such as rare-earth mines, telecommunications hubs and vaccine suppliers—are like geopolitical buttresses, as important for the internal operations of the United States as its own homeland security.
However, this overseas network is neither seamless nor even necessarily identifiable as such. Rather, it is aggressively and deliberately discontiguous, and rarely acknowledged in any detail.
That is what made the controversial release by WikiLeaks, in December 2010, of a long list of key infrastructural sites deemed vital to the national security of the United States so interesting…
Does The U.S. Have A Team In Iran?
Middle East expert Seymour Hersh reveals the United States’ military’s ties with The People’s Mujahedin of Iran, a/k/a M.E.K., in the New Yorker:
From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led…
Showdown With The Afghan National Army
Our convoy was screaming down the road, traffic got out of our way in a hurry, as most would when multiple multi-ton armed vehicles packed full of pissed off soldiers are in their rearview mirror. We shouldn’t have even been out in sector this night, mostly because we got back from another patrol only a few hours prior, and it was the other squads turn to roll out but there we were.
The Afghan National Army had received a tip from a kid saying his dad was Taliban, and that he had weapons in his house somehow this got sent to us. We never work with the Afghan Army, we work with the Afghan Police. The area they got the tip from wasn’t even in my company’s battle space but again, there we were.
Everyone in the trucks were bitching and complaining, my Team Leader kept saying the whole thing was a…
U.S. Coast Guard Sinks Japanese ‘Ghost Ship’
Via Voice of America:
The U.S. Coast Guard has sunk an abandoned Japanese fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, more than a year after a tsunami sent it drifting aimlessly across the Pacific Ocean.
The 50-meter long Ryou-Un Mara went down Thursday in the Gulf of Alaska, hours after a Coast Guard vessel started shooting at it, setting fire to the so-called “ghost ship,” which had no lights, crew or communications system.
The Coast Guard decided to sink the Ryou-Un Mara because it posed a significant danger to ships sailing in the area. Officials say sinking the ship poses no risk to the environment and that any fuel on board would be evaporated by now. The sinking operation was delayed when a Canadian fishing boat expressed interest in salvaging the Japanese boat. The Canadian ship eventually determined it could not tow the crippled vessel…
Iraq War’s Curveball Confesses All
Remember how the Bush era had pivotal, history-altering characters with names like “Brownie” and “Curveball”? The latter comes clean and has no regrets, via the Independent:
A man who helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up.
When it is put to him, “We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply replies: “Yes.”
His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003, after US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs, admits General Powell’s former chief of staff.
Mr. Janabi tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq.”
We Are the Good Guys (Video)
Certainly whatever I do is good because I’m the one doing it. The Daily Show’s John Oliver “reports” on the Obama administration’s decision to defund UNESCO:
Part 1:
A World of Religion
In honour of the recent “world’s largest” gathering of atheists in Washington D.C, a reminder of their place in the great scheme of things — there are less than 150 million of them at last global count:
Still beats the Wiccans, Bahai’i and Yazidis combined. On the other hand, secularism (separation of church and state) counts as 1.1 billion.
Reference: ‘Graphic: A demographic breakdown of the world of religion‘, National Post, 23 March 2012
CFR Report Says U.S. Education Decline Is Jeopardizing Its National Security
Via the Council on Foreign Relations website:
The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role, finds a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security.
“Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk,” warns the Task Force, chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state. The country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long,” argues the Task Force.
The report notes that while the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their…
Afghan Villagers Believe Soldier’s Massacre Fueled by Revenge
Via Common Dreams:
Afghan villagers near the site where US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is alleged to have murdered 16 civilians, including nine children, claim US troops — just days before the shooting — lined them up against a wall after a roadside bombing and told them that they, and even their children, would pay a price for the attack.
Although the villagers account could not be independently verified by the Associated Press, “their claim that the shootings by a US soldier may have been payback for a roadside bombing has gained wide currency in the area and has been repeated by politicians testifying about the incident to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.”
In the United States, where Americans broadly accept the lone-shooter explanation offered by the US military, the media focus has been mainly on Bales’ “state of mind” and what impact the massacre might have on public support for the ongoing…
U.S. Marines Dispatched to Five African Countries
Via Global Research:
The hidden agenda in Uganda, Central Africa and the Horn of Africa is the conquest of oil and strategic mineral resources. Going after Joseph Kony and protecting Ugandan children is a cynical smokescreen, a pretext for a “humanitarian intervention” in a region where US sponsored “civil wars” (Sudan, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia) have in the course of the last 20 years resulted in more than eight million deaths:
“Through AFRICOM, the United States is seeking a foothold in the incredibly resource rich central African block in a further maneuver to aggregate regional hegemony over China. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one of the world’s largest regions without an effectively functioning government. It contains vast deposits of diamonds, cobalt, copper, uranium, magnesium, and tin while producing over $1 billion in gold each year. It is entirely feasible that the US can considerably increase…
The United States Under Permanent State Of Emergency
Did you know that we in the U.S. are living under the gravest of danger, like, always? Via Parapolitical:
Due to a variety of crises, the United States has been in an almost continuous State of Emergency since 1941.
A declaration of emergency allows the President to exercise any of approximately 500 powers contingently delegated to him by Congress, from the dramatic – such as the seizure of ships in port (50 USC § 191) – to the mundane – such as the waiver of vehicle weight limits on a section of I-95 in Maine (23 USC § 127).
The Real Meaning Of Kony 2012
Via Warscapes, Dinaw Mengestu explains that the viral video’s appeal is that “the real star of Kony 2012 isn’t Joseph Kony, it’s us”:
Kony 2012 is the most successful example of the recent “activist” movement to have taken hold of celebrities and college students across America. This movement believes devoutly in fame and information, and in our unequivocal power to affect change as citizens of a privileged world. Our privilege is the both the source of power and the origin of our burden – a burden which, in fact, on closer scrutiny, isn’t really a burden at all, but an occasion to celebrate our power … helping to end the war in Darfur is as simple as adding a toolbar to your browser.
In the world of Kony 2012, Joseph Kony has evaded arrest for one dominant reason: Those of us living in the western world haven’t known about him, and because…
Selling KONY
For all the cynicism of this photo-comic, I thought it was hilarious (click image to view or here):
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The Seven Worst International Aid Ideas
Matador Network on the “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism”. There’s the inexplicable — entrepreneur Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts campaign, which involved producing and shipping a million t-shirts for donation to strife-affected (but presumably clothed) Africans for no apparent reason.
But the actual worst may be the United States’ scattering the hills of Afghanistan with food packets — intended for hungry Afghan children — identical in appearance to the cluster bombs also scattered by the U.S. through the same regions:
Each yellow BLU-97 bomblet is the size of a soda can and is capable of killing anyone within a 50 meter radius and severely injuring anyone within 100 meters from the detonation. A Humanitarian Daily Rations (HDR) package contains a 2,000 calorie meal.
It was inevitable that Afghans coming across the yellow packages in the field would confuse the two. Children in particular — with no English and little idea of what…
Government Or Regime? The Language Guide
Via Parapolitical, a compare and contrast exercise in how the news media describes our world. Nations which do business with the United States, even those among the most brutally oppressive, are led by “governments”. If arms money is not flowing, the countries are ruled by “regimes”. What does “regime” imply? It sounds villainous and evil, less legitimate, more tenuous — as though overthrow (or invasion) is inevitable and warranted:
A War Tax at the Gas Pump?
Interesting point of view from Jeff Klein on Counterpunch:
It’s hard to miss the higher cost of gas every time we fill up our cars these days, but the News Media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining why. There isn’t any mystery, though, if you read the financial press and oil industry sources: We’re paying extra for gas because of rising tensions in the Middle East and especially the scare over a possible US or Israeli attack on Iran. In effect, we’re paying a “war tax” at the gas pump, and the cost will only get higher unless we put aside the talk of war and get down to serious diplomacy to settle the differences in the region.
Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say recently, under the headline “Oil Rise Imperils Budding Recovery”:
Rising oil prices are emerging once again as a threat to the U.S. economic recovery…
WikiLeaked Stratfor Emails: Osama Bin Laden Wasn’t Buried At Sea
Among the bounty unearthed by WikiLeaks, the global intelligence agency Stratfor believes that the CIA has bin Laden’s body here in the United States, Business Insider reports. No word on what they might be doing with it:
Stratfor analysts did not believe that Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, according to Stratfor emails. At 5:26 a.m. on May 2…Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email with the subject “[alpha] OBL” that said: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.” Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, followed that up at 5:51 a.m. with an email titled “[alpha] Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane.”
Two Ex-Senators Say Saudi Arabian Government Linked to 9/11 Attacks
Rym Momtaz and Trevor J. Ladd report on ABC News:
Two former Senators who led inquiries into the 9/11 attacks have issued sworn statements that they believe the government of Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally in the fight on terrorism, may have played a role in the terror attacks ten years ago.
“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” said former Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat, in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government by families of Sept. 11 victims and others. Graham led a 2002 Congressional probe of the attacks.
Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat who served on the 9/11 Commission, said in a separate affidavit that “significant questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions. “Evidence relating to the plausible…
