Edd Vulliami: "War, as I came to report it, was something fought between people with causes, however crazy or honourable: like between the American and British occupiers of Iraq and the insurgents who opposed them. Then I stumbled across Mexico's drug war –..."
Commentary on this article and about the subject in general is at Chis Floyd's Empire Burlesque.
One of the questions frequently asked about the NSA scandal was why Bush and Cheney decided to eavesdrop in violation of the law rather than having Congress approve their program; in the wake of 9/11, both parties in Congress were as subservient as could be, and would have offered zero resistance to requests by the administration for increased eavesdropping powers (the same question was asked of Bush's refusal to seek Congressional approval for the detention and military commissions regime at Guantanamo). The answer to that question ultimately became clear: they did not want to se
French Finance Minster Christine Lagarde has emerged as the front-runner in the race to replace ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. She is a champion swimmer, an accomplished attorney, and a competent bureaucrat. She's also a friend of Wall Street who will ferociously defend the interests of big capital.
Meanwhile, in the war zone they built a quarter-million-dollar stage set for nonstop war briefings. At home, they gave a boost to a form of militarized “journalism” already up and running during Gulf War I in which retired high military officers, like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football, became regular TV news consultants. This time around, they fielded a squadron of retired top brass, carefully coached by the Pentagon
Already the story is starting to unravel, mutate, transmogrify. Government statements that were presented as gospel truths in every media outlet in the world, and which served as the basis for ten thousand earnest, serious commentaries, turn out, one day later, to have been false.
Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:
I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.
So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain.
Ever since the rebel opposition forces in Libya have taken control of the cities, there have been reports that have surfaced regarding torture, racial violence and repression. Coming across some recent articles regarding Benghazi, the last rebel stronghold in Libya, I can’t say that I’m amazed at the police state that they have designed and who is in power in Benghazi. It was no doubt a complete error on the part of so-called “progressives” to take the side of these rebel forces (never mind those who hailed them as “revolutionaries”).
An Indiana deputy prosecutor and Republican activist resigned Thursday after the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism uncovered an email to Gov. Scott Walker in which he suggested a fake attack on the governor to discredit union protesters.
“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions,” the email said.
"The war in Libya did not begin on March 19. That should not be forgotten because after 112 cruise missiles slammed into Libya’s air defense sites that day and the phrase “shock and awe” started getting tossed around once again, the implication for many observers was that Western intervention in Libya marked the beginning of another American-made war in the Arab world. It didn’t."
