United Nations

A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

dlindorff — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:34:51 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Before the odor of burned gunpowder has left the air of the Taj
Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, the US is lecturing India not to go off
half-cocked and attack Pakistan, simply because all of the attackers in
the terrorist assaults in that city arrived by boat, apparently from
neighboring Pakistan. US officials, including Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, are calling on India to engage in a “transparent” and
“thorough” investigation into the attacks to establish who was
responsible.

How different this is from the American government’s response to the 9-11 attacks in the US!

`Instead of a “transparent” investigation, we got secret sessions
of the Congressional intelligence committees, closed-door interviews of
key officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney by
the 9-11 Commission, and of course the secret round of thousands of
mostly Islamic people living in the US, many of whom were held of
months incommunicado and without charge, some of whom were subjected to
torture, and many other of whom were deported to likely arrest, torture
and even death.

Instead of a calm assessment of what had happened and who was
responsible, the Bush Administration rounded up Saudi members of the
Bin Laden family, and others connected to the regime in Saudi Arabia,
whence came most of the people reportedly involved in the hijacking of
the four planes used in the attacks, and, with no attempt at
interrogation, flew them home to Saudi Arabia. Then, again with only
minimal evidence, the US launched an all-out war within days upon
Afghanistan, with the goal of ousting and destroying the Taliban
government of that country. Shortly after that aggressive move, the
Bush/Cheney administration shifted its focus and launched an even
larger all-out war against Iraq, a nation that had no connection
whatsoever with the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

So much for transparency and measured responses.

Here again, we have an example of the US expecting one mode of behavior for the rest of the world, and another for itself.

We Americans, it would appear, are not required to operate in a
logical manner, are not required to think through the consequences of
our actions, are not required to obey international laws, and are not
required to listen to the counsel of others. If the United Nations will
not support our plan to attack and topple the government of another
sovereign nation, we will just do it ourselves. But other countries may
not behave in this manner.

There is another way that India and the US are different which has
come to light in this latest atrocity. Following the Mumbai attacks,
India’s minister of security resigned, in an admission that his
department had failed to discover an attack that was clearly at least
six months in planning, and had failed to prevent the massive loss of
life because of inadequate preparation of police and troops for such an
eventuality (police and soldiers were not equipped even with sniper
rifles and scopes that might have enabled them to shoot and kill some
of the 10 terrorists with minimal threat to their hostages).

Nobody resigned for the manifold failings that led up to and allowed
for the 9-11 attacks. Nobody resigned for intelligence failures, nobody
resigned for air defense failures, nobody resigned for investigative
failures, nobody resigned for the lies that were the basis for the
attack on Afghanistan and the war against Iraq. There has indeed been
zero accountability in the US for the biggest national security
disaster since Pearl Harbor. But in India, it took only days for the
chief person responsible for security in the Indian government to
resign his post in disgrace.

Let us hope that saner heads prevail in India when it comes to Pakistan, as the story of this latest terror action is exposed.

And let us hope that Americans finally demand an honest accounting
of what happened on 9/11/2001 and that those who are guilty of allowing
it to happen, and of sending the country off on a pointless, bloody and
seemingly endless jihad in the Middle East as a result are exposed and
forced to pay for their ineptness and their crimes.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Shoot Your Friends First: The Cheney Doctrine

dlindorff — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:28:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some people are expressing consternation and disbelief at a report
by journalist Seymour Hersh that Vice President Dick Cheney had
discussed the idea in his office of having some Navy Seals dress up as
Iranians, and then putting them in faked Iranian speedboats to make a fake
attack on US ships in the Persian Gulf. The ensuing faked battle, with
fake Iranians shooting at US ships and US ships firing back, he
suggested, could be used to spark a war between the US and Iran.

` I don’t know why people would find it hard to believe that this
vice president would think up an idea like having Americans shoot at
other Americans in the interest of his own warped view of national
security.

After all, this is a guy who shoots his own friends.

Besides, Cheney is in good company in this kind of thinking. We know
from reports of the meeting filed by British intelligence that
President Bush engaged in the same kind of thing when he was having
trouble getting the country and the rest of the civilized world behind
his and Cheney’s plan to attack Iraq. It was disclosed years later that
in early 2003, Bush suggested to Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US
could paint a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and fly it over sensitive
parts of Iraqi airspace, so that Saddam Hussein would order it show
down. That, he argued, would anger enough UN member states to win a
security resolution to support a war on Iraq, and failing that, would
give the US an excuse to go in on its own. Blair was reportedly
horrified at this kind of kamikaze thinking—but not horrified enough to
expose the president as a nutcase.

So that’s where we are today folks. A president and a vice president
who both think that it’s a great idea to either send some of your own
troops under false flags into harm’s way to get shot at so you can
start a war, or, even worse, to dress up some of your soldiers as the
enemy you want to go after, and have them open fire on your own guys so
that you can claim you were attacked, and then go to war.

Who gets tricked by all these mad schemes?

Not the Iranians, or in the earlier instance, the Iraqis. They know
they aren’t attacking American forces. No. It’s us, the American
people, who are being tricked. Cheney knows that most Americans think
the idea of attacking Iran—especially when we’re five years into an
interminable war in Iraq and seven years into another war in
Afghanistan, neither of which has an end in sight—is really, really
stupid. So they’re trying to think up a way to trick us into supporting
doing such a stupid thing. And the only thing they can come up with to
overcome our reticence is making us think that our guys are being
attacked.

Now let me say that I’ve been a skeptic about people who claim the
9-11 attacks were an “inside job”—that the US government actually
organized those attacks. I know all the arguments and evidence, but it
always seemed to me that it was over the top to think that our leaders
would try to deliberately kill Americans in order to achieve some
policy goal. And yet, here we have Dick Cheney, the real brains (such
as they are) behind the Bush administration, discussing a plan, using
American forces, to fake an attack on other American forces.

It makes me wonder whether maybe Cheney deliberately shot his friend
Harry Whittington, either to flush those damned elusive quail he was
after, or so that he could generate public sympathy for the embattled
President Bush. And it even makes me wonder whether crazy Dick actually
did have a hand in bringing down those Twin Towers. He may be too
stupid to pull something like that off, but he has made it clear that
it isn’t moral scruples that would prevent him from doing such a
monstrous thing.

As ludicrous, pathetic and outrageous as this administration is, we
need to take this latest Hersh report seriously. It seems clear that
Cheney has a predilection for using fratricide to achieve his nefarious
ends.

It’s one thing when he does it with his own rifle, though. It’s
another when he does it with the world’s most mighty military machine.
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available
in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

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The Eve Of War

Chris Elliott — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:45:23 -0500

US / Iranian rhetoric is at fever pitch. Both sides are claiming to have “evidence” of military foul play. Both sides are holding military exercises in each others faces and the Gulf is so full of warships it must be highly dangerous to navigate. Both sides are threatening a massive military response to any use of force. Both presidents have backed themselves into political corners and neither shows the slightest sign of backing down.

A second US carrier strike group has just arrived in the Gulf bringing the total number of US (and allied) warships there to about 50 and a third group, headed by USS Reagan has just been ordered to rendezvous in the Western Pacific with destroyers from Pearl Harbour before sailing to the Gulf.

This is in addition to the large US and allied navies operating in the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria, purportedly to “keep the peace in Lebanon”, and the numerous military airbases that surround both Iran and Syria on multiple fronts. Not to mention the massive military base that is otherwise known as Israel.

In just a few hours from now the 60-day deadline that the US forced through the United Nations in December, demanding Iran cease all nuclear enrichment and research will expire. The question is what will follow? Threats of yet more economic sanctions are unlikely to achieve anything. China has no reason to cut off their oil supply and Russia has nothing but contempt for Bush’s foreign policy. Even European countries are signing long term energy contracts with Iran.

These dubious reports about Iranian weapons being used in Iraq (the ones conveniently labelled in English and dated using the Western calendar no less) seem to indicate that only a military solution is being considered and Bush is now desperate for his casus belli. If Iran tells the UN to shove it’s 60 day deadline and proceeds with nuclear enrichment then Bush will either have to back down and face international ridicule or force Iran to stop via military means.

Today the Iranian president rejected the Western demands to cease nuclear enrichment unless the West also ceases nuclear enrichment, a reply that was laughingly dismissed in Washington.

Even if the Bush administration lacks the nerve to launch an attack on Iran, the close proximity of so many ships, subs, aircraft and missiles all flexing their muscle is the perfect environment for accidents to happen, staged or otherwise. All the ingredients for a major conflict are in place, only a spark is required to set the whole region ablaze.

Congress does have the power to block a new war with Iran. But congress has already given permission to the armed forces to bring stability to Iraq by any means (the so called ‘surge’) and now suddenly we have all this ‘evidence’ of Iranian activity in Iraq. A possible reason we are seeing this now is that they intend to exploit this congressional loophole and make Iran the reason for the disaster in Iraq and consequently deal with the Iranian 'problem' by any means necessary. The media seem to be pushing this idea already.

Additional related articles:

US Warships to Persian Gulf

The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

U.S. diplomat tells Iran to back off in Gulf

Syria's terror networks

Venezuela Preparing for 'Asymmetrical' Showdown With U.S.

Russia's President Putin Delivers Stern Warning On US Military Aggression

Chris Elliott — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 20:15:38 -0500

Russia's President Putin made a very eye-opening speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy this Saturday. The speech was widely reported in the media but in most cases was incomplete or inaccurately translated, no surprises there. Amongst other things, his speech contained a scarcely veiled warning to the United States and other NATO countries that they were pushing Russia to the brink of a direct confrontation.

Deploying anti-ballistic missile systems on Russia's border under the ruse of "shielding America from North Korean nuclear missiles" was not fooling anyone, especially as North Korea, if it had such weapons, would be pointing them in the exact opposite direction across the Pacific ocean. He also warned "Simultaneously the so-called flexible frontline American bases with up to five thousand men in each. It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders..."

Speaker: Putin, Wladimir W.

Funktion: President, Russian Federation

Nation/ Organisation: Russian Federation

Speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy

02/10/2007

(The speech was held in Russian. Find the English translation below.)

Thank you very much dear Madam Federal Chancellor, Mr Teltschik, ladies and gentlemen!

I am truly grateful to be invited to such a representative conference that has assembled politicians, military officials, entrepreneurs and experts from more than 40 nations.

This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. This conference’s format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech Mr Teltschik will not turn on the red light over there.

Therefore. It is well known that international security comprises much more than issues relating to military and political stability. It involves the stability of the global economy, overcoming poverty, economic security and developing a dialogue between civilisations.

This universal, indivisible character of security is expressed as the basic principle that “security for one is security for all”.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said during the first few days that the Second World War was breaking out: “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”

These words remain topical today.

Incidentally, the theme of our conference – global crises, global responsibility – exemplifies this.

Full transcript of President Putin's Speech

US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, and a likely Republican presidential contender, Senator John McCain sat stony-faced throughout Putin's words. McCain told The Observer the speech was 'the most aggressive from a Russian leader since the end of the cold war', adding that it was confrontational, with some of the observations bordering on paranoia.

Gordon Johndroe, press secretary for the White House National Security Council, said: "We are surprised and disappointed with President Putin's comments. His accusations are wrong."

John Bolton's Greatest Hits by Ian Williams

CactusPat — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:14:48 -0500

The Nation's Ian Williams counts the ways and assesses the damage done by John Bolton during his tenure at the United Nations...

John Bolton's Greatest Hits by Ian Williams
posted December 4, 2006
In a rare midterm election in which foreign policy was a major issue, it is not too much of a stretch to say that American voters put UN Ambassador John Bolton out of office. Bolton's resignation from his unconfirmed recess appointment at the UN removes the residual fear that the Bush team had something up its sleeve to bypass senatorial resistance to his confirmation. The White House had claimed the support of a bipartisan silent majority for his appointment--even though it was vociferous defections from GOP ranks that helped thwart his confirmation... (more)

In fact, Bolton's determination to hang on up to this point suggests that his obsession with the United Nations is as serious as Ted Haggard's with sin: He just can't keep away from it. For three decades of work at conservative think tanks and at the State Department, Bolton has angled for appointments that would in some way keep him grappling at close quarters with the organization even if they sometimes involved him in contradictory positions.

Even when the Bushes were out of office, Bolton filled in his time working with former Secretary of State James Baker when he was appointed UN special envoy for the Western Sahara. The Moroccan annexation of the territory has been on the UN agenda for more than thirty years and a standing invitation to complaints about the organization's ineffectiveness; Bolton has been remarkably reticent to highlight it.

Bolton's other job in exile was to advise the Taiwanese government on how to get into an organization that he had spent decades advising the United States to get out of. No sooner had he arrived at the UN in 2005 than he cooked up a deal with Beijing's ambassador to scuttle the efforts of Germany, Japan and India--all US allies--to get permanent seats on the Security Council. He may have had a point about the undesirability of the changes--but a more diplomatic envoy would not have left American fingerprints so messily obvious.

From the White House point of view, Bolton's appointment appeased the know-nothing foreign policy crowd while rewarding his longstanding loyalty to the Bush dynasty. That loyalty had been shown most memorably in 2000, when the man who has spent the past year preaching democracy to the members of the United Nations strode into a library polling place in Florida yelling, "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."

To be fair, while Bolton's tenure has from the standpoint of any rational diplomacy been a disaster, it has not been an unmitigated one. He has been a very well-trained attack dog, always coming to heel when the White House wanted and chewing his own words when necessary.

One of his proudest achievements in his previous job at the State Department was to "unsign" the treaty that committed the United States to the International Criminal Court, and then to bully and browbeat small countries across the world into signing agreements not to extradite US citizens to its seat in the Hague. And then this year he had to allow a Security Council resolution setting the Court's prosecutors on the perpetrators in Darfur.

As pious commentators talk about how effective he was, it is worth remembering that while he was in charge of arms control, North Korea joined the nuclear club and that, according to him and Bolton and his allies, Iran is about to. It is an achievement--but of a dubious sort for an alleged arms control maestro. To be fair, within the Administration, he reportedly opposed the US-Indian nuclear deal, although he remained silent on Israeli nuclear capabilities.

Otherwise, Bolton's most memorable "achievement" occurred while he was in charge of arms control at the State Department before moving to the UN. He was a major saboteur of Congressional efforts to improve and tighten the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If these measures had been passed, countries would not have been able, as North Korea did, to drop out of the treaty after reaping its dual-use benefits, and the voluntary protocols on inspection that Iran stopped observing would have been compulsory.

However, his greatest legacy may be his semi-successful attempt to wreck the UN reform proposals last year. By introducing hundreds of unilateral amendments after long months of painstaking negotiations between the members, he certainly managed to destroy the efforts of Kofi Annan to persuade the Third World members that managerial reforms were not some form of American and Western plot. In fact, almost every public statement he made pretty much confirmed their suspicions.

Bolton leaves unfinished business at the UN. His attempt to enforce on Iran an international law in which he professes disbelief comes to nothing as Security Council members try to insure that Washington has no excuse to take military action. The resolution is stalemated and diluted.

Although he is now implying personal credit for the appointment of Ban Ki-moon, the incoming Secretary General, Ban is astute enough to know that he was far from Washington's first choice for the position. Ban differed from Bolton on issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to how to deal with Pyongyang.

Bolton has clearly relished his role at the UN, and one nightmare scenario would be intense White House pressure on Ban to grant him a senior UN appointment. If that sounds farfetched, just consider the recent appointment of Bush supporter and former Washington Times editor Josette Sheeran Shiner as head of the World Food Program.

One cannot help but suspect that Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman will soon have competition in xenophobic grandstanding. Bolton's media prominence, his longstanding credentials as a Goldwater supporter and his newly acquired status as a martyr for conservatism would certainly equip him for a political career in the GOP's new confederate heartland, where tough talk regularly obscures lack of achievement.

Welcome to Bush's Third World America

CactusPat — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 07:13:53 -0400

So how do you like living in Bush's third-world Amerika? Nearly 13% poverty with a third of our children living in poverty. Infant mortality rates as high as Malaysia. "NO" healthcare, let alone health insurance, for tens of millions. Debt Slavery looming for millions more....

(IndependentUK) UN hits back at US in report saying parts of America are as poor as Third World Parts of the US are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking UN report on global inequality. Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare. The document constitutes a stinging attack on US policies at home and abroad in a fightback against moves by Washington to undermine next week's UN 60th anniversary conference which will be the biggest gathering of world leaders in history...

The annual Human Development Report normally concerns itself with the Third World, but the 2005 edition scrutinises inequalities in health provision inside the US as part of a survey of how inequality worldwide is retarding the eradication of poverty.

It reveals that the infant mortality rate has been rising in the US for the past five years - and is now the same as Malaysia. America's black children are twice as likely as whites to die before their first birthday.

The report is bound to incense the Bush administration as it provides ammunition for critics who have claimed that the fiasco following Hurricane Katrina shows that Washington does not care about poor black Americans. But the 370-page document is critical of American policies towards poverty abroad as well as at home. And, in unusually outspoken language, it accuses the US of having "an overdeveloped military strategy and an under-developed strategy for human security".

"There is an urgent need to develop a collective security framework that goes beyond military responses to terrorism," it continues. " Poverty and social breakdown are core components of the global security threat."

The document, which was written by Kevin Watkins, the former head of research at Oxfam, will be seen as round two in the battle between the UN and the US, which regards the world body as an unnecessary constraint on its strategic interests and actions.

Last month John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the UN, submitted 750 amendments to the draft declaration for next week's summit to strengthen the UN and review progress towards its Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015.

The report launched yesterday is a clear challenge to Washington. The Bush administration wants to replace multilateral solutions to international problems with a world order in which the US does as it likes on a bilateral basis.

"This is the UN coming out all guns firing," said one UN insider. "It means that, even if we have a lame duck secretary general after the Volcker report (on the oil-for-food scandal), the rest of the organisation is not going to accept the US bilateralist agenda."

The clash on world poverty centres on the US policy of promoting growth and trade liberalisation on the assumption that this will trickle down to the poor. But this will not stop children dying, the UN says. Growth alone will not reduce poverty so long as the poor are denied full access to health, education and other social provision. Among the world's poor, infant mortality is falling at less than half of the world average. To tackle that means tackling inequality - a message towards which John Bolton and his fellow US neocons are deeply hostile.

India and China, the UN says, have been very successful in wealth creation but have not enabled the poor to share in the process. A rapid decline in child mortality has therefore not materialised. Indeed, when it comes to reducing infant deaths, India has now been overtaken by Bangladesh, which is only growing a third as fast.

Poverty could be halved in just 17 years in Kenya if the poorest people were enabled to double the amount of economic growth they can achieve at present.

Inequality within countries is as stark as the gaps between countries, the UN says. Poverty is not the only issue here. The death rate for girls in India is now 50 per cent higher than for boys. Gender bias means girls are not given the same food as boys and are not taken to clinics as often when they are ill. Foetal scanning has also reduced the number of girls born.

The only way to eradicate poverty, it says, is to target inequalities. Unless that is done the Millennium Development Goals will never be met. And 41 million children will die unnecessarily over the next 10 years.

Decline in health care

Child mortality is on the rise in the United States

For half a century the US has seen a sustained decline in the number of children who die before their fifth birthday. But since 2000 this trend has been reversed.

Although the US leads the world in healthcare spending - per head of population it spends twice what other rich OECD nations spend on average, 13 per cent of its national income - this high level goes disproportionately on the care of white Americans. It has not been targeted to eradicate large disparities in infant death rates based on race, wealth and state of residence.

The infant mortality rate in the US is now the same as in Malaysia

High levels of spending on personal health care reflect America's cutting-edge medical technology and treatment. But the paradox at the heart of the US health system is that, because of inequalities in health financing, countries that spend substantially less than the US have, on average, a healthier population. A baby boy from one of the top 5 per cent richest families in America will live 25 per cent longer than a boy born in the bottom 5 per cent and the infant mortality rate in the US is the same as Malaysia, which has a quarter of America's income.

Blacks in Washington DC have a higher infant death rate than people in the Indian state of Kerala

The health of US citizens is influenced by differences in insurance, income, language and education. Black mothers are twice as likely as white mothers to give birth to a low birthweight baby. And their children are more likely to become ill.

Throughout the US black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday.

Hispanic Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to have no health covererage.

The US is the only wealthy country with no universal health insurance system. Its mix of employer-based private insurance and public coverage does not reach all Americans. More than one in six people of working age lack insurance. One in three families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Just 13 per cent of white Americans are uninsured, compared with 21 per cent of blacks and 34 per cent of Hispanic Americans. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before the age of one by about 50 per cent.

More than a third of the uninsured say that they went without medical care last year because of cost

Uninsured Americans are less likely to have regular outpatient care, so they are more likely to be admitted to hospital for avoidable health problems.

More than 40 per cent of the uninsured do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment. More than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including prescription drugs, in the past year because they lacked the money to pay.

If the gap in health care between black and white Americans was eliminated it would save nearly 85,000 lives a year. Technological improvements in medicine save about 20,000 lives a year.

Child poverty rates in the United States are now more than 20 per cent

Child poverty is a particularly sensitive indicator for income poverty in rich countries. It is defined as living in a family with an income below 50 per cent of the national average.

The US - with Mexico - has the dubious distinction of seeing its child poverty rates increase to more than 20 per cent. In the UK - which at the end of the 1990s had one of the highest child poverty rates in Europe - the rise in child poverty, by contrast, has been reversed through increases in tax credits and benefits.