Category: The Regime

There you go

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor 05-4089

Now we understand why it’s so very hard to cut military spending:

In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and then-Air Force Secretary Michael Donley forcefully requested that Congress end production of the F-22, capping the program at 187 planes, a shift designed to save the military $13 billion. Military officials called for F-22 money to be diverted to weapons that could be deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon request touched off a fierce, though ultimately fruitless, lobbying battle. Lockheed Martin directed its registered lobbyists to fight back against the cuts in Congress and took out full-page advertisements in D.C. publications. And the Heritage Foundation produced a flurry of reports and media outreach efforts to encourage Congress to overturn the Pentagon’s decision.

Emails show that the Heritage Foundation’s fundraising staff worked closely with Mackenzie Eaglen, a researcher at the think tank who authored severalreports calling for restoring F-22 funding. According to Heritage’s internal weekly calendar, Eaglen was scheduled to participate in “a Lockheed Martin think tank delegation to visit their fifth-generation fighter production facilities in Fort Worth, TX” in April 2009.

“I had a very interesting 20 minute conversation this morning with Mackenzie Eaglen about the F-22 and defense spending in general. She gave me the sad update of defense spending on the hill, which provided good context for me to understand our activities during Protect America month,” wrote Jeffrey Trimbath, the assistant director of major gift planning at Heritage. Trimbath’s notes show that Eaglen said that Heritage had attempted to “convince the Congress to fund an Allied Variant of the F-22 so that the production lines stay open while retaining a critical aerospace industrial base,” but that the combined opposition of Secretary Gates and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made the request difficult.

James Jay Carafano, the vice president of Heritage’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, met several times with Lockheed Martin executives, even traveling to Marietta, Georgia, where the F-22 is produced, to participate in a “Lockheed Martin Tour of F-22 Programs.”

Some of the meeting documents list their topics, including one titled “Lockheed Martin Briefing on the Saudi Eastern Fleet Modernization Program.” But the documents do not go into detail about what was discussed at the meetings.

Fighting for Tariq Ba Odah’s release

~ susie

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Last week CCR yet again urged the court to release Tariq Ba Odah, filing a reply brief and supplemental expert declarations renewing our argument that Tariq – who has been hunger striking to protest his unjust detention since 2007 and is “on the precipice of death” according to three medical experts – must be released on humanitarian grounds. Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, despite never having been charged with any crime and having been cleared for release more than five years ago. And despite being brutally force fed 2,600 calories a day, he weighs just 74 pounds now. In its opposition to our June motion for Tariq’s release, the Department of Justice, shockingly, trotted out Bush administration arguments about how he was not covered under the Geneva Convention and does not have prisoner-of-war status. Tariq’s case has come to epitomize the incoherence and dysfunction of the Obama administration’s Guantánamo policy and has garnered major media attention as a result.

Meanwhile, for CCR client Zaher Hamdoun, who like Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, it is his soul rather than his body that has been crushed nearly to death by injustice. In a heart-rending letter to his attorney, CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei, he writes:
I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo.

So tired

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

YEMEN-CONFLICT

Of American Empire. WTF are we doing to Yemen?

The strike’s victims included Tayseer Okba, a 12-year-old girl who that morning had been visiting her 65-year-old grandmother, Amana al-Khowlani.

There is little mystery about the repeated attacks on the northern Saada Province, the birthplace of the Houthi movement. Months ago, the Saudi coalition declared that the entire province was a military zone, drawing an outcry from human rights groups that did little to deter the warplanes.

In border areas that the Houthis have used for attacks into Saudi Arabia, the coalition forces have struck deep into Yemeni territory, bombing hospitals, roads and towns even when no Houthi fighters are present, said Dr. Natalie Roberts, who worked with Doctors Without Borders in one of the few clinics in the province.

Mothers delivered babies in caves where they found shelter. People who were ill waited weeks before traveling to hospitals. “It’s no kind of life,” Dr. Roberts said. “Waiting in a cave to see if you’re going to get bombed.”

A road leading into Saada has been cratered by airstrikes that destroyed at least four bridges and obliterated trucks carrying fuel or livestock. In Saada City, so many houses were bombed in one neighborhood that all the residents simply fled.

Omar Mohammed al-Ghaily, 28, sat in the center of town, near the ruins of his clothing store, destroyed in airstrikes that razed a stretch of government buildings. The strikes killed Seif Ahmed Seif, who owned an umbrella store. Mr. Ghaily kept Mr. Seif’s identity card, maybe to return it one day to his daughter, who lives far away in Taiz. He kept coming to the rubble, he said, because he had “no place to go.”

Saada had suffered mightily over the last decade, when the Houthis fought six wars against Yemen’s central government. But those conflicts paled in comparison to the damage being inflicted by the coalition, Mr. Ghaily said: “this war from the sky.”

Snowden: Clinton would be fired for email server if she were a regular employee

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

How Edward Snowden Inadvertently Helped Vladimir Putin's Internet Crackdown

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked classified government surveillance information, has some words for presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in an Al Jazeera interview airing Friday. Both 2016 front-runners have been critical of Snowden and his disclosures, but in the interview Snowden takes a more pointed jab at Clinton’s handling of her… Continue reading “Snowden: Clinton would be fired for email server if she were a regular employee” →

‘If these images don’t change Europe, what will?’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Heart-rending pictures of a toddler’s lifeless body washed ashore on a Turkish beach sparked horror as the cost of Europe’s burgeoning refugee crisis hit home. The images of a tiny child lying face down in the surf at one of Turkey’s main tourist resorts has once more put a human face on the dangers faced by… Continue reading “‘If these images don’t change Europe, what will?’” →

Crazy conspiracy theories

~ susie

So in our eagerness to take down the Russians, we actually funded the Afghani provocation? Isn’t American Empire just peachy?

From an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, translated by William Blum, available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

When even the right wing generals stopped Netanyahu

~ susie

PM Netanyahu’s Meeting with Governor Mike Huckabee

Via Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. I strongly urge you to read the rest, this is such an important issue:

In a radio interview, former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak revealed that the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was on the verge of attacking Iran on 3 separate occasions in 2010-2012, but was consistently blocked by other (even far right wing) cabinet ministers or by the military chief of staff.

Although Netanyahu consistently depicts Iran as a military aggressor, that country hasn’t attacked another in a conventional war in modern history, whereas Israel has repeatedly launched wars of aggression, including 1956, 1967, 1982, 2009 and 2014. (The 1982 Israeli act of naked aggression on Lebanon eventuated in an 18-year occupation of 10% of Lebanon, during which Lebanese Shiites formed Hizbullah to resist their oppression; Iran’s support for this resistance is typically held against it by the US and Israel as ‘support for terrorism,’ while Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s support for the illegal invasion and occupation are considered perfectly normal.)

Israel has several hundred nuclear warheads, whereas Iran has none, but Iran has been sanctioned for its civilian nuclear enrichment program for generating electricity whereas Israel thumbed its nose at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and kicked off a nuclear arms race with Iraq that led, ironically and through propaganda, to the 2003 US invasion of that country.

Trumped!

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

We are in a very dangerous place in this country:

Two Boston men have been charged with assault after attacking a sleeping homeless Hispanic man and telling police that “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

The Boston Globe reports that brothers, Scott and Steve Leader of South Boston, cited the leading the Republican presidential candidate after they were arrested and charged on multiple assault charges, indecent exposure, and malicious destruction of property:

The Leader brothers were heading home after a Red Sox game when they approached a 58-year-old homeless man who was in a sleeping bag near the JFK/UMass T station. The brothers allegedly urinated on the man, punched him multiple times, and struck him with a metal pole.

(…)

The victim suffered a broken nose and bruises to his head and torso was taken to Boston Medical Center.

According to the police report filed in court, “Scott also stated Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported” and complained that he was only being arrested “because white people always are and never the minorities.”