The US government has assassinated at least one British citizen over his pro-ISIS Tweets, and we know they killed Al-Awlaki over his pro-al-Qaeda propaganda. Currently the US Administration is discussing whether to accelerate its use of drones against those who Tweet the wrong things. More on the Liberty Report:
Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
The Financial Times recently reported that Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama has conducted ten times more drone strikes than his predecessor George W. Bush. As far as we can tell, that number is somewhere in the ballpark of 500 strikes and spans a wide array of countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. We can’t know for sure exactly how many drone attacks have taken place, who is conducting them, how many people have been killed by them, or how many other countries have been victim.
It’s important to Obama that the extent of his drone wars remain secret. His peaceful veneer would quickly disintegrate if we had an accurate Obama-death-toll. Drone wars have been kept so secret, in fact, that Obama’s former Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, revealed that he was instructed not to acknowledge or discuss their existence. A handful of investigative journalist groups like The Long War Journal have been left conducting important but difficult guess work about Obama’s drone wars, as if putting together a large puzzle one small piece at a time.
All the while, the American public is left clueless as to the activities being conducted in their name. Obama proclaims that “a decade of war is over,” while behind the scenes he expands the scope of the War on Terror. As a result of our being kept largely ignorant of our government’s actions, we are all the more astounded when the consequences of such wars come to fruition.
After 18 years in prison, the man who exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the world, Mordechai Vanunu, remains restricted under obsolete principles contradicting the UN Charter on Human Rights, prominent whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told Russia Today.
Calling Vanunu a “preeminent prophet of the nuclear era,” Ellsberg stressed that Israel must recognize, for its own good, what Vanunu did was right and come clean about the existence of its nuclear weapons program. The Israeli government should also stop lying to its own people and the world and admit that they were the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East, he added.
Ellsberg, who exposed the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War to the American media in 1971 and was prosecuted and branded a “traitor” by some for his move, also talked about Vanunu’s ordeal from the perspective of a whistleblower.
RT:Ten years since his release, Vanunu is still under constant government pressure, is in constant fear of arrest. Why is that happening, do you think?
Daniel Ellsberg: I think it’s essentially what they want to be a life-time punishment, in effect, for embarrassing them, actually, in a policy that really can’t be defended in the nuclear era. Is it really legitimate for a country to develop nuclear weapons in secret and continue to maintain the secrecy, then, indefinitely from the world, or pretend to keep that secret? I think not. I think Vanunu did exactly the right thing by telling his fellow citizens, and the rest of the world, that Israel had a large nuclear program. And for that, he served 18 years in prison: 10 and a half in a very small cell of isolation – a 6 by 9 foot cell – what Amnesty called “torture,” essentially, for that long period.
Fourteen years later, the horrors of 9/11 continue with deadly ripple effects. American militarism has become the dominant position of U.S. foreign policy, while other options remain banished to the sidelines. Yet from the outset of the “war on terrorism,” some Americans spoke out against a militarized response to the terrible events on Sept. 11, 2001.
Conventional wisdom presents the “war on terrorism” — proclaimed by President George W. Bush and maintained under President Barack Obama — as the only practical response to 9/11. Fighting terrorism has been the main rationale for all U.S. military interventions since then, spinning the Pentagon’s machinery into overdrive despite the absence of clearly identified foes or geographical boundaries.
Even the most prominent warnings against such an approach were marginalized and vilified in the wake of Sept. 11. And those warnings have been buried by the U.S. media as though they never occurred, even though their concerns have proved prescient. The U.S. has spent trillions of dollars on military interventions across the Middle East, and yet the region is more violent and turbulent than ever.
It could be ISIS. Maybe.
US spy chief James Clapper, best known for lying to Congress about NSA surveillance, is now riled up about refugees “descending on Europe,” saying that even though there’s no evidence of it, he’s super, super worried that those refugees might turn out to be ISIS fighters just sneaking in.
Which is a great story for scaring people, but makes zero sense. In addition to not being backed by any evidence, it vilifies the people fleeing from ISIS and the war surrounding its rise.
It also totally ignores what intelligence officials the world over have made obvious is the biggest reason ISIS is a danger to Western countries. ISIS has a huge number of recruits from Western nations already, including a lot from Europe. Those recruits don’t need to “sneak” into Europe as starving refugees, but rather have passports that would give them access to targets in these nations in ways that traditional Middle Eastern Islamist groups simply don’t.
Demonizing the refugees is very convenient for governments around the world, of course, as it lets them off the hook for having to house refugees who their policies often created in the first place. Not copping to the bad things you’ve done, of course, is simply Clapper’s go-to move, but as the Director of National Intelligence he of all people surely knows better than this.
Reuters is releasing huge numbers of articles about Russia’s military today, mostly centering on the idea that Russia’s military advisers in Syria, despite having been there for years, are a new and major issue.
But they also announced an “exclusive” story about Russia planning to build a “major military base” inside Russia, but not far from the Ukrainian border. Despite referring to it as a “secret” base in the article, they confirm that the information was obtained from publicly available Russian military documents.
And the “major” base? Not so much. The base is described as 300 hectare site, which makes it about 700 acres. By comparison, most “major” US military bases are more than 100,000 acres in size, meaning this new base is less than 1% of that.
With the US and other NATO nations setting up sites for more and more deployments along the Russian frontier, it is perhaps unsurprising that Russia should also be building new bases on its western borders. That a publicly available document about a comparatively tiny site should become a “major” and “exclusive” underscores just how eager people are to latch on to anything Russia related.
