[Peace] AWARE on the Air, Friday 16 September (#294)

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=145s0sQw2RY&list=PLF2B283336F85E5A0&index=1

'AWARE ON THE AIR' ON URBANA PUBLIC TV FOR 16 SEPTEMBER 2014

{INTRO} 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.”

I’m Carl Estabrook. It’s the 38th 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. To that end, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq a dozen years ago.

This week, President Obama announced that he is attacking Iraq and Syria. That’s hardly surprising: the president who promised hope and change has become the 4th president in a row to bomb Iraq. Like the others, he says he’s doing it to fight terrorism, in this case the ISIS group, which was funded and supported by principal US allies in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey. Obama says he’s killing more people in the Mideast - in the last day or so, by an air attack SW of Baghdad - because ISIS threatens Americans and what he called American interests. That partly true, because the principal American interest is the control of Mideast energy resources.

Obama’s new killing is called fighting terrorism because terrorism is the name the US gives to the armed resistance - which of course can be vicious and brutal - to the generations-long US invasion of the region. Even the greatest example of terrorism, the crimes of 9/11/2001 were counterattacks; al-Qaida said they were launched for three reasons:

[1] Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians;
[2] the Clinton administration’s sanctions on Iraq, which killed a half million children (and Clinton’s SOS said it was worth it): and
[3] Saudi Arabia’s allowing US troops into the Muslim holy land.   

The Obama administration is now trying to rally the Sunni Alliance (principally Saudi Arabia and Israel) against ISIS - hoping to continue to use it against the Shia Alliance (Iran and Syria, with Russia and China  in the background). But the US has "no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests" - and those interests are the interests of the US 1% in controlling the Eurasian economy by means of controlling Mideast energy resources - the "world's greatest material prize," as the State Department put it in 1945.

"Shortly after the invasion of Iraq [in 2003], Zbigniew Brzezinski, an advisor to Democratic presidents from Carter to Obama, pointed out that America's control over the Middle East 'gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region.' If the United States can maintain its control over Iraq, with the world's second largest known oil reserves, and right at the heart of the world's major energy supplies, that will enhance significantly its strategic power and influence over its major rivals in the tripolar world that has been taking shape for the past 30 years: (1) US-dominated North America, (2) Europe, and (3) Northeast Asia (that is, China and Japan) linked to South and Southeast Asia economies.

"It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today in this age of nuclear weapons is only that the stakes are enormously higher." [Noam Chomsky]

As a writer at counterpunch.org puts it this week, "If the U.S. were not controlled by the 1% wedded to the military-industrial establishment, and if common sense were the operative principle, it would make sense to refrain from any military action, leaving it to the Iraqi and Syrian people to deal with these new oppressors, perhaps with local powers’ support. The record shows that U.S. military actions in the Middle East produce no good but rather lots of harm" - .

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 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.

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. 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 members and friends of AWARE...

[...]

{OUTRO} You've been watching AWARE ON THE AIR, presented by members and friends of the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, a local peace group - in the 38th week of 2014 [September 16].


~ It's what White House aides call “Terror Tuesday," the day each week when President Obama picks out some people to be murdered by drones or US death squads (the "special operations command”). The president's underlings - notably CIA director John Brennan - compile a list of who should be executed, and the president then chooses from "baseball cards" who will die. The assassinations are carried out in  secrecy - the administration doesn't release accounts of the people they kill - but literally thousands of men, women, and children have been killed on Obama's order. Most Americans don't know that the US is running this terrorist program. It’s thoroughly unconstitutional - Obama should be impeached for it...

~ Finally, AWARE honors those who reveal the crimes of the US government - which the rest of the world knows about, but Americans don't - Manning, Assange, Snowden, and others - who are being persecuted by the Obama administration.

~ Now this is Carl Estabrook for members and friends of the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, saying in the words of the late Edward Murrow, “Good night - and good luck."

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