Editor’s Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it’s viewed as a mistake or an aberration.
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”
There is a dark — seldom acknowledged — thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic. Read the rest of this entry »
For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services. Read the rest of this entry »
Amidst fears that conspiracy theorists may undermine US national security by pointing out the effect of EM radiation on honey bees and other life forms and thereby compromising the top secret HAARP and the Total Information Awareness projects, the Department of Homeland Security has confirmed its leading role in investigations into the mystery of the disappearing bees. This follows up their brilliant research showing that bees can detect landmines, a discovery which underlines the importance of preventing their complete disappearance. Their unprecedented role in an apparently civilian project has brought them face to face with new challenges, not least of which is the technique required to mash up dead bees, if they can find any, for analysis.
A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.
GM soy a death sentence for humans and the environment
Argentina has become a giant experiment in farming genetically modified (GM) Roundup Ready (RR) soy, engineered to be tolerant to Roundup, Monsanto’s formulation of the herbicide glyphosate. The Argentine government, eager to pull the country out of a deep economic recession in the 1990s, restructured its economy around GM soy grown for export, most of which goes to feed livestock in Europe. In 2009, GM soy was planted on 19 million hectares – over half of Argentina’s cultivated land – and sprayed with 200 million litres of glyphosate herbicide [1]. Spraying is often carried out from the air, causing problems of drift.
Peterborough’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Rosana Pellizzari, talked about WiFi in schools to the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board last week and said that anyone can cherry-pick results to support their conclusions and this is exactly what she did.
The desultory nature of this protest does come across in the video- it does look a bit like resignation. This is understandable because the phase of exuberant consumerism and individualism in Iceland , and in the west as a whole, is over. That will never return, no matter how much we demonstrate and people, on one level, may be grieving for that. The point is not to return to the past but to prevent the descent in a kind of dark age, to stop the rot and to reaffirm certain fundamental values, to rebuild a real economy, real community and solidarity: to defend national sovereignty and democracy. This is a moment to draw the bottom line: none without shelter, none without food, none without the possibility of work. Everything in this crisis is about quantities, usually mind-boggling figures for debt or fraud, but behind just numbers there is a qualitative shift and we will become more positive as we realize the potential in all this.
As proceedings begin against Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, for the banking crisis of 2008, at least two thousand Icelanders took to the streets in two days of protest this weekend. Iceland joins over a dozen other nations protesting economic measures taken out on the public while banks and large corporations receive bailouts. Class war is on, and it’s gone global.
On October 5, 2000, the regular presidential election process in Yugoslavia was boisterously interrupted by what Western media described as a “democratic revolution” against the “dictator”, president Slobodan Milosevic. In reality, the “dictator” was about to enter the run-off round of the Yugoslav presidential election which he appeared likely to lose to the main opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. Rather than support the democratic electoral process, the United States trained and incited activists to take to the streets and replace it by a televised spectacle of popular uprising. Probably, the scenarists modeled this show on the equally stage-managed overthrow of the Ceaucescu couple in Rumania at Christmas 1989, which ended in their murder following one of the shortest kangaroo court trials in history. For the generally ignorant world at large, being overthrown in an uprising was meant to prove that Milosevic was really a “dictator” like Ceaucescu. Being defeated in an election would have tended to prove the opposite.
“Do you have to look behind you every 10 steps if someone is following you? Or do you have to look under the bed when you enter a hotel room?” he asked rhetorically. “You must use the airports. You have to go by train. There’s no chance to protect yourself. The warning is not followed by any real advice. For me, it’s a little stupid, to be honest.”
The US media have extensively covered the US State Department’s travel alert for Europe, even naming specific targets in Berlin and Paris. But Germany says the threat of a terror attack is no higher than usual.
In These New Times 