In These New Times

A new paradigm for a post-imperial world

Archive for August, 2011

Time for the radicals

Posted by seumasach on August 7, 2011

Craig Murray

 

7th August, 2011

A financial system in which the face value flow of funds was vastly greater than the face value flow of goods traded is a bubble. The “bailout”, or payment of vast sums of ordinary people’s money to bankers to keep this crazed system going, could never make it sane.

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Libya – NATOs Increasing war crimes

Posted by seumasach on August 7, 2011

Leonor en Libia

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British government sued for colonial torture

Posted by seumasach on August 6, 2011

Joe Mount

WSWS

2nd August, 2011

Four Kenyan citizens are to sue the UK government for the treatment they received during the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising during the early 1950s when their country was a British colony. The case has finally reached court because the victims’ lawyers have forced the British government to release documents it has kept secret for more than half a century.

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McKinney leads resistance to Libya war

Posted by seumasach on August 6, 2011

Anti-war & Black activists unite against Libya war: Cynthia McKinney Tour now to 19 cities

Global Research

5th August, 2011

A continuing mobilization against the U.S. war on Libya has taken place in cities across the country. Packed, standing room only audiences at major meetings have heard former Congressperson Cynthia McKinney report on her June fact-finding trip to Libya with the Dignity delegation. In every meeting the message rings out: Stop the U.S./NATO bombing of Libya.

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‘NATO strike buries mother, children’

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

How long is the world going to stand back looking on as NATO does its bloody work? Let’s join Roland Dumas in calling for NATO and the ringleaders amongst the western leaders to be before a court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

PressTV

4th August, 2011

A mother and her two children have been killed by a NATO airstrike in the Libyan coastal town of Zliten, a Libyan official says.

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Italy prosecutors seize Moody’s, S&P documents

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

The criminality of these agencies was already well in evidence with their fraudulent granting of AAA status to subprime securities. Their bias against Europe is also perfectly evident as no matter what they do european bonds are downgraded while the US and UK magically retain their AAA status despite being obvious basket cases in complete economic, social, political and moral disarray.

MILAN, Aug 4 (Reuters) – Italian prosecutors have seized documents at the offices of rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s in a probe over suspected “anomalous” fluctuations in Italian share prices, a prosecutor said on Thursday.

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ECB buying sovereign bonds

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet admits to buying sovereign bonds.

74 bullion euros sounds like peanuts compared to US debt monetization. It’s interesting how the anti-eurozone campaign increases in proportion to the evidence of crisis in the anglosphere. This is possible due to the power of the rating agencies and media outlets at the disposal of Wall Street and the City. The europeans didn’t mean to challenge the US by launching the Euro. Nor did they realize how precarious the US economy was. Now the empire has decided that the world isn’t big enough for two such currencies: one or other must go. In our view it will be the dollar.

Telegraph

4th August, 2011

“I never said that the SMP had been interrupted,” Mr Trichet said in reply to a question on the ECB’s Securities Markets Programme that bought around €74bn in public debt so as to support the financial system with liquidity.

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Libya:France brings forward carrier withdrawal

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

France to withdraw Libya carrier by mid-August

Reuters

4th August, 2011

MARSEILLE, France Aug 4 (Reuters) – France will bring home its Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier from its Libyan mission next week for maintenance, Defence Minister Gerard Longuet told the regional daily Var-Matin.

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NATO’s “strategic blunder”

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

NATO’s “strategic blunder”

Cailean Bochanan

4th August, 2011

“Strategic blunder”: this is how Denis MacShane, Labour MP and ardent neo-con of the “Scoop” Jackson school correctly characterizes NATO’s Libya fiasco. This is not just a stupid adventure gone wrong, it is the collapse of grand strategy for the Middle East and Africa whose contours, to me, at least, are only now becoming clear.

Of course, whereas a successful strategy soon reveals its goals and the motives and thinking behind it, a failed one tends to be obscured by the mess it has left. Even more is it obscured by the remorseless workings of the law of unintended consequences. Who could have recognised the workings of a plan which strengthened the rule of two leading bogeymen of the West, Gaddafi and Assad; which strengthened democracy and sovereignty rather than further fragmenting the region’s nations: which strengthened tolerance in the face of the CIA’s obscurantists: which  strengthened the hand of Iran and, more especially, Russia: which left Israel exposed and which threatens to bring revolution to the heart of the empire’s regional policemen Saudi Arabia and Bahrain? But such is indeed the outcome of NATO’s misguided and plainly criminal enterprise.

The idea, supposedly being aired in Libya, that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were a necessary prelude to the assault on Libya in that they removed leaders sympathetic to Gaddafi, cannot be dismissed. The CIA could then very well have had a hand in starting those revolts believing that any revolutionary process could be derailed by giving support to the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood who also seem to be at the heart of the armed struggle against Assad. I initially dismissed this idea since I didn’t see how it would work: I still don’t but perhaps this only goes to show just how much the CIA has lost it’s touch. But, as Thierry Meyssan has pointed out, the whole plan was posited on simultaneous displays of regime change in Libya and Syria. Had that worked out then perhaps the rest of the pieces would have fallen into place.

That has most decisively not worked out. In Libya what looks like the collapse of the TNC has been received with the most eerie silence apart from a few interventionist stalwarts lamenting the ineptitude of it all. In Syria, Russia has not deceived this time by failing to check the empire in the Security Council and without western intervention the West’s forces on the ground look too weak.

This can and must become a turning point in West’s post-Soviet NATO rampage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the West won the ultimate ideological victory. To borrow from Baudelaire’s witticism, the devil, western imperialism, triumphed by managing to convince the world that he no longer existed. From then on he appeared in  humanitarian guise only: NATO was almost a charity although unable to conceal the cloven-hoof of its ever burgeoning arsenal. But those, it was claimed, were only to help his friends in the military-industrial complex and by no means for actual use. Endlessly intervening on behalf of the oppressed you could almost have said that he was doing God’s work and some, indeed, did say that.

That particular charade must now be exposed. A five year old could successfully identify the Evil One and if a chorus of thousands continue to sing his praises it only shows how many must go down with NATO.

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Russia reaches out to Iran

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

M.K.Bhadrakumar

Asia Times

4th August, 2011

A recurring feature of the Russian-Iranian relationship is that it mostly languishes on the horizon but can be trusted to move to the center stage whenever there is a criticality in the Middle East situation. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi made a point recently in an interview with the Russian media when he described Iran as the “most significant neighbor” of Russia, which stands in the way of the Western strategy to encircle Russia.

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Proclamation of council of Libyan tribes

Posted by seumasach on August 4, 2011

Extract from “NATO war crimes, the murder of journalists”

Lisa Karpova

Pravda

3rd August, 2011

 

Speaking for Libya’s 2000 tribes, the Council issued a Proclamation signed by scores of tribal leaders from eastern Libya.

“By this letter to the extraordinary African Summit, convening in Addis Ababa, the notables of the Eastern tribes of the Great Jamahiriya confirm their complete rejection of what is called the Transitional Council in Benghazi which hasn’t been nominated nor elected by Tribal …representatives but rather imposed by NATO.”

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