Western Civilization Has Shed Its Values
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State."
-- Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister
By Paul Craig Roberts
December 06, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?
For example, the US print and TV media and the US government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the US government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the US government’s improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the US government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032010.html
The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the US media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush’s reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that “authorized” Bush to violate US law.
Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks’ critics. A number of American politicians have called for the US government to murder Julian Assange, as have journalists such as neoconservative propagandist Jonah Goldberg, who wrote: “Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?”
WikiLeaks’ critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks’ critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.
The US government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime’s use of lies, fabricated “intelligence,” and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into US puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating US and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime.
As the cables leaked by a patriotic American to WikiLeaks reveal, the US government was even able to prevent accountable government in the UK by having British prime minister Brown “fix” the official Chilcot Inquiry into the deceptions used by former prime minister Tony Blair to lead the British into serving as mercenaries in America’s wars. The US was able to do this, because the British prime minister does not believe in accountable government either.
The leaked documents show that the last thing the US government wants anywhere is a government that is accountable to its own citizens instead of to the US government.
The US government’s frontal assault on freedom of information goes well beyond WikiLeaks and shutting down its host servers. In a December 2 editorial, “Wave goodbye to Internet freedom,” the Washington Times reports that Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski has “outlined a plan to expand the federal government’s power over the Internet.”
The obvious, but unasked, question is: Why does the US government fear the American people and believe that only news that is managed and spun by the government is fit to print? Is there an agenda afoot to turn citizens into subjects?
Perhaps the most discouraging development is the accusation that is being spread via the Internet that Julian Assange is a dupe or even a covert agent used by the CIA and Mossad to spread disinformation that furthers US and Israeli agendas. This accusation might come from intelligence services striving to protect governments by discrediting the leaked information. However, it has gained traction because some of the cables contain false information. Some have concluded, incorrectly, that the false information was put into the documents for the purpose of being leaked.
There is another explanation for the false information. Diplomats concerned with advancing their careers learn to tell their bosses what they want to hear, whether true or false. Diplomats understand that the US government has agendas that it cannot declare and that they are expected to support these agendas by sending in reports that validate the undeclared agendas. For example, the US government cannot openly say that it is endeavoring to create a climate of opinion that gives the US a green light for eliminating the independent Iranian government and re-establishing an American puppet state. US “diplomats,” a.k.a., spies, understand this and fabricate the information that supports the agenda.
In my opinion, the most important of all the cables leaked is the secret directive sent by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to 33 US embassies and consulates ordering US diplomats to provide credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers, frequent-flyer account numbers and biographic and biometric information including DNA information on UN officials from the Secretary General down, including “heads of peace operations and political field missions.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-spying-un
The directive has been characterized as the spy directive, but this is an unusual kind of spying. Usually, spying focuses on what other governments think, how they are likely to vote on US initiatives, who can be bribed, and on sexual affairs that could be used to blackmail acquiescence to US agendas.
In contrast, the information requested in the secret directive is the kind of information that would be used to steal a person’s identity.
Why does the US government want information that would enable it to steal the identities of UN officials and impersonate them?
The US government loves to pretend that its acts of naked aggression are acts of liberation mandated by “the world community.” The world community has been less supportive of US aggression since it learned that the Bush regime lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, the UN has not given Washington the green light Washington wants for a military assault on Iran. Neither has the UN given Washington the extreme sanctions that it wants the world community to impose on Iran.
As the UN refused Washington’s menu of sanctions, Washington unilaterally added its own sanction package to the UN sanctions, to the dismay of the Russians and other governments who believed that they had arrived at a compromise with Washington over the Iran sanctions issue.
Could it be that Washington wants to be able to impersonate UN officials and country delegates so that it can compromise them by involving them in fake terrorist plots, communications with terrorists real or contrived, money laundering, sex scandals and other such means of suborning their cooperation with Washington’s agendas? All the CIA has to do is to call a Taliban or Hamas chief on a UN official’s telephone number or send a compromising fax with a UN official’s fax number or have operatives pay for visits to prostitutes with a UN official’s credit card number.
The report in the Guardian on December 2 that the CIA drew up the UN spy directive signed off by Hillary Clinton is a good indication that the United States government intended to compromise the United Nations and turn the organization, as it has done with so many governments, into a compliant instrument of American policy.
Perhaps there is another plausible explanation of why the US government desired information that would enable it to impersonate UN officials, but as a person who had a 25-year career in Washington I cannot think of what it might be.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27012.htm
Vichy Britain: The truth exposed by WikiLeaks
For special relationship read special doormat, says Neil Clark in the light of latest WikiLeaks disclosures
By Neil Clark
December 06, 2010 "First Post" -- Oh, how the mighty have fallen! A hundred years ago, Britain was the centre of a vast global empire, which controlled about a quarter of the world. Today, as the WikiLeaks disclosures reveal, the one-time rulers of the world have been reduced to the status of arch-crawlers to American imperial power.
Saturday's batch of leaked cables - published by the Guardian - reveal how leading Conservatives, when in opposition, promised to US diplomats that they would run a 'pro-American regime' and buy more US arms once they got into power.
The level of obsequiousness shown by the self-confessed 'children of Thatcher' to their imperial masters in Washington is quite extraordinary.
To stress his pro-American credentials, William Hague, now Foreign Secretary, reveals that he has a sister who is an American and that he vacations in the US. He assures the US Deputy Chief of Mission that he, George Osborne and David Cameron, are "staunchly Atlanticist".
Liam Fox, now Defence Secretary, affirms his party's desire to "follow a much more pro-American profile in procurement". Fox also boasts about how he has "rebuffed" those in the Conservative party who are less enthusiastic about the US alliance than he is, and who have been asserting that "we're supposed to be partners with, not supplicants to, the United States".
It's hard not to laugh at this shameless sucking-up to Uncle Sam. Even the Americans themselves are shown by the leaked cables to find the British neurosis about the so-called 'special relationship' amusing.
But in reality there's nothing very funny about the British elite's sycophancy towards America - because the consequences in recent years have been calamitous.
Our determination to follow the US, come what may, has seen us become involved in disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - conflicts where the wisest course for Britain would have been to stay on the sidelines.
Our "staunchly Atlanticist" elite have helped make Britain a prime target for Islamic terrorists. Does anyone seriously believe that the 7/7 bomb attacks in London would have happened if Britain had not taken part in the Iraq war?
In return for its slavish obedience, Britain has received precious little, if anything, in return from Washington. As WikiLeaks revealed last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown couldn't even get the US to agree to allow Gary McKinnon, the 43-year-old computer hacker with Asperger's Syndrome, who is accused of hacking into US government computers, to serve his jail sentence in Britain.
For 'special relationship' read 'special doormat'.
The tragedy is that it doesn't have to be like this. For the first 35 years after World War Two, our leaders were far less sycophantic towards America, despite Britain's indebtedness to the US.
Harold Wilson, to his great credit, refused to send British troops to Vietnam. Edward Heath defied Washington by adopting a policy of strict neutrality during the 1973 Yom Kippur war between the Arab states and Israel and refused to allow the United States to use Britain's spy and air bases on Cyprus.
But from 1979, things changed dramatically. Margaret Thatcher's election not only destroyed the domestic post-war mixed-economy consensus, it also shifted Britain's foreign policy towards a more hardline pro-American stance.
And when the Blairites took over the Labour Party in the mid-1990s, both Britain's main political parties were in the control of people happy to pledge their undying allegiance to Pax Americana.
Public opinion has had nothing whatsoever to do with this shift.
Given our historical and linguistic ties, most would consider it perfectly reasonable for Britain and America to enjoy amicable relations. But there is a world of difference between the Anglo-US friendship of the immediate post-war era and today's subservience.
Things could get worse if, as seems possible, a gung-ho right-wing Republican president evicts Barack Obama and takes over at the White House in January 2013.
If a President Palin or a President Huckabee asks the British government for support in a US/Israeli attack on Iran in early 2013, we know only too well what the response of the 'staunchly Atlanticist' Cameron, Hague and Fox is likely to be. Yet a war with Iran would almost certainly develop into a full-scale Middle East conflict, and be far bloodier than even the Iraq invasion.
The cables detailing Hague and Co's crawling behaviour towards the Americans make me think of Vichy France under the Germans. If Britain is foolish enough to get involved in such a terrible bloodbath, we'll only have our Vichy-esque elite to blame.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27014.htm
Not that you are, but I was waiting for someone to accuse the Swedish women of being political whores. Always amazes me how ideology can so easily trump sensitivity.
Always amazes me how ideology can so easily trump sensitivity.
Happy as a Hangman
By Chris Hedges
December 06,2010 "Truthdig" -- Innocence, as defined by law, makes us complicit with the crimes of the state. To do nothing, to be judged by the state as an innocent, is to be guilty. It is to sanction, through passivity and obedience, the array of crimes carried out by the state.
To be innocent in America means we passively permit offshore penal colonies where we torture human beings, some of whom are children. To be innocent in America is to acquiesce to the relentless corporate destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. To be innocent in America is to permit the continued theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the state by Wall Street swindlers and speculators. To be innocent in America is to stand by as insurance and pharmaceutical companies, in the name of profit, condemn ill people, including children, to die. To be innocent in America is refusing to resist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are not only illegal under international law but responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. This is the odd age we live in. Innocence is complicity.
The steady impoverishment and misery inflicted by the corporate state on the working class and increasingly the middle class has a terrible logic. It consolidates corporate centers of power. It weakens us morally and politically. The fraud and violence committed by the corporate state become secondary as we scramble to feed our families, find a job and pay our bills and mortgages. Those who cling to insecure, poorly paid jobs and who struggle with crippling credit card debt, those who are mired in long-term unemployment and who know that huge medical bills would bankrupt them, those who owe more on their houses than they are worth and who fear the future, become frightened and timid. They seek only to survive. They accept the pathetic scraps tossed to them by the corporate elite. The internal and external corporate abuse accelerates as we become every day more pliant.
Our corrupt legal system, perverting the concept that “all men are created equal,” has radically redefined civic society. Citizens, regardless of their status or misfortune, are now treated with the same studied indifference by the state. They have been transformed from citizens to commodities whose worth is determined solely by the market and whose value is measured by their social and economic functions. The rich, therefore, are rewarded by the state with tax cuts because they are rich. It is their function to monopolize wealth and invest. The poor are supposed to be poor. The poor should not be a drain on the resources of the state or the oligarchic elite. Equality, in this new legal paradigm, means we are all treated alike, no matter what our circumstances. This new interpretation of equality, under which the poor are abandoned and the powerful are unchecked, has demolished the system of regulations, legal restraints and services that once protected the
underclass from wealthy and corporate predators.
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The creation of a permanent, insecure and frightened underclass is the most effective weapon to thwart rebellion and resistance as our economy worsens. Huge pools of unemployed and underemployed blunt labor organizing, since any job, no matter how menial, is zealously coveted. As state and federal social welfare programs, especially in education, are gutted, we create a wider and wider gulf between the resources available to the tiny elite and the deprivation and suffering visited on our permanent underclass. Access to education, for example, is now largely defined by class. The middle class, taking on huge debt, desperately flees to private institutions to make sure their children have a chance to enter the managerial ranks of the corporate elite. And this is the idea. Public education, which, when it functions, gives opportunities to all citizens, hinders a system of corporate neofeudalism. Corporations are advancing, with Barack Obama’s assistance, charter schools and educational services that are stripped down and designed to train classes for their appropriate vocations, which, if you’re poor means a future in the service sector. The eradication of teachers’ unions, under way in states such as New Jersey, is a vital component in the dismantling of public education. Corporations know that good systems of public education are a hindrance to a rigid caste system. In corporate America everyone will be kept in his or her place.
The beating down of workers, exacerbated by the prospect that unemployment benefits will not be renewed for millions of Americans and that public sector unions will soon be broken, has transformed those in the working class from full members of society, able to participate in its debates, the economy and governance, into terrified people in fragmented pools preoccupied with the struggle of private existence. Those who are economically broken usually cease to be concerned with civic virtues. They will, history has demonstrated, serve any system, no matter how evil, and do anything for a salary, job security and the protection of their families.
There will be sectors of the society that, as the situation worsens, attempt to rebel. But the state can rely on a huge number of people who, for work and meager benefits, will transform themselves into willing executioners. The reconfiguration of American society into a corporate oligarchy is conditioning tens of millions not only to passively accept state and corporate crimes, but to actively participate in the mechanisms that ensure their own enslavement.
“Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1945 essay “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” “it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.”
Organs of state repression do not rely so much on fanatics and sadists as ordinary citizens who are desperate, who need a job, who are willing to obey. Arendt relates a story of a Jew who is released from Buchenwald. The freed Jew encountered, among the SS men who gave him certificates of release, a former schoolmate, whom he did not address but stared at. The SS guard spontaneously explained to his former friend: “You must understand, I have five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.”
Arendt also quotes an interview with a camp official at Majdanek. The camp official concedes that he has assisted in the gassing and burying of people alive. But when he is asked, “Do you know the Russians will hang you?” he bursts into tears. “Why should they? What have I done?” he says.
I can imagine, should the rule of law ever one day be applied to the insurance companies responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans denied medical care, that there will be the same confused response from insurance executives. What is frightening in collapsing societies is not only the killers, sadists, murderers and psychopaths who rise up out of the moral swamp to take power, but the huge numbers of ordinary people who become complicit in state crimes. I saw this during the war in El Salvador and the war in Bosnia. It is easy to understand a demented enemy. It is puzzling to understand a rational and normal one. True evil, as Goethe understood, is not always palpable. It is “to render invisible another human consciousness.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago” writes about a close friend who served with him in World War II. Solzhenitsyn’s defiance of the Communist regime after the war saw him sent to the Soviet gulags. His friend, loyal to the state, was sent there as an interrogator. Solzhenitsyn was forced to articulate a painful truth. The mass of those who serve systems of terrible oppression and state crime are not evil. They are weak.
“If only there were vile people ... committing evil deeds, and if it were only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The expansions of public and private organs of state security, from Homeland Security to the mercenary forces we are building in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the burgeoning internal intelligence organizations, exist because these “ordinary” citizens, many of whom are caring fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, have confused conformity to the state with innocence. Family values are used, especially by the Christian right, as the exclusive definition of public morality. Politicians, including President Obama, who betray the working class, wage doomed imperial wars, abandon families to home foreclosures and bank repossessions, and refuse to restore habeas corpus, are morally “good” because they are loyal husbands and fathers. Infidelity, instead of corporate murder, becomes in this absurd moral reasoning the highest and most unforgivable offense.
The bureaucrats who maintain these repressive state organs, who prosecute the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or who maintain corporate structures that perpetuate human suffering, can define themselves as good—as innocent—as long as they are seen as traditional family men and women who are compliant to the laws of the state. And this redefinition of civic engagement permits us to suspend moral judgment and finally common sense. Do your job. Do not ask questions. Do not think. If these bureaucrats were challenged for the crimes they are complicit in committing, including the steady dismantling of the democratic state, they would react with the same disbelief as the camp guard at Majdanek.
Those who serve as functionaries within corporations such as Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil and carry out crimes ask of their masters that they be exempted from personal responsibility for the acts they commit. They serve corporate structures that kill, but, as Arendt notes, the corporate employee “does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity.” At home the corporate man or woman is meek. He or she has no proclivity to violence, although the corporate systems they serve by day pollute, impoverish, maim and kill.
Those who do not carry out acts of rebellion, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, are guilty of solidifying and perpetuating these crimes. Those who do not act delude themselves into believing they are innocent. They are not.
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.” On Dec. 16 he, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and several others will hold a rally across from the White House to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and attempt to chain themselves to the White House fence. More information on the Dec. 16 protest can be found at www.stopthesewars.org.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27015.htm
Things could get worse if, as seems possible, a gung-ho right-wing Republican president evicts Barack Obama and takes over at the White House in January 2013.
If a President Palin or a President Huckabee asks the British government for support in a US/Israeli attack on Iran in early 2013, we know only too well what the response of the 'staunchly Atlanticist' Cameron, Hague and Fox is likely to be. Yet a war with Iran would almost certainly develop into a full-scale Middle East conflict, and be far bloodier than even the Iraq invasion.
The cables detailing Hague and Co's crawling behaviour towards the Americans make me think of Vichy France under the Germans. If Britain is foolish enough to get involved in such a terrible bloodbath, we'll only have our Vichy-esque elite to blame.
Not that you are, but I was waiting for someone to accuse the Swedish women of being political whores. Always amazes me how ideology can so easily trump sensitivity.
The troubling aspect of the WikiLeaks documents concerning Iran is thus not that they demonstrate the hostility of Arab leaders toward the Islamic Republic. Rather, it is the fact that the mainstream media has failed to talk about the huge gap between the sentiments of the masses in the Islamic and Arab worlds and those of their rulers regarding Iran's nuclear program and its stance toward Israel. The mainstream media has also failed to remind the public of the nature of the Arab regimes that are supposedly U.S. allies and of what the consequences of a military attack on Iran would be. Let us consider these issues that have been swept under the rug by the mainstream media.
To begin with, the mainstream media fails to point out that almost all of the Arab nations whose leaders have advocated an attack on Iran are ruled by unpopular and corrupt dictatorships that are supported by the United States:
Not only the main stream media, though I suppose that the lack of anything approaching honesty in the US might well lead to the oh so common response you hear from "concerned citizens for Afghans", to wit, "but the Taliban mistreat their citizens, especially their women"; this last remark is custom made to always scores huge points on the propaganda scale.
* The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is run in a virtually medieval fashion. Women have almost no rights and citizens in general enjoy no political freedom.
* In the island nation of Bahrain, the ruling Sunnis harshly suppress the Shiites, who are the vast majority of the population. The government has even been importing Sunni Arabs and quickly granting them citizenship to increase the Sunni population share. Until the late 1960s, the Iranian governments considered Bahrain Iran's 14th province. A secret deal between the Shah and Great Britain led to the island's independence.
* Kuwait, a city-state in which Shiites constitute about 40 percent of the population, has been virtually occupied by U.S. forces for the past two decades. Though it has a parliament, it is under the autocratic rule of the Al-Sabah clan. It was from Kuwait that U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.
* The UAE, a federation of seven absolute monarchies, is ruled by a tribe installed in power when the nation was created by the British Empire in 1971. It bogusly claims ownership of three Persian Gulf islands, the Lesser and Greater Tunbs and Abu Mousa, that have been part of Iran for at least 1,000 years. At the same time, the UAE is enriched through its lucrative commerce with Iran and by at least $400 billion of Iranian investments in the country.
* Egypt has been ruled under a state of emergency since 1981. It has been one of the destinations for the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, whereby terrorist suspects are sent to countries where information and confessions are extracted from them via torture. Hosni Mubarak has been Egypt's president for 29 years.
The supposedly "moderate" Arab regimes that are allies of the United States are thus all ruled by unpopular regimes that are dictatorial, even autocratic. Their rulers say one thing about Iran in public and the opposite in private because they are afraid of their own citizens.
The mainstream media also fails to mention that an extensive poll released by the Brookings Institution in August clearly indicates that, contrary to their dictators' sentiments, the Arab masses support Iran and its nuclear program. They even support Iran's attainment of nuclear weapons and consider that possibility as positive for the Middle East. They reject the narrative that it is Iran that is the source of all of the Middle East's problems. In fact, the vast majority of Arabs consider Israel and the United States as the main threats to peace and stability in the region. Only a tiny minority holds such a view of Iran.
In using the WikiLeaks documents to advance the War Party/Israel lobby narrative, the mainstream media has also completely forgotten that one of the main reasons for the terrorism committed by Middle Eastern radicals against the West, and the United States in particular, is the West's close association with those corrupt Arab regimes. The mainstream media fails to point out
* that 15 of the 19 terrorists that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from Egypt, and one each from the UAE and Lebanon, the same nations that are supposedly U.S. allies and have called for attacks on Iran;
* that Iran and Iranians have not been implicated in any terrorist attacks on the United States, either here at home or abroad since at least the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While the Islamic Republic was accused by some U.S. officials of involvement in the terrorist attacks on the U.S. base in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, no proof was ever established and in fact no Iranian was ever indicted, though others were;
* that the Taliban -- bloody enemies of Iran -- are in fact the former Afghan Mojahedin that were funded by Saudi Arabia, armed by the CIA, and trained by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI);
* that the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996 with the direct support of the ISI and Pakistan's military;
* that during the administration of President Mohammad Khatami it was Iran -- not Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab governments that have urged attacking Iran -- that provided significant support to the American campaign against the Taliban in 2001, and that it was not the U.S. Army but the Northern Alliance, armed and backed by Iran, that entered Kabul and overthrew the Taliban;
* that without Iran's crucial involvement, the formation of Afghanistan's national unity government in December 2001 would not have materialized. During the U.N. talks in Bonn on the future of Afghanistan after the Taliban's ouster, Iranian representatives met daily with U.S. envoy James Dobbins, who later credited Iran with preventing the conference from collapsing due to the Northern Alliance's last-minute demands to control the new government;
* that the Shia groups now in power in Iraq that are supported by the United States -- which touts them as models of democratic Middle Eastern political parties -- were suppressed by Saddam Hussein during the 1980s when the United States was supporting his war against Iran;
* that it is the rich citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf Arab states that provide funding to the Islamic schools, or madrassas, in Pakistan that are a breeding ground for radicals who eventually carry out attacks on the United States and its allies;
* that it is Saudi Arabia that supports terrorist group such as Jundallah that carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran;
* that Saudi Arabia, by siding with Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran and with Iraq's Sunni insurgents after he was overthrown, has contributed much to war and misery in the Middle East. The foreign fighters in Iraq were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other U.S.-supported Sunni states. Of the 60 to 80 fighters who traveled to join al-Qaeda in Iraq every month, half were from Saudi Arabia. All the suicide bombers in Iraq were Sunni, the majority of them Saudis. Roughly half of all foreign militants who targeted U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians were from Saudi Arabia, as were nearly half of the foreign prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq;
* that it is the Salafi and Wahhabi branches of Islam, both emanating from Saudi Arabia, that provide the core ideology for Middle Eastern terrorists and other radicals;
* that WikiLeaks documents indicate the deep worries of U.S. officials, including former ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal -- the most rapidly growing such arsenal in the world -- and the possibility that radicals may get their hands on some of its weapons; and
* that WikiLeaks documents also indicate that the ISI and factions of the Pakistan military still support the Taliban, while Western soldiers continue to die in a pointless war and the people of Afghanistan suffer greatly.
No, the mainstream media has no interest in pointing out these irrefutable facts, because they would destroy the narrative of war with Iran. It is instead interested in one and only one subject: advancing the war narrative against Iran in exactly the same way that it sold George W. Bush's outrageous lies about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and convinced the public that it should support the illegal -- many would say criminal -- invasion of Iraq.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27009.htm
NPR this evening has a story about the sex thing, talking to a Reuters reporter in Sweden who did a good job of explaining the sequence of events that are alleged to have happened. I could summarize what he reports but, quite frankly, it is too tawdry for me to comfortably talk about
"Gemma Lindfield, for the Swedish authorities, ... said the first complainant, Miss A, said she was victim of 'unlawful coercion' on the night of August 14 in Stockholm. ... Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.
"The second charge alleged Assange 'sexually molested' Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her 'express wish' one should be used. The third charge claimed Assange 'deliberately molested' Miss A on August 18.
"The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep."
Can we cut the needless distraction? If a three headed baby eating monster passed the diplomatic cables to me it wouldn't make them any less true
