Remember the thumping of Obama’s war drums for a US attack on Syria last August and September, including his spokesmen’s absurd invocations of Kosovo as a precedent for a limited cruise missile strike on Syria? The trigger for hyping that war fever was a sarin gas attack in Eastern Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, on August 21. Obama was quick to blame Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for crossing Obama’s bizarre Netanyahu-esque “red line.”
Global Research News Hour Episode 46. Conversations with Yoichi Shimatsu and Hatrick Penry
We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says,
Click on Image to Enlarge
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
-Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project which created the first atomic devices. [1]
The Warsaw conference demonstrated that the “climate summit” model is broken and, more importantly, that capitalism itself is driving us to the brink. Protests are not the solution — it's time to fight the system using its own weapons.
Corporate Copyright Ubber Alles
The municipal utility company in the city of Potsdam is currently wooing new customers with a special “BabyBonus” offer. The slogan reads, “We value little energy robbers! Welcome to the world!” Every newborn receives a credit of 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, allowing him or her to revel from the start in a world where everything, especially energy, will always be available in abundance. These babies may later find they're in for a surprise.
President Obama has announced that due to the interminable whining, nagging, and complaining from Israeli PM Netanyahu and US Congress clown Michele Bachmann, he has decided to go ahead and bomb Iran with them – despite the P5+1 nuclear agreement.
“Michele Bachmann – I hesitate to use the word ‘Congresswoman’ out of respect for that once-great legislative body – insists that Iran absolutely must be bombed, agreement or no agreement,” Obama said Friday. “Her commander-in-chief, the Israeli Prime Minister, agrees. So just to shut them up, I have decided to launch a really ugly-looking bat-winged Northrop-Grumman B-2 to drop a truly vicious load on the Iranian nuclear facilities at Arak. And I have decided to honor dear Michele and my good friend Bibi by making them an integral part of the mission.”
Click on Image to Enlarge
Obama has ordered the Strategic Air Command to prepare a place for Netanyahu and Bachmann in the B-2′s bomb bay atop a moth-eaten mattress beside an ice bucket of cheap champagne. The pair will ride in comfort from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri until the aircraft is approaching the Iranian nuclear facility at Arak. As “preparation to launch” orders are issued, the bomb bay doors will open and Netanyahu and Bachmann will be dangled by their heels, stark naked, outside the aircraft. At “launch,” the pair will be released to plummet head first toward strategic targets at the Iranian nuclear site.
Click on Image to Enlarge
“Nobody since Slim Whitman – I mean, Slim Pickens – has had the privilege of serving as a human bomb on such an important mission,” Obama said. “Bibi and Michele will go down in history beside Bonnie and Clyde, Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, and other heroic, romantic couples who have sacrificed themselves for their homicidal beliefs. I wish them the best of luck in the afterlife – they’re going to need it.”
After Obama’s surprise announcement, the P5+1 negotiators met in an emergency session to approve Obama’s plan and nominate other Zionists to be dropped out of planes above Iranian nuclear sites.
Iran-US: This week the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman denounced the US “fact sheet” on the Iran agreement as a misrepresentation. Today, 27 November, Foreign Minister Zarif clarified the situation, obliquely.
Zarf said the capacity at the Arak plutonium nuclear reactor construction site is not going to increase. “It means no new nuclear fuel will be produced and no new installations will be installed, but construction will continue there,” Zarif told Iran's parliament in translated comments broadcast on Iran's Press TV.
Zarif also said that uranium enrichment at the Natanz and Fordow facilities will continue at levels around 3.5-5 percent purity, but the facilities' capacities will not be expanded.
When asked about this, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said: “In the interim accord, the Arak reactor is specifically targeted and the end of all work at this reactor. In the agreement and the text, which has been approved by the Iranian authorities, the Arak reactor is clearly targeted.”
Comment: Basic contract law in US jurisprudence stipulates no agreement exists when there is no meeting of the minds of the contracting parties, regardless of the words of the agreement. The absence of a meeting of the minds, i.e., the existence of different interpretations of terms, is prima facie evidence that no agreement exists.
That is what appears to have taken place in Geneva – two sides used the same words in English, but meant different things. In short, there was no agreement at Geneva.
The strongest evidence of sharp legal practice is the US “fact sheet.” In almost no significant substantive respect, the fact sheet fails to correspond to the actual four-page agreement, which NightWatch used in its analysis. Whoever wrote that fact sheet should be fired because it makes assertions about Iranian undertakings that are factual misrepresentations.
For example, Iran did not agree to freeze construction at Arak. Iran agreed not to expand Arak beyond existing plans and the US agreed to that, according to the Iranians. The US fact sheet, however, says Iran agreed to freeze construction at Arak, the plutonium producing reactor. This is a pivotal issue about which there is no agreement.
Today, the US said that construction at Arak does not violate the agreement. The US statement indicates the Iranian interpretation is the accurate interpretation, not the fact sheet. It also means the Iranians gave up nothing at Arak because that nuclear site will be under construction far beyond the six month time term of the agreement.
Iran agreed to not expand its capacity to enrich, meaning it agreed to not add more centrifuges. It did not agree to not use its existing centrifuges, as the US fact sheet contends. It agreed to not expand its nuclear program, but did not agree to not continue is development under existing capacity limits. The US fact sheet indicates it agreed to halt nuclear development.
The actual agreement requires no “roll back” of the Iranian nuclear program, though the US fact sheet indicates it does.
These inconsistencies are the signs of a rushed job. If the White House fact sheet represents the US understanding of the terms of the agreement, there is no agreement because the Iranians have an entirely different understanding. They got everything they wanted and sanctions relief. That explains the Iranian declarations of a diplomatic victory and the celebrations in Tehran.
Please be aware that “the Israel Lobby” is not equivalent to “American Jews.” As MJ Rosenberg notes, most American Jews are far more progressive than the organizations that officially speak for them (because most American Jews are not affiliated with those organizations). The Israel Lobby gets much of its strength from a minority of American Jews who back their positions with lots of money, and by the Christian Zionists.
The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations In Favor Of War
MJ Rosenberg
The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control.
The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal. Iran would give up any plans it might have to develop nuclear weapons (verified by international inspections) in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions that are doing significant damage to the Iranian economy.
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40th anniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other nations might get ideas about independence, were the very reason for the coup and even the partial moves toward nationalization instituted by Allende could not be tolerated by the US business class.
Henry Kissinger was national security advisor and one of the principle architects – perhaps the principle architect – of the coup in Chile. US-instigated coups were nothing new in 1973, certainly not in Latin America, and Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon were carrying on a violent tradition that spanned the breadth of the 20th century and continues in the 21st – see, for example, Venezuela in 2002 (failed) and Honduras in 2009 (successful).
Where possible, such as in Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964, coups were the preferred method for dealing with popular insurgencies. In other instances, direct invasion by US forces such as happened on numerous occasions in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and many other places, was the fallback option.
The coup in Santiago occurred as US aggression in Indochina was finally winding down after more than a decade. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger again, along with Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Click on Image to Enlarge
It is impossible to know with precision how many were killed during those four years; all the victims were considered enemies, including the vast majority who were non-combatants, and the US has never been much interested in calculating the deaths of enemies.
Estimates of Indochinese killed by the US for the war as a whole start at four million and are likely more, perhaps far more. It can thus be reasonably extrapolated that probably more than a million, and certainly hundreds of thousands, were killed while Kissinger and Nixon were in power.
In addition, countless thousands of Indochinese have died in the years since from the affects of the massive doses of Agent Orange and other Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction unleashed by the US. Many of us here know (or, sadly, knew) soldiers who suffered from exposure to such chemicals; multiply their numbers by 1,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 – again, it’s impossible to know with accuracy – and we can begin to understand the impact on those who live in and on the land that was so thoroughly poisoned as a matter of US policy.
Studies by a variety of organizations including the United Nations also indicate that at least 25,000 people have died in Indochina since war’s end from unexploded US bombs that pocket the countryside, with an equivalent number maimed. As with Agent Orange, deaths and ruined lives from such explosions continue to this day. So 40 years on, the war quite literally goes on for the people of Indochina, and it is likely it will go on for decades more.
Near the end of his time in office, Kissinger and his new boss Gerald Ford pre-approved the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, an illegal act of aggression again carried out with weapons made in and furnished by the US.
