Another Bomb in Beirut: Roll Out the Media Boilerplate
You will hear repeated everywhere in the mainstream media all over the world that another “anti-Syrian” Lebanese leader was killed by a massive car bomb in Beiruit on Wednesday. The Guardian is early out of the blocks with this report:
Everything They Say About Promoting Democracy Is, And Always Has Been, A Damnable Lie
“Bandargate,” the exploding scandal involving a billion-dollar arms-deal kickback to presidential crony Prince Bandar — the Saudi poobah dubbed “Bandar Bush” by the president himself for his decades-long intimacy with America’s ruling family — continues to provide telling revelations about the way the world really works.
For instance, buried deep in one of the Guardian’s latest stories on the scandal, we find this illuminating passage:
Brothers in Arms: Bandar Bush Took a Billion in Bribes to Push UK Weapons Deal
So says the Guardian, which has had a sneak peek at the evidence compiled by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in its lengthy investigation of vast corruption in a decades-long arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the Anglo-American arms merchant, BAE, Tony Blair’s favorite war profiteer. The SFO’s probe was preemptorily quashed by Blair’s ever quiescent attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, last December. Now the Guardian has learned that BAE paid a quarterly bribe to Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud– long-time ambassador to
Inhuman Shields: The Relativity of Evil in the Terror War
We are often told how the evil insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan use “human shields” as a cowardly way to avoid attacks on their own forces. This is indeed a heinous, inhuman practice – a war crime, in fact, worthy of the sternest punishment. (Just as dropping thousand-pound bombs into civilian areas and later claiming that all the “collateral damage” was the result of the “enemy using human shields” is an egregious war crime.)
But it seems that it
This Wheel’s on Fire: Iraq Veterans Against the War
I’m not a veteran, but these people are, and they know whereof they speak. They make sense, they’ve got passion, they’ve got guts, they’re out there every day working to end the war crime in Iraq. Here are their goals:
* Reparations for the destruction and corporate pillaging of Iraq so that Iraqi people can control their own lives and future; and<br
Gods and Generals: The Apostle of Imperial War
Not to turn this blog into an outpost of the ever-interesting Hitchens Watch, but Chris Hedges has just offered up a somewhat more substantive critique of Christopher Hitchens than the literary one I wrote a few days ago, and is definitely worth a read. Hedges deals with Hitchens’ new book, God is Not Great – an attempt to claw back some of his “contrarian” cred by knocking some of the favorite nostrums of his new bedfellows on
Gulagian’s Island: The Deadly Farce of Bush’s Gitmo Tribunals
Ladies and gentlemen, we give you George W. Bush: the only man in the world who could screw up a kangaroo court. (Judge dismisses charges against detainee.)
The Bush Regime has invented so many new categories of bogeymen for its gulag that they’ve taken a pratfall on their own bullshit. Their case against the “boy terrorist,” Omar Khadr — who was just 15 years
old when he was captured in Afghanistan — collapsed within minutes today after a military judge
True in the Dark
http://www.chris-floyd.com/images/stories/mp3/command2.mp3
Command
Fire
They said fire
Said there was fire
A shot from the dark
We shot in the dark
At the dark figures
All in a row
<br
Scare Tactics: The Great American Freak-Out
I was going to write about the latest “terror scare” from people who allegedly planned to do something at JFK Airport that was not technically feasible and had not actually gotten around to procuring any supplies or making any concrete plans for the technically unfeasible thing they had allegedly been talking about doing. (This is of course the exact same scenario we saw last year in the UK with the “liquid bomb” plot to blow up airliners — a Terror War extravaganza that is still
Holy Terror: Extremist Clerics Justify Killing Non-Combatants
Yes, they’re at it again, those bearded fanatics with their violent religious extremism, justifying the mass murder of innocent people by citing supposedly holy scripture. Is there no atrocity or abomination that cannot be countenanced by these Muslim — What? Hang on a second.