15 May 2009
Obama 'to revive military trials'
Hail, Obama - the US Military Industrial Complex & the Wall Street's Puppet-President! O-ba-ma - Yes-You-Can... be the Project for the New American Century's saviour! Looks like we're in for another eight long years of corporate prosperity and gung-ho "justice"...
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I'm as disappointed (and upset) as anybody else. Dar, pe de alta parte, n-am nici o indoiala ca in toata afacerea asta un rol cheie il joaca mana lunga (si grea) a Pentagonului&Co ( a se citi ' a Complexului . . . '). Culisele politicii sunt intotdeauna mult mai complicate si mai dure decat se vede (ori crede) cu ochiul liber si lasa prea putin loc de joc pentru delimitari transante alb-negru. Cine nu stie asta presupun ca nu are ce cauta in politica. Reactia de opoizitie a sistemului 'caracatizat' este cu atat mai vehementa cu cat se vade in pericol real. Din nefericire ori poate nu, depinde de perspectiva din care ne raportam, in politica nu te poti misca pe principiul 'totul sau nimic' ( ca in activismul politic) caci intervin atatea variabile ori 'virgule existentiale' . . . ; )) spre exasperarea noastra, a celorlalti. Hence, before a two year term, I am not willingly going to give up hope on this president. I have no doubt that there will very well be other faux pas along the way. We'll see.
Si mai pun si eu paie pe foc cu articolul de mai jos scris de un baiat foarte destept si furios pe Obama, un adevarat investigative reporter. A publicat anul trecut o carte -- Blackwater: The Rise of the World 's Most Powerful Mercenary Army -- despre 'mecenarizarea' razboiului care ar merita toata atentia.
Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
The 'Black Shirts' of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and 'dousing' them with chemicals.
by Jeremy Scahill
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/15-9
In extensia subiectului despre puterea si ramificatiile complexului industrial-militar de mai sus, iata cateva extrase din articolul de azi al lui Chalmers Johnson de la rubrica sa, 'Book Review' :
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090514_chalmers_johnson_on_the_cost_of_empire/
Chalmers Johnson on the Cost of Empire
Book Review
By Chalmers Johnson
In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage—no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity—about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally innocent of the huge costs involved, the crimes committed by our soldiers against women and children in the occupied territories, the environmental pollution, and the deep and abiding suspicions generated among people forced to live close to thousands of heavily armed, culturally myopic and dangerously indoctrinated American soldiers. This book is an antidote to such parochialism.
************************* One other subject that Lutz touches on in her introduction and that cries out for a book-length study is the political machinations that every American embassy and military base on earth engages in to undermine and change local laws that stand in the way of U.S. military plans. For years the United States has interfered in the domestic affairs of nations to bring about “regime change,” rig elections, free American servicemen who have been charged with extremely serious felonies against local civilians, indoctrinate the local officer corps in American militarist values (as at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga.), and preserve and protect the so-called Status of Forces Agreements that the United States imposes on all nations with U.S. bases. These SOFAs give our troops extraterritorial privileges such as freedom from local laws and from passport and travel regulations, and they absolve the U.S. from a country’s anti-pollution requirements, noise restrictions and environmental laws. ******************************
Today the “abuses and usurpations” of American standing armies “include more than rape, murder, sexual harassment, robbery, other common crimes, seizure of people’s lands, destruction of property, and the cultural imperialism that have accompanied foreign armies since time immemorial. They now include terrorizing jet blasts of frequent low-altitude and night-landing exercises, helicopters and warplanes crashing into homes and schools and the poisoning of environments and communities with military toxins; and they transform ‘host’ communities into targets for genocidal nuclear as well as ‘conventional’ attacks.” When it comes to opportunism, Gerson notes that the Navy’s Indian Ocean tsunami relief operations of 2005 helped open the way for U.S. forces to return to Thailand and for greater cooperation with the Indonesian military. ********************************
They reveal that there are today still an estimated 350 to 480 free-fall B-61-type tactical nuclear weapons in the territories of the NATO allies, compared with a maximum of 7,300 land, air, and sea-based nuclear weapons based in Europe in 1971. The bombs are housed at eight air bases in six NATO countries, all of which enjoy Bechtel-installed Weapons Storage and Security Systems, type WS-3. These devices are vaults installed in the floors within a “protective aircraft shelter” and allow for the arming of bombs and aircraft inside hangars, offering high degrees of secrecy and (supposedly) security. Heller and Lammerant note that the weapons based in Europe are “secret, deadly, illegal, costly, militarily useless, politically motivated, and deeply, deeply unpopular.” Before they were all withdrawn, ground-launched nuclear missiles were based at Greenham Common and Molesworth in Britain, Comiso in Italy, Florennes in Belgium, and Wuescheim in the former West Germany. Pershing II missiles were based at Schwaebisch-Gmuend, Neu Ulm, and Waldheide-Neckarsulm in West Germany.
Asta este 'off topic', dar n-am rezistat sa o aduc aici
fiinca aduce o nota de optimism si umor 'against all odds of these bleak days':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMSrpZi_6WM
Completez ideea din postarea #1 cu acest extras dintr-un articol publicat azi, 5/16/09:
May 16, 2009 by The Progressive
Changing Obama's Mindset
by Howard Zinn
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he's a politician. He's other things, too-he's a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he's a politician.
If you're a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you-the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don't have to do, if you make it clear to them they don't have to do it.
*************************************************************************************
Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it's not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.
*****************************************************
That's been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/16-0
K* : )
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