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FREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTH
FREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTHFREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTHFREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTHFREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTHFREEING YOUR MIND TO THE TRUTH - THE WHOLE TRUTH
For eighteen months the entire 1.5 million people of Gaza experienced a punishing blockade imposed by Israel, and a variety of traumatizing challenges to the normalcy of daily life. A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot.
During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel’s 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle.
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have decried Israel’s continued aerial bombing campaign as unlawful and denounced the killing of more than 300 Palestinians since 27 December, including scores of unarmed civilians not taking part in the hostilities. Israel’s attacks on the densely populated Gaza Strip also elicited condemnation from numerous world politicians and sparked protests in global cities.
Despite international outcry over escalating violence, the U.S. mainstream media continues to privilege a prepackaged narrative in which Israel’s actions are never disproportionate, never counterproductive and certainly never gratuitous. According to the mainstream media, the U.S. must continue uncompromisingly supporting Israel because the allegedly beleaguered democracy is held hostage by monomaniacal Islamofascists who are inherently evil. Promoting a paradigm in which Israel is always David up against Goliath, the U.S. media presents suffering Palestinians as expendable for the greater cause of Israel winning its epic struggle.
To justify U.S.’s carte blanche to Israel, the mainstream media restricts American readers to an echo chamber in which the following claims are repeated ad nausem until they are mistaken for fact:
‘The myth of “al Qaida” is built on an expansive foundation of many half-truths and hidden facts. It is a CIA creation. It was shaped by the agency to serve as a substitute “enemy” for America, replacing the Soviets whom the Islamist forces had driven from Afghanistan. Unknown American officials, at an indeterminate point in time, made the decision to fabricate the tale of a mythical worldwide network of Islamic terrorists from the exploits of the Afghan Mujahedeen.
The CIA already had their own network of Islamic militant “freedom fighters,” all that was needed were a few scattered terrorist attacks against US targets and a credible heroic figurehead, to serve as the “great leader”.’
Some celebrate the holidays with giving and fellowship; making up for the rest of the year when they can’t see the profit in it or it involves that extra effort that is better spent sitting on one’s ass and being entertained in lieu of an existence. Some opt for the religious angle and enjoy recreations of events for which no historical data exists. Some opt for the spiritual and we have no way of knowing what they are doing. Some look at it as an excuse to be more lubricated than usual and for some it is an opportunity to be more depressed than usual and some… some like to war on their neighbors because that is how they celebrate their holy days. Chief among the latter is the serial killer, theme park known as Israel.
Just as they attacked the U.S.S. Liberty in an attempt to provoke a war between The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. by way of Egypt and just as they used their control of the world press to give the im’press’ion that Lebanon kidnapped their soldiers on Israeli soil when they were actually captured well into Lebanon and… conveniently had all their forces mustered on the border and just as they bombed the King David Hotel and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, they are now showing their holiday spirit bombing the shit out of the people they have been starving to death in Palestine based on rather crude evidence of Hamas related rocket attacks; this would be almost funny if it weren’t so sick. Of course, the one who violated the cease fire was Israel.
What is the definition of a Conspiracy Theory? Wikipedia definition here, Another definition of “Conspiracy Theory” from Webster’s Online Dictionary:
” A conspiracy theory is the belief that historical or current events are the result of manipulations by one or more secretive powers or conspiracies.”
Where on Earth might one hear of such a paranoid idea? How about from President John F. Kennedy?
Or how about President Eisenhower? Watch this segment of the entire Eisenhower farewell below:
ot only are children in the Gaza Strip losing their parents, missing food, medicines and school, they are being killed.
Israeli forces took the lives of at least 30 children in Gaza since air attacks began on Saturday. A statement issued by the Global Movement for the Defense of Children says its initial reports indicate that another 150 children are injured.
The first children hit en masse were during struck during the beginning of the attacks when they were leaving school. Dozens of school children were raced to area hospitals in Gaza City on Saturday. Among the children killed are the sisters in Jabaliya yesterday and the eight year old boy today in Khan Younis.
The British university movement to boycott Israel wrote in their petition, “‘Children,’ says an Israeli spokeswoman, ‘are legitimate targets because if they inhabit a house allegedly being used to manufacture home-made rockets to fire into Israel, they are ‘terrorists’ themselves.’”
The international children’s agency Global Defense for Children called today on the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency session. The UNSC has yet to take effective action to force Israel to stop its aggression or apply previous UN resolutions, which include an end to occupation.
Not content with destroying the only vestige of stability that Somalia had known for almost two decades by arming, backing and participating in a brutal “regime change” invasion by Ethiopia, the Bush Administration now wants to turn the ravaged land into an international “free fire zone,” a giant Fallujah where any powerful nation on earth can launch armed incursions on Somali soil, wreaking the usual “collateral damage” in the search for pirates — or for those arbitrarily designated as pirates.
The Bush Regime is drafting a UN Security Council resolution that will give “the international community” carte blanche to “hunt down” alleged pirates on land in Somalia
As we noted here recently, the “Somali government” is a rapidly collapsing coalition of CIA-paid warlords and Ethiopian collaborators which “controls” only a few city blocks of territory in the entire country. It is unfathomable that this near-fictitious entity would or could oppose a “request” by a world power to send armed forces into Somalia in a noble quest to clamp down on pirates. And what happens when these invading forces inevitably clash with the various other armed groups now waging a multi-sided, hydra-headed war in the country? Why, the invaders will have to take stern “force protection” measures, of course.
The inquest jury examining the death of Jean Charles de Menezes has returned an open verdict - refusing to accept the police’s contention that he was lawfully killed in a fast-moving anti-terrorist operation.
The jurors also answered a series of questions about the circumstances of Mr de Menezes’s death on board a Tube train at Stockwell, South London, in a way which rejected much of the account of the shooting given by police firearms officers.
Asked if they believed that the policemen had shouted a warning of armed police, the jury answered no. They also answered no when asked if Mr de Menezes had moved towards the officers before he was shot.
The jury had been banned by Sir Michael Wright, QC, the coroner, from considering a verdict of unlawful killing. His ruling led the de Menezes family to withdraw from the proceedings and brand the inquest “a complete whitewash”.
Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.
When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.
Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.
Earlier this year, bulldozers and backhoes returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.
Demonstrations against the killing were seen in cities across the continent with left-wing radicals and other sympathisers taking to the streets.
In Spain, 11 protesters were arrested and several police officers injured when clashes took place in Madrid and Barcelona.
In Copenhagen, 32 people were arrested when their protest in support of the Greek protests turned violent.
In neighbouring Turkey, about a dozen left-wing protesters daubed red paint over the front of the Greek consulate in Istanbul.
Around 150 people belonging to a Danish underground movement took to the streets, throwing bottles and paint bombs at buildings, police cars and officers. In Moscow and Rome, protesters threw petrol bombs at Greece’s embassies.
Journalists came under attack for the first time in the riots, with a Russian news crew assaulted by a mob of about 50 youths, some of them reportedly drunk.
The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country.
Contracts to supply British bases and those of other Western forces with fuel, supplies and equipment are held by multinational companies.
However, the business of moving supplies from the Pakistani port of Karachi to British, US and other military contingents in the country is largely subcontracted to local trucking companies. These must run the gauntlet of the increasingly dangerous roads south of Kabul in convoys protected by hired gunmen from Afghan security companies.
The Times has learnt that it is in the outsourcing of convoys that payoffs amounting to millions of pounds, including money from British taxpayers, are given to the Taleban.
The former Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Afghanistan yesterday accused the country of being corrupt “from top to bottom”, and said the international community had wrongly treated President Hamid Karzai with kid gloves.
The criticism came from Kim Howells, who was in charge of the Afghanistan brief for three-and-a-half years until he stepped down as a foreign affairs minister in the October government reshuffle. The remarks reflect his considered judgment on what has been described as the most difficult foreign policy challenge facing the UK government and its armed forces.
Breaking his silence on the issue, he told MPs: “Institutionally, Afghanistan is corrupt from top to bottom. There are few signs that the chaotic hegemony of warlords, gangsters, presidential placemen, incompetent and under-resourced provincial governors and self-serving government ministers has been challenged in any effective way by President Karzai.
We live and struggle in an era of blatantly militarized capitalism and the violence of capital. War, occupation, national security ideologies and repression of dissent –at home and abroad - make for booming business opportunities the world over. As pro-free market US journalist Thomas Friedman succinctly put it: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force and Marine Corps.”
Militarized capitalism: The military-industrial complex in 2008
What is the military-industrial complex in 2008? Where is it? What does it look like? I am not even sure if the phrase, used so famously by former US president Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 is the best descriptor to encompass the many tentacles and facets of the war and security industry and the links and connections between capital and its political allies. Do terms like ‘defence industry’ and ‘arms trade’ adequately encompass the face of today’s war profiteers, whose devastating impacts can equally be found in the high-tech apartheid wall being built by Israel to seal off the West Bank and Gaza, and its Western Hemispheric counterpart on the US-Mexico border, in the computer flight simulation programs provided to US and British military by Canada’s CAE, in private corporate mercenary armies like Blackwater, DynCorp and Aegis in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, in the outsourced intelligence, IT, interrogation and translation services of L-3/Titan, in the massive military aid budgets which the US gives to the governments of Israel, Pakistan, Egypt and Colombia, among others, and in the ‘hearts and minds’ operations of US Special Operations Forces based in the Philippines doing ‘humanitarian work’ - medical, dental and other social services, including infrastructure projects in many remote communities - services which should be the function of a government, in Mindanao, as much as it is in weapons production and arms exports.
Like all transnational corporations, these companies enjoy both patronage and revolving door relationships with the highest echelons of governments and their armed forces, tax breaks, support for exports, and all kinds of other incentives which help them to focus firmly on their bottom line – profit. US administrations, regardless of their party allegiance, brim with politicians with investments and business interests in the defence industry and war profiteers, perhaps most vividly symbolized by Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton and its multi-billion-dollar contracts to provide construction, hospitality, and other services to the US military after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But it is business as usual for US militarized capitalism. An April 2008 Centre for Responsive Politics report states that US Congress members invested US $196 million of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts to provide goods and services to US armed forces, ranging from aircraft and weapons manufacturers to producers of medical supplies and soft drinks. To cite a couple of typical revolving door examples, General Dynamics board of directors includes an ex-Vice Chief of US Army staff, a former US Air Force General, a former Chief of Naval Operations in the US Navy, and a former Chief of Defence Procurement at the British Ministry of Defence, while Canada’s CAE’s current and former executives include a former Canadian minister for international trade and former PM Mulroney’s head of staff.
‘A key element in any new initiative would be for the U.S. president to declare publicly what, in the view of this country, the basic parameters of a fair and enduring peace ought to be.
These should contain four principal elements: 1967 borders, with minor, reciprocal and agreed-upon modifications; compensation in lieu of the right of return for Palestinian refugees; Jerusalem as real home to two capitals; and a nonmilitarized Palestinian state.
Something more might be needed to deal with Israeli security concerns about turning over territory to a Palestinian government incapable of securing Israel against terrorist activity. That could be dealt with by deploying an international peacekeeping force, such as one from NATO, which could not only replace Israeli security but train Palestinian troops to become effective.’
Look at this move to try and push NATO into areas they were never mandated to go . The World Army in waiting.! Note also the conditions they put forward Palestinian refugees to get compensation and not allowed to return home and Palestine to be Non Militarized. Well as long as Israel is Non Militarized also !
This looks very much like Problem - Reaction - Solution to me!
Today, a surreal event will take place in London. The Foreign Office is holding an open day “to highlight the importance of human rights in our work as part of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. There will be various “stalls” and “panel discussions”, and foreign secretary David Miliband will present a human rights prize. Is this a spoof? No. The Foreign Office wants to raise our “human rights awareness”. Kafka and Heller have many counterfeits.
There will be no stall for the Chagos islanders, the 2,000 British citizens expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland, whom Miliband’s government has fought to prevent from returning to what is now a US military base and suspected CIA torture centre. The high court has repeatedly restored this fundamental human right to the islanders, the essence of Magna Carta, describing the Foreign Office actions as “outrageous”, “repugnant” and “illegal”. Yet Miliband’s lawyers refused to give up, and were rescued on October 22 by the political judgments of three law lords.
There will be no stall for the victims of a systemic British policy of exporting arms and military equipment to 10 of Africa’s most war-bloodied and impoverished countries. In his speech today, with the good people of Amnesty and Save the Children in attendance, shamefully, what will Miliband say to the sufferers of this UK-sponsored violence? Perhaps he will make mention, as he often does, of the need for “good governance” in faraway places, while his own regime suppresses a Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE’s £43m arms deal with the corrupt tyranny in Saudi Arabia - with which, noted Foreign Office minister Kim Howells in 2007, the British had “shared values”.
There will be no stall for those Iraqis whose social, cultural and real lives have been smashed by an unprovoked invasion based on proven lies. Will the foreign secretary apologise for the cluster bombs the British have scattered, still blowing legs off children, and the depleted uranium and other toxic substances that have seen cancer consume swaths of southern Iraq? Will he speak about the universal human right to knowledge, and announce a diversion of a fraction of the billions bailing out the City of London to the restoration of what was one of the finest school systems in the Middle East, obliterated as a consequence of the Anglo-American invasion, along with museums and publishing houses and bookstores, and teachers and historians and anthropologists and surgeons? Will he announce the dispatch of simple painkillers and syringes to hospitals that once had almost everything and now have nothing, in a country where British governments, especially his own, took the lead in blocking humanitarian aid, including Howells’ ban on vaccines to protect children from preventable diseases?
There will be no stall for the people of Gaza, of whom, says the International Red Cross, starvation threatens the majority, mostly children. In pursuing a policy of reducing one and a half million people to a Hobbesian existence, the Israelis have cut most lifelines. David Miliband was in Jerusalem recently, within a short helicopter flight of the captive people of Gaza. He did not go, and said nothing about their human rights, preferring weasel words about a “truce” between tormentor and victims.
There will be no stall for the trade unionists, students, journalists and human rights defenders assassinated in Colombia, a country where the government’s “security forces” are trained by the British and Americans and responsible for 90% of torture, says a new study by the British human rights group Justice for Colombia. The Foreign Office says it is “improving the human rights record of the military and combating drug trafficking”. The study finds not a shred of evidence to support this. Colombian officers implicated in murder are welcomed to Britain for “seminars”.
There will be no stall for history, for our memory. Stored in the great British libraries and record offices, unclassified official files tell the truth about British policy and human rights, from officially condoned atrocities in the concentration camps of colonial Kenya and the arming of the genocidal General Suharto in Indonesia, to the supply of biological weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. As we hear the moralising drone of ex-British military “security experts” telling us what to think about current events in Mumbai, we might recall Britain’s historic role as midwife to violent extremism in modern Islam, from the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s through the overthrow of Iran’s liberal democratic government to MI6’s arming of the Afghan mujahideen, the Taliban in waiting. The aim was and remains the denial of nationalism to peoples struggling to be free, especially in the Middle East, where oil, says a secret Foreign Office document from 1947, is “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence and domination”. Human rights are almost entirely absent from this official memory, unlike fear of being found out. The secret expulsion of the Chagos islanders, says a 1964 Foreign Office memorandum, “should be timed to attract the least attention and should have some logical cover [so as not to] arouse suspicions as to their purpose”.
How is this wonderland perpetuated? The media play their historic role, censoring by omission. Roland Challis, who was the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent when Suharto was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of alleged communists in the 1960s, told me, “It was all triumph for western propaganda. My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew … British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in this terrible holocaust.”
Today, PR propaganda dressed up as scholarship promotes the same rapacious British power while seeking to fix the boundaries of public discussion. A report released last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research describes itself as “the UK’s leading progressive think tank”. Having been emptied of its dictionary meaning, the once noble term “progressive” joins “democracy” and “centre-left” as deception. Lord George Robertson, the New Labour warmonger, Trident devotee and ex-Nato boss, has his moniker at the front, along with Paddy Ashdown, ex-viceroy of the Balkans. Couched in crisis management cliches, the IPPR report is a “call to action” because “weak, corrupt and failing states have become bigger security risks than strong, competitive ones”. With western state terror unmentionable, the “call” is for Nato in Africa and military intervention “if deemed necessary”.
Unsubstantiated references to “terrorist plots on British soil” include barely a nod to the “perception among Muslims” that the current Anglo-American “intervention” in the Middle East and northern Asia is the blindingly obvious cause. In February 2003, almost 80% of Londoners believed that a British attack on Iraq “would make a terrorist attack on London more likely”. This was precisely the warning given to Blair by the Joint Intelligence Committee. The warning is no less urgent while “we” continue to assault other people’s countries and allow false champions to appropriate all our human rights.
‘Several Israeli right wing leaders called for a full invasion into the Gaza Strip especially after eight soldiers were wounded by Palestinian homemade shells. A Likud member of Knesset called for establishing an open air prison in the Negev area in order to imprison Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in it as use them as human shields against Qassam shells.’
British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists, Indian government sources claimed today, as the death toll rose to at least 150.
As many as seven of the terrorists may have British connections and some could be from Leeds and Bradford where London’s July 7 bombers lived, one source said.
Two Britons were among eight gunmen being held, according to Mumbai’s chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. At least nine others are reportedly dead.
The eight arrested were captured by commandos after they stormed two hotels and a Jewish centre to free hostages today.
One security official said: ‘There is growing concern about British involvement in the attacks.’
Israel went back on a pledge to ease its blockade of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, turning away critical deliveries of fuel and food at the borders for the seventh consecutive day.
In reneging on its pledge, Israel blocked delivery of United Nations food aid intended for 750,000 Palestinians.
Gaza was plunged into darkness as the territory’s only power plant shut down at 6:00pm local time due to a lack of fuel. Just before dark, Palestinans went into the streets in a frantic search for candles and bread.
As night fell, sirens sounded accross the Gaza Strip in protest of the closure.
Earlier in the day, 20 European consuls who planned to visit Gaza were turned away at the Erez border crossing. Aid workers were also denied entry to the Strip and medical patients were prevented from entering Israel for treatment.
John Ging, the director of UN operations in Gaza, warned of an impending “humanitarian disaster” if Israel continues to bar food and other supplies from the territory.
“We cannot describe the situation in the Gaza Strip except as a terrible and terrifying one. There are 750,000 refugees who depend on what we offer them in food supplies. Israel is preventing us from distributing these supplies,” he told Ma’an.
Gordon Brown is to lobby European leaders on behalf of Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Obama has repeatedly called on Europe to “share the burden” in the conflict and it is expected to be the central theme of his first visit after his inauguration next year.
Whitehall and diplomatic sources have revealed that Brown is to act as Obama’s agent in Europe, calling on other Nato leaders to find more soldiers and resources for the Afghan conflict.
Mark Thomas shows us in his own inimitable style just how to ‘Play The Game’ and win against the barrage of ‘Big Brother’ draconian laws that have come in to restrict our Civil Liberies.
This is a absolutely hilarious 3 part session but look through the humour and see the structures of how to play their system.
A Two part interview with Webster Tarpley describing who is behind Obama and pulling the strings on the president elect and the plans behind it for the future. A must watch with brilliant insight and analysis.
In October, 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the “Battle of the Bulge,” my training was cut short. My furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the “kissing disease,” I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a “repo depot”(replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned and don’t recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April, 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly, they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from “higher up.” No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was “out of line,” leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners’ food and that these orders came from “higher up.” But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the “offense,” and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, Why?,” he mumbled, “Target practice,” and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn’t tell if any had been hit.
This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies; this amplified our self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.
These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. “Yankee traders” were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.
Once again, the suffering of African people caught up in a war that makes little sense to non-Africans has made the front pages in western media, as more than a million people have been displaced in the past week by re-newed fighting in the Eastern Congo. For most Americans who don’t pay much attention to the details of African history and politics, the humanitarian disaster in the Congo has exploded into public consciousness, as if the 25-year war to control Central Africa began only yesterday.
But, in fact, the human rights disaster that the people of the world are watching on our TV screens is just the most recent human tragedy in a 25 year struggle for economic and political dominance in Central Africa that has been raging since the decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet influence in Africa in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. A sad fact of the 20th Century is that, even after the end of formal “colonialism” in the mid-20th Century, ruling African elites in virtually every African nation have looked to one or more powerful “sponsors” in the developed world to gain or retain power. And, to grab the personal wealth that goes with political/military power in Africa.
Dozens of Afghan civilians are dead and dozens more are wounded after a series of air strikes aimed at Taliban fighters fell short of their target and exploded in the middle of a wedding party in a mountainous region north of Kandahar city, tribal elders and wedding guests told The Globe and Mail on Tuesday.Survivors of the attacks, which occurred in the village of Wech Baghtu in the district of Shah Wali Kowt on Monday evening, said the majority of the dead and injured were women – the bombs struck while male and female wedding guests were segregated, as is customary in Kandahar province.
They said the bodies of at least 36 women have been identified, and hundreds more men and women have been injured. Local leaders have yet to establish a firm casualty count because many of the victims remain buried beneath rubble, said Abdul Hakim Khan, a tribal elder from the district.
In interviews at Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar city, where at least 16 male victims and dozens of female victims were being treated Tuesday night, several villagers described the attack. While Mr. Khan corroborated much of the information witnesses gave during a separate interview, it was not possible to independently verify their account or the numbers of dead and injured they gave.
Witnesses gave conflicting statements about the identity of troops who arrived at the scene after the air attacks, with some saying they saw Canadian soldiers while others said they saw U.S. troops.
It was not immediately clear which international forces were responsible for the air strikes.
Two men arrested for running an Israeli spy ring in the Bekaa Valley are relatives of a suicide hijacker who piloted a plane in the September 11, 2001, attacks, a security source told The Daily Star on Sunday. The Lebanese Army announced on Saturday that it had arrested two people suspected of involvement with a spy network that gathered information for Israel’s intelligence services.
The army said that the men had been arrested on Friday, but the source said that they were actually captured two weeks ago and the discovery of the arrests by the media prompted the army to announce their capture.
The army said the men had admitted “gathering information on political party offices and monitoring the movements of party figures for the enemy.”
The statement added that the men had been found with “communications devices and other sophisticated equipment,” which they used to gather information and transmit it to Mossad agents.
