Chris Hedges speaks about suing the Obama administration for the NDAA, the conspiracy to use Al Qaeda to strip civil liberties and make a police state, the death of Osama Bin Laden, attack on journalists and more in this Buzzsaw interview hosted by Sean Stone.
What is becoming clearer, as stated by various senior military officers as the recent DSEi arms fair, is a commitment to armed drone technology beyond Afghanistan.
It is not supposed to be awarded to good humanitarians whose work has little or nothing to do with peace, such as most other recent recipients. As with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace which works for almost anything but, in violation of its creator’s will, and as with many a “peace and justice” group focused on all sorts of good causes that aren’t the elimination of militarism, the Nobel has become a “peace” prize, rather than a peace prize.
A documentary, directed by Chis Smith, on Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned independent reporter who predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness.
Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who describes himself as an investigative reporter and radical thinker, has authored books on the events of the September 11 attacks and of energy issues. Critics call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist but he’s been proved to be truly prophetic.
Michael Ruppert is an investigative journalist and author of two books, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil and Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World. In the 1970s, Ruppert was a narcotics officer for the LAPD. While there, he discovered evidence that the CIA was complicit in the illegal drug trade. He alerted his superiors with this information and soon found himself dismissed even though he had an honorable record. These events spurred Ruppert to begin a new career for himself as an investigative journalist. He was the publisher/editor of the From The Wilderness newsletter which, until its closure in 2006, examined government corruption and complicity in such areas as the CIA’s involvement in the war on drugs, the Pat Tillman scandal, the 2008 economic collapse and issues surrounding Peak Oil.
The parliamentary rebellion against Cameron and Obama came as a big surprise to just about everyone in mainstream UK politics, mainly because it was not organized by any of the main political parties. It came, rather, from the grassroots of society – ordinary people who lobbied their MPs before Thursday’s vote, and from the legacy of protests against the Iraq war.
This week the British parliament voted against the London government’s arrogance to provide its usual criminal special relationship to the Americans. In the execution of past war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – to mention a few – Washington could rely on the trusty British imperialists to give a veneer of “coalition of the willing”. British premier David Cameron’s plans to repeat the criminality by backing Washington’s plans to bomb Syria were dealt a crushing blow by the British parliament voting against any such military action. Cameron was forced to withdraw. The vote in the British parliament is not so much a sign of ethics among Britain’s political class. It is more a reflection of the global awakening among ordinary citizens that this insane state terrorism must stop.
There is absolutely no evidence or confirmation that the Assad government carried out the alleged chemical attack.
United Nations weapons inspectors are in Syria at the direct REQUEST of the Syrian government to prove that they have not used chemical weapons. The attack took place a mere ten miles away from the inspection team, on the very day they arrived.
Carla Del Ponte, a United Nations Human Rights investigator, has stated that the Syrian government has not used chemical weapons but the rebels have.
Britain, France and the US are committing to another disastrous military intervention. Apart from the inevitable casualties, any attack on Syria can only inflame an already disastrous civil war and would risk pulling in regional powers further.
Most people in this country have learnt from the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. According to a Telegraph/YouGuv poll on Sunday only 9% of the British public would support troops being sent to Syria, and only 16% support sending more arms to the region. Our politicians however have learnt nothing.
If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated.
International law, embodied in treaties signed between the nations of the world in good faith, must be regarded neither as an inconvenience nor something to be twisted using weasel reasoning. Any legal ‘ambiguity’, seized upon by the US and NATO for their own strategic goals, is an enormous threat to world security. This faux-perceived ambiguity must be urgently addressed, and any nation which regards itself as moral must stand up to this campaign of mass murder disguised as warfare. There can only be one answer to the murder of children.
Public accountability is essential to democracy. We can’t have meaningful “consent of the governed” without informed consent. We can’t have moral responsibility without challenging official hypocrisies and atrocities.
