The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.
The overarching framework, Chomsky points out, is the so-called Clinton Doctrine, named after former US president Bill Clinton. The doctrine asserts that United States is entitled to the ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources’. This entitlement is dressed up as alleged ‘security’ or ‘humanitarian’ concerns.
If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue.
Westerners don’t want to face the truth of what their governments are doing – particularly NATO governments, and the US government most of all. The millions who died in Iraq were victims of a genocide that was intended to kill Iraqis in such numbers. The victims were not incidental to some other project. The same was true in Korea and Viet Nam, but it is also true in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, in Somalia, in the DR Congo, and in many other places.
The US funded, armed and fueled the very crisis its partisan media are now calling for it to swoop and in save. The moral ADD required by those pushingfurther US involvement in the Syrian civil war in the face of this fact is severe.
A cursory yet objective glance at Western powers’ domestic and foreign policies over the course of the last 100 years shows a repeated penchant for exploitation, abuse, insatiable greed and mass murder, all under the guise of ‘fiscal responsibility’, ‘peace keeping’, ‘foreign investment’, ‘fighting terrorism’ or some other paramoralistic hokum.
Successive British governments have spent billions on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, plus on covert intervention in Syria. The outcome has been destruction of infrastructure across the Middle East, the growth of terrorism in the region, and the displacement of millions.
In spite of the erased and ruined lives in millions, the ruins of Iraq, of much of Baghdad “the Paris of the 9thcentury”, of many of historical gems that have survived assaults over millennia but not Bush and Blair, it seems likely Chilcot’s Inquiry, if it eventually appears, will prove another dead end.
A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).
The Labour leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn will be remembered for several notable reasons, not least the descent of the UK’s corporate media into unremitting farce, with the Guardian in its role as vanguard of the ‘liberal left’ decisively leading the pack.
In 2006, one year after 7/7, a report prepared for the Ministry of Defence’s internal think-tank, the Defence Academy, concluded — contrary to your dishonest or wilfully ignorant announcements — that the Iraq War had acted as a “recruit sergeant” for al-Qaeda.
The White House’s story of how US special forces hunted down and assassinated arch terrorist Osama bin Laden in his secret lair in Pakistan is unraveling.
