[Peace] AWARE on the Air, Friday 23 September

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV54h96aki8

'AWARE ON THE AIR' ON URBANA PUBLIC TV, 9/23/14 [#296]

...featuring this week a criminal lie from the Obama administration - as follows - because the only recent invasion of Ukraine was the U.S. subversion of an elected government:

'“The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top nuclear adviser in his first term and now a scholar at Harvard. “That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”'

--“U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms [NYT]  [This expansion of nuclear weapons] comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and [said he] made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy..."

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{INTRO}...AWARE was established 13 years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, by citizens of Champaign-Urbana who 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. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were as much about imperial control as Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

Last night, in direct continuation of that murderous policy, which he said he would end, President Obama attacked yet another country. “He's attacked the opponents of the Syrian regime he said needed to be attacked a year ago,” {D. Swanson} but then he was prevented from bombing Syria by public opinion and Russian diplomacy. Now--
 
“President Obama’s decision to bomb Syria stands in stark violation of international law, the UN Charter, and the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.” {P. Bennis}

Even if he could get a craven and unrepresentative Congress (now in recess) to agree, as they agreed to support Israel’s massacre this summer, his actions are still criminal under the UN Charter, which forbids the threat or use of force in international affairs, when not approved by the UN Security Council. Hypocritically enough, Obama went to the Security Council today, but for PR, not to request the legal authority that he knows he doesn’t have and can’t get.

If the UN were an effective organization, he would be arrested and tried, like President Milosevic of Serbia was.

“The US has begun bombing Islamic militants in Syria using a “mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles”, the Pentagon announced on Monday night ... the Pentagon spokesman said in a statement that the US and “partner nation forces” [Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar] were undertaking military action against members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Isis ... The U.S. military plans to strike up to 20 targets [with what they call] manned and unmanned air assets, including F-22s, B-1 bombers, F-16s, F-15s and F/A-18s. The aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush is at the ready in the Persian Gulf, and the USS Arleigh Burke, a guided missile destroyer that fires Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, is in the Red Sea.”

“The White House’ stated goal is to destroy the headquarters of the violent and extremist ISIS militia. But you can’t bomb extremism out of existence. The U.S. bombs do not fall on ‘extremism,’ they are falling on Raqqah, a 2,000 year-old Syrian city with a population of more than a quarter of a million people – men, women and children who had no say in the take-over of their city by ISIS. The Pentagon is bombing targets like the post office and the governor’s compound, and the likelihood of large number of civilian casualties as well as devastation of the ancient city, is almost certain.

“...Bombing Syria, without Congressional authorization, without United Nations approval, in direct opposition to the stated position of Syria’s government, will only make that crisis worse. It will give ISIS and its allies a new basis for recruitment, it will strengthen the repressive Syrian government, it will undermine Syria’s struggling non-violent opposition movement, and it will further tighten the links between ISIS supporters in Syria and in Iraq.” {P. Bennis}

The president also announced that he’s attacking Iraq, where the US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in this decade.  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 originally 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  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. {But that’s in the interest only of 1% of Americans, the rich who profit from US control of the world economy.}  

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}.

"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 [for the people of the region] but rather lots of harm” <http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/15/isis-and-washingtons-ignorance-about-the-sunni-shia-divide/>.

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.

One of the first (and most read) books about the 9/11 attacks pointed out accurately,  “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.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the Obama administration wants war in the Mideast - not just for the profits of the arms makers, although that’s an important consideration for the USG, but because otherwise there’s no propaganda justification for US military control of the region. And in the last 24 hours, Obama has widened the killing - “...joined in this action [as he said] by our friends and partners — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar.” They, in alliance with Israel, are Obama’s dogsbodies in his present round of murder in the Mideast.

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 & friends of AWARE...

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