News and Views
It looks like the neocons may not succeed with their plot to blow up the Trump/Kim meeting next month. With Trump canceling the meeting at the end of last week, the North and South Korean leaders held an impromptu meeting on the border to look for a path ahead toward peace. President Trump has taken notice and plans are again underway for the historic meeting. Are neocons sidelined for now? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
How best to show respect for the U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and for their families on Memorial Day? Simple: Avoid euphemisms like “the fallen” and expose the lies about what a great idea it was to start those wars in the first place and then to “surge” tens of thousands of more troops into those fools’ errands.
First, let’s be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 US troops killed in Iraq so far and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan [by May 2015] did not “fall.” They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream “journalists” almost none of whom gave a rat’s patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.
And, as for the “successful surges,” they were just P.R. devices to buy some “decent intervals” for the architects of these wars and their boosters to get space between themselves and the disastrous endings while pretending that those defeats were really “victories squandered” all at the “acceptable” price of about 1,000 dead US soldiers each and many times that in dead Iraqis and Afghans.
Continue reading “Ray McGovern on How To Honor Memorial Day”
Luis Posada Carriles, CIA asset and wanted terrorist, died last week free in Miami at age 90. This article is from 2011. Stephen Kinzer remembers:
It was a simple whim that saved my life: I had finished reporting in Barbados quicker than anticipated and so I changed my flight to Havana, getting on an earlier plane. Two days later, a terrorist blew up the Cuba-bound flight I had been booked on.
All 73 people aboard perished. I would have been the 74th.
On Monday, the man believed to have masterminded this horrific attack in 1976, Luis Posada Carriles, will go on trial in El Paso, Texas. But perhaps because he spent most of his adult life working for the Central Intelligence Agency, he is not being tried for that crime.
Thanks no doubt to his bellicose national security adviser John Bolton, President Donald Trump has now lost control of the movement toward peace between the two Koreas. Trump has put himself in a corner; he must now either reject – or, better, fire – Bolton, or face the prospect of wide war in the Far East, including the Chinese, with whom a mutual defense treaty with North Korea is still on the books.
The visuals of the surprise meeting late yesterday (local time) between the top leaders of South Korea and North Korea pretty much tell the story. South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in drove into the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and Seoul quickly released a one-minute video of what, by all appearances, was an extremely warm encounter with Kim Jung-un. It amounted to a smiling, thumbing of two noses at Bolton and the rest of the “crazies” who follow his advice, such as Vice President Mike Pence who echoed Bolton’s insane evocation of the “Libya model” for North Korea, which caused Pyongyang to go ballistic. Their angry response was the reason Trump cited for canceling the June 12 summit with Kim.
But Trump almost immediately afterward began to waffle. At their meeting on Friday the two Korean leaders made it clear their main purpose was to make “the successful holding of the North Korea-U.S. Summit” happen. Moon is expected to announce the outcome of his talks with Kim Sunday morning (Korean time).
Originally appeared on The American Conservative.
Marc Thiessen has more awful advice for Trump on North Korea:
Trump should make clear to both North Korea and China, absent an agreement, that sanctions will get tighter and military action is possible. And that means the “Libya model” is indeed on the table.
Thiessen’s “analysis” of why North Korea reacted so angrily to the “Libyan model” rhetoric is wrong as usual, but the more important thing that he misses is that North Korea today and Libya c. 2003-04 don’t have much in common except for their pariah status. North Korea’s government took offense from the Libya comparison above all because they found it demeaning to be likened to a government with a much less developed nuclear program. Inasmuch as North Korea’s government desires to be acknowledged as a nuclear-weapons state on par with the others, talking about them in the same breath with Libya was an insult as well as a threat.
Luis Posada Carriles, the most notorious and wanted terrorist in the Western Hemisphere – but one few Americans have ever heard of – has died a free man in Miami at age 90.
The Miami Herald reports Posada Carriles died peacefully in his sleep in a Hollywood, Florida hospital early on May 23 following a lengthy battle with throat cancer.
At the time of his death, Posada Carriles, a staunchly militant anti-Castro Cuban exile and former longtime CIA agent, was wanted by authorities in Cuba and Venezuela for his leading role in masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner over the Caribbean, an attack that killed 73 innocent people. He is also wanted for orchestrating a string of terror attacks on Cuban hotels and for repeatedly plotting to assassinate the late Cuban president Fidel Castro.
