[Peace] AWARE on the Air, Fri. 2 Sept. (#294)

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace]

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ2VCMcOSr8>


Good evening and welcome to AWARE ON THE AIR. Our program is presented by members and friends of AWARE, a local peace group. 

The name is an acronym for “Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort.”

It’s the 36th week of 2014. AWARE was established after the attacks of 9/11/2001 by citizens of Champaign-Urbana. They realized that the US government would use those crimes to justify its already long-standing attempts to exercise military control over the Middle East. Mideast gas and oil are needed by America’s economic competitors in Europe and Asia, and control of them gives the US an advantage over China, Germany and other countries. T o that end, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since WWII, the US government has sought to dominate the world economy for the benefit of the American rich, the one-percent. It’s not in the interests of the vast majority of Americans to kill people around the world for the profits of the one-percent, but that’s what the American government has done, up to and including President Obama’s administration.

In 1962 President Kennedy attacked South Vietnam to prevent the emergence in an Asian peasant society of a modernizing economy that was not subservient to American economic control. The US killed 4 million people in SE Asia to insure that result. In 1999 President Clinton attacked the former Yugoslavia for the same reason. Today President Obama is arranging for people to be killed in Ukraine to insure that the Eurasian economy does not pass out of US control. The Russian scholar Stephen F. Cohen writes, “The seemingly unthinkable is becoming imaginable: an actual war between NATO, led by the United States, and post-Soviet Russia." President Obama this week is at the NATO meeting in Wales to threaten exactly that, to maintaihn the one-percent’s control of the world economy.

In 1967 the civil rights leader Marin Luther King admitted with dismay that “...the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.” Tragically, nothing has changed in the intervening years. American presidents have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings in the last 50 years, mostly civilians - not to spread peace and democracy, as they claimed, but to ensure US economic control - as the rest of the world recognizes. They have made the US government the most feared and hated in the world.

After the 9/11 attacks, the US government attempted to cloak its military and economic control by declaring it was fighting a “war on terror.” But by terrorism the US meant armed opposition to the US military in the Mideast. The crimes of 9/11 were in fact a counter-attack. The perpetrators said that there were three principal reasons for them: (1) the oppression of the Palestinians by US client Israel; (2) the murder of a half million children by sanctions on Iraq (US Secretary of State Albright: “we think the price is worth it”); and (3) the stationing of US troops near the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

Noam Chomsky wrote in one of the first (and most read) books on the 9/11 attacks, “Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it ... In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason.” The US has 1,000 military bases outside its borders: Russia and China have none. The US “Special Operations Command” - a 63,000 member private army that reports to the US president’s National Security Council, not to Congress - is active by its own admission in 124 countries around the world. Its activities include “rendition” (kidnapping), “enhanced interrogation” (torture), and “disposition” (murder - read about the CIA’s “disposition matrix.”)

Last year President Obama told White House aides, “Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine." In his “Terror Tuesday” sessions, as the administration explained to the New York Times, Obama has selected - from “baseball cards” presented to him by CIA director John Brennan - thousands of people to be killed. Obama’s drone strikes alone have resulted in 5,000 deaths - including 200 child corpses.

He still continues to order drone strikes - including strikes in Africa this week. In recent weeks Obama, working for the American one-percent, has backed Israel and Ukraine as those governments kill thousands of civilians - and their children - in Donbas and Gaza.

You’re watching AWARE ON THE AIR. AWARE wants to stop the child-killers in the White House and the Congress in their efforts around the world on behalf of the American one-percent. We try to do that by exposing the real story of what’s going on - over against the false account that the US media, a creation of big business, want you to believe. We’ll challenge that false account tonight with commentaries by Ron Szoke, Karen Aram, Ya’aQov Ziso, and Karen Evans-Levy.

And we’ll begin with Ron Szoke on “Wayward Warriors”...

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