Reaction to Fort Hood: stupidity beyond belief by Richard Cook
Note: I wrote this article Monday night and feel it was a normal response to a horrendous event. Already, however, anomalies with the official story are coming out. How many shooters were there? How could a lone gunman have such a free hand in attacking a huge facility full of combat veterans? Was Hasan “set-up” to take the blame? We may never know. But something strange is surely going on. Is it a frame-up?
November 10, 2009 - The United States military is engaged in the conquest of the world. This is not a secret. The strategy has been spelled out repeatedly by official Defense Department policy statements (”full-spectrum dominance”), think-tank studies (PNAC), and official government action by the president and Congress (the biggest war budget in human history). It’s what led to the Reagan Doctrine which was the practice of picking off one small nation at a time. It’s what led George H.W. Bush to invade Panama and Iraq and the Clinton administration to destroy Yugoslavia. 9/11, whoever did it, followed by the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, was a convenient springboard for the current phase involving Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Next up: Obama’s impending assault on Iran, whether done with U.S. forces or Israeli proxies. The showdown with Russia and China is clearly on the agenda, subject to intense planning by thousands of uniformed and civilian analysts who earn a lot of taxpayer money. Ft. Hood, Texas, is a place where men and women in uniform get ready to deploy in order to carry out all these plots and schemes. Some of those deployed are killed and never return. Some come back alive, then kill other people or themselves. Who can blame them for serving? They too need to earn enough for themselves and their families to eat. And jobs now are sparse. It’s what’s assuring the military meets its recruitment quotas. Last week a psychiatrist who had been ordered to Afghanistan went berserk and shot up the place. So happens he was a Muslim, a loner, deeply conflicted, subject to abuse from other soldiers who had been taught by our politicians and media that “Allah” is a dirty word. The stupidity beyond belief is that anyone is surprised at this, that it should be viewed by anyone as a brand of “terrorism,” or that hundreds or even thousands of people on the government payroll are now “investigating” or even “asking why.” The hand wringing by the media is particularly odious. Reports indicate that if the shooter is convicted and sentenced to death President Obama himself will sign the death warrant. America, you have brought it on yourself, and there is more to come, much worse, as far as the eye can see. “Live by the sword; die by the sword.” The Master said it long ago.
source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/reaction-to-fort-hood-stupidity-beyond-belief/16007
Tehran steps into US-Israel Iran row with threat of pre-emptive strike
Deputy Chief of Iran’s Armed Forces Gen. Mohammad Hejazi issued a new threat Tuesday, Feb. 21: “Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests… we will act without waiting for their actions.”
debkafile’s military sources report that an Iranian preemptive attack on Israel has been in the air for some weeks. It became realistic because the dragging out of the argument between Washington and Jerusalem over a military strike and the two government’s indecisiveness gave Tehran a golden opportunity to further its interests.
It bestowed on Iran the gift of entering into talks on its nuclear program with the six world powers (P5 plus 1) free of a military threat and therefore in a superior bargaining position. For openers, Tehran has already pocketed the Obama administration’s promise of permission to continue to enrich uranium up to 5 percent in any quantity and will be more than ready to lay down more demands.
Gen. Hejazi’s threat of a preemptive strike against Israel also serves the Islamic regime in its run-up to a general election on March 3. It aims to show the Iranian voter and Middle East public that Iran has successfully turned US and Israeli aggression against Iran against them and demonstrated they are no more than paper tigers incapable of carrying through on their rhetoric. The military initiative therefore stays in Iran’s hands.
In Tehran, the standard Israeli cliché of “We don’t’ advise anyone to test our resolve” has worn thin.
By letting two Iranian warships bearing arms for Assad pass Israel’s coast on its way to Tartus without interference, Israel encouraged Tehran to assume that, in the last reckoning, it will abstain from a unilateral strike to eradicate Iran’s nuclear facilities without Washington’s blessing.
The Netanyahu government’s resolve is expected to melt away under the bulldozer assault of one American emissary after another touching down at Ben-Gurion airport to corner them into backing down.
Once Israel lets its hands be tied, Tehran calculates, it will become progressively harder to break them loose, so that if Tehran does carry out a limited “preemptive” missile attack on the Jewish state, Jerusalem will again bow to Washington and let itself be coerced into not responding.
Thursday, Feb. 23, US National Director of Intelligence James Clapper arrives in Israel to tackle its military and intelligence chiefs on the question, after US National Defense Director Tom Donilon spent three days in fruitless discussions with government leaders Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff tried his hand at persuasion earlier this month. This cycle of pressure will peak with Netanyahu’s White House talks with President Obama on March 5.
The Iranians felt confident enough to safely deny requests from the team of IAEA inspectors who arrived in Tehran Monday for access suspect nuclear locations and meetings with scientists employed in their nuclear program.
Gen. Hejazi’s words were backed up by a four-day air defense exercise, dubbed Sarallah (God’s Revenge), in the south of the country. The Islamic Republic also took another initiative by cutting off oil exports to Britain and France and so turning the tables on the European Union’s oil embargo on Tehran.
How the Arab League Has Become a Tool of Western Imperialism
rickrozoff.wordpress.comHow the Arab League Has Become a Tool of Western Imperialism
Stop NATO-1 (richardrozoff) - 2/10/12 12:04 PM
Global Research
February 9, 2012
How the Arab League Has Become a Tool of Western Imperialism
By Finian Cunningham
NATO-UAE Relations and the Way Forward in the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, October 29-30, 2009
It’s an intrigue befitting the machinations of classical colonialism in past centuries, such as the Sykes-Picot carve-up of the Middle Eastern Levant territories, or the betrayal of the Arabs after World War I, or the theft of Mesopotamia’s oil by British capitalists.
Only this time, it is Arabs who are helping the neocolonial powers to deceive and subjugate other Arabs. Enter the Arab League.
Over the past year, the 22-member organization has emerged as a useful deceptive cover for Western powers as they seek to redraw the political contours of the Arab World, and beyond, for their own strategic interests.
The momentous popular upheavals that began in early 2011 across the Arab World have in many ways been co-opted or manipulated by Western imperialist powers to minimize democratic gains and to refashion the political map to their continuing advantage. A feat of achievement considering that these same powers have for decades supported the repressive regimes that have inflicted so much misery and suffering.
The leitmotif for Western intervention is “responsibility to protect” (R2P) – the notion that these powers are motivated by concern for human rights and the protection of civilian lives. But given that the United States, Britain, France and other NATO states have been conducting criminal wars of aggression over the past decade in mainly Muslim lands, with a death toll exceeding one million and casualties amounting to many more millions, these powers found themselves with a huge credibility problem when it came to contriving a pretext to intervene in the Arab upheavals.
What better than to shroud the Western agenda for intervention in Arab affairs with an appearance of Arab support? The League of Arab States has fulfilled this role. Since its inception in 1945, it has only ever suspended two member states. The first of these was Libya in March 2011; the second is Syria, suspended eight months later in November.
Ostensibly, the Arab League has been motivated to take such measures because it purportedly shares the concern of Washington, London, Paris, for the safety of civilians being violently repressed by their rulers. Without the League’s sanction, the intervention of Western powers would ring decidedly hollow and smack of old-fashioned colonialism. This is in fact what it is, but the addition of Arab voices to the Western sanctimonious chorus lends a crucial veneer of international solidarity.
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Robert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?
independent.co.ukRobert Fisk: Could there be some bad guys among the rebels too?
The Independent - Opinion RSS Feed-1 - 2/10/12 9:21 PM
John McCain backed the good guys in Libya, who are now keenly torturing their opponents to death.
The same John McCain now backs the good guys in Syria – no “boots on the ground”, mind you, for this is war without death for America – and it all seems OK, until I sit opposite a guy over coffee in Beirut who kind of makes the whole story a bit more complicated. We back surrounded minorities, fighting bravely for their rights against overwhelming odds – Homs, for example. We did the same when the Kosovo Liberation Army – not exactly the squeaky-clean outfit that Nato would have us believe until Slobodan Milosevic surrendered – fought against overwhelming Serbian odds in 1998.
Israel 'will make own decision' on Iran, says military chief
ISRAEL will ultimately decide on its own whether to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, its military chief of staff says, as a senior US official arrived for talks on the Islamic Republic.
“Israel is the central guarantor of its own security; this is our role as army, the State of Israel should defend itself,” Lieutenant General Benny Gantz told state-owned Channel One TV.
“We must follow the developments in Iran and its nuclear project, but in a very broad manner, taking into account what the world is doing, what Iran decided, what we will do or not do,” he said.
In recent weeks, there has been feverish speculation that Israel was getting closer to mounting a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program, though Israel has denied reaching such a decision.
Tensions between Iran and Israel have been simmering with Iranian warships entering the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal in a show of “might”, a move Israel said it would closely monitor.
On Wednesday, Iran said it had installed another 3000 centrifuges to increase its uranium enrichment abilities and was stepping up exploration and processing of uranium yellowcake.
And Israel blamed a recent wave of attacks targeting Israeli diplomats on agents of Tehran, allegations that Iran denies.
US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon will begin talks with Israeli officials on a range of issues including Iran, two weeks ahead of a Washington visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for White House talks with US President Barak Obama on the same topic.
A recent article in the Washington Post said that US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta thinks Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear installations in the coming months.
According to Gantz, whose interview was conducted prior to the developments, Iran was not only an “Israeli problem”, but also “a world and regional problem”.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called on the world to tighten sanctions on Iran before the country enters a “zone of immunity” against a physical attack to stop its nuclear program.
Iran has been slapped with four sets of UN sanctions and a raft of unilateral US and European Union measures over its nuclear drive, which Tehran maintains is peaceful.
