Thursday, January 31, 2013

Assassination of JFK or the Decline and Fall of Democrasy


THE ABSURD TIMES










Illustration:  I could figure the above out more easily than I could what has happened to the U.S. gradually, but reading those sorts of handwritten manuscripts in differing languages is what Philologists are trained to do.  And no, I cannot decipher the above at all.  I do know it is Nietzsche’s handwriting and, of course, in German, but about the only person who could readily decipher that script was Peter Gast, and he is long dead.  Still, it can be done.

Decline and Fall of Democracy



          So, how do we understand what has happened to the U.S.?  It used to be the clear leader in all sorts of nice stuff, but today about all it leads in is its military budget (which is about equal to or above all the rest of the world’s combined).  We have been at war constantly.  Each President has seemed to be worse than the previous one and even Nixon, Mr. Scum himself, seems liberal by today’s standards.  So – What happened?



          I have attributed this to money, capitalism ueber alles, corporate media and the lack of information, a stupid electorate, Just about anything that would explain it.  Finally, I heard an answer.



          It came from a very strange source.  I used to be a fan of Mort Sahl’s but he seemed to drop off the radar and then when he reappeared he seemed to lack the same sharpness.  Perhaps the fact that he is in his 80s has something to do with it.  Anyway, he recently tweeted a line that made sense to the effect that we are being ruled by the descendants of JFK’s assassins.  (John F. Kennedy.)  I’ve always thought the assassins were part of our government and his brother’s assassination followed right when he was about to retake that position.   Eugene McCarthy followed a far more principled path, but RFK was more likely to be elected.  So, then he was eliminated with extreme predjudice.



          Lyndon Johnson replaced JFK and did the bidding of the Assassin camp.  While he stated he did not think we “should” be at war in Vietnam, he was careful to point out before he died that he said, “shouldn’t,” not, “wouldn’t”.  An extreme point of contention, even today, was whether JFK would have pulled out of Viet Nam. 



JFK was no Roosevelt in domestic matters, but he did feel strongly about a number of domestic issues.  It was in foreign policy, however, that he had the greatest impact.  He inherited a CIA with all its plans and an FBI that was its own world.  The CIA planned the Bay of Pigs and JFK was livid when he learned how he was being mislead by them and the “foreign policy experts.”  He refused to bomb Cuba during that invasion and that was what led to the Bay of Pigs failure.

This is still obscure and this is one of the reasons: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20121207/   When Castro took over, he nationalized all the big business properties, but tried to reimburse the companies.  They said that the properties were worth more than that.  He said that he would pay that, then, if they paid back taxes at their own valuation.  They said no.  So he took them.  Big business made sure no one knew about that, but that they did know he was a, gasp, Communist.  (Actually, he wasn’t – more socialist.)



During to so-called embargo, both he and RFK conspired, along with Kruschev, to pretty much end the worst phase of the cold war, although credit for avoid a nuclear war at the time should go to a soviet submarine captain who refused to attack the US fleet at the time.  From that time on, he began to eliminate most of the Eisenhower/Nixon/Dulles personnel (and that caused problems).   RFK kept making Hoover report to him, as Attorney General, instead of the President directly.  Hoover did not take kindly to that and lived to see RFK die.



          So, that leaves Viet Nam.  When JFK was killed, we had 20,000 troops there, all so-called volunteers.  He had talked in his inauguration speech about “Communist” threats there and I knew then that it was time to start research on the Viet Nam issue before I was conscripted as an indentured servant in the Killing fields.  It turned out that Viet Nam had been at constant war for over 1,000 years, that the French were the last to occupy it, that we had stashed munitions there at the end of WWII or Korea (not sure which), and that they simply would not be occupied peacefully or defeated – ever.  It seems that JFK came to the same conclusion, or that parties of the “Military-Industrial-Complex” had decided that he did and thus he had to go.  After all, whose country is this?  Big business or the people?  He had to go.



          LBJ did carry on with most of JFK’s programs (civil rights, medicare, etc.) but had agreed or resolved to escalate Viet Nam in accordance with the desires of the Complex.  He also enjoyed reading the salacious gossip steadily fed to him by Hoover.  The people were angry.  He led them to believe no war.  His opponent, Barry Goldwater, promised bombing Viet Nam into the Stone Age.  It was a clear choice.  Actually, Goldwater had helped LBJ get re-elected.  All was going according to plan.



          The people were angry.  They had not been outright lied to in so long, and JFK had instilled an emotional idealism in them, that they could not accept what had happened.  Many had joined the Peace Crops when it was run by Sergeant Shriver and before it was turned into a cover for the CIA.  They had little memory of Nixon and McCarthyism, the Depression was in the past, they believed in government, even became patriotic, and then came the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, something LBJ carried around in his pocket for six months before he pulled it out.



          After 4 years of escalation, and McCarthy’s surprise support in the primaries against him, LBJ resigned.  Then RFK joined in the campaign.  He was assassinated too.  The convention to name a new Democratic candidate took place in Chicago of 1968. 



          It was a crowd filled with peace, love, hate, anger – just about every emotion you can imagine and just about every character you could imagine.  Many of those I knew, scattered to corners of the parks.  Many of those I met, I didn’t identify until much later.  The only one I had even corresponded with before was Tom Hayden and I didn’t see him.  Norman mailer was there, gave a self-promoting speech, and went off to write up his version of what happened.  Hunter Thompson was there, but I didn’t know who he was.  Abbie Hoffman was everywhere and there was no way to follow anything about him or predict what was going to happen next. 



          I grew up in Chicago and tried to tell people about the police, warn about alleys, but, as was usual in those idealistic days, no one listened.  It got louder and louder and I finally would up far away after one particularly bloody police blitzkrieg watching the rest on television.  I knew when the attack was about to start, was off by a few minutes, and wound up finally escaping down toward the lake shore.  (No one went looking there, at least not wearing a badge and carrying a stick and a gun.)  I saw the rest on TV.  It was enough to see reporters beaten up in the convention hall and the tape delayed by 30 minutes.  In short, anyone who objected to the election process as dictated by the assassination’s aftermath got the bloody shit beat outta them.



          Some of them would up on trial a couple years later and that trial is a story all in itself.  Even the transcripts of the testimony are lively reading.  The lead Defense attorney was given 4 years in jail for contempt charges alone.  Hoover had long since turned from fighting organized crime to killing “communists”.  I always suspected that the mob caught him cross-dressing and put the heat on him.



          That led to Richard Nixon being elected.  I think you can take it from there.  Ever since then, each president was worse than the previous.  Carter seemed to try to turn things around, but Iran’s deal with Ronny Raygun did him in.  Ever since them, the split between rich and everyone else has gotten bigger.



          To sum it all up, there is no reason to idealize JFK or to attack him.  Yes, he was on painkillers, speed, was hypersexual, and so on.  And yes, Bobby had to run around and clean up after him.  And yes, Jackie got hooked as well.  And yes, Joe helped a great deal in getting him elected and his connections were involved.  The point is, however, that he went into the office with the notion of doing what was best for the American people and ran up against the so-called “Military-Industrial-Complex” that Eisenhower warned about.  Eisenhower was in a great position to know as he was in the middle of it all and could do nothing.  The Dulles brothers were the mouthpieces for it all and the CIA and FBI were in their hands. 



          Kennedy ran into a myriad of problems with this crowd, being tripped up repeatedly by things they had going on that they kept secret from him.  When he found out, he started cleaning house.  These people didn’t like that, had too much money and power to lose, and so they stopped him the most effective way they could.  Threats and blackmail didn’t work, so they simply killed him – and with him any chance there was of moving this country in a sensible direction.  We don’t need the stupid cliché’ of “Conspiracy Theory” as it has been manipulated into sounding insane and, hence, wrong.  The fact that there was a conspiracy, meaning a group of vested interests cooperating in ending JFK’s reforms, remains, however – make it sound as you will – you still have to live with the results. 




          One of the results is the strange change in some Presidents once they get into office.  Of course, Reagan was produced by GE, and Bush by the oil companies, but we certainly saw a great difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the President.  I think these international interests, which are now firmly entrenched, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse early on, right after he signed the papers closing Gitmo.



         
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German:Decline and Fall of Democracy


Die absurde TIMES

 

Illustration: Ich konnte die oben aus leichter als ich es könnte, was in den USA passiert allmählich herausfinden, aber das Lesen dieser Arten von Handschriften in unterschiedlichen Sprachen ist das, was Philologen geschult werden, um zu tun. Und nein, das kann ich nicht entziffern, die oben überhaupt. Ich weiß, es ist Nietzsches Handschrift und natürlich in deutscher Sprache, sondern um die einzige Person, die könnten leicht. Entziffern, dass script Peter Gast war, und er ist schon lange tot Dennoch kann es geschehen.

Decline and Fall of Democracy



          
Also, wie können wir verstehen, was in den USA passiert? Früher war es der klare Marktführer in allerlei schöne Sachen, aber heute über alle führt in ist sein Militärbudget (das ist etwa gleich oder größer als der ganze Rest der Welt zusammen). Wir haben im Krieg waren ständig. Jeder Präsident hat zu sein schien schlimmer als die vorherige und sogar Nixon, Mr. Scum selbst scheint liberale nach heutigen Maßstäben. So - Was ist passiert?



          
Ich habe dies zurückzuführen Geld, Kapitalismus über alles, Corporate Media und das Fehlen von Informationen, ein dummer Wähler, einfach über alles, es zu erklären wäre. Schließlich hörte ich eine Antwort.



          
Es kam aus einer sehr seltsamen Quelle. Früher war ich ein Fan von Mort Sahl das sein, aber er schien zu fallen off the radar und dann, wenn er wieder schien er die gleiche Schärfe fehlt. Vielleicht ist die Tatsache, dass er in seinem 80er Jahre ist, hat etwas damit zu tun. Jedenfalls hat er kürzlich tweeted eine Linie, die Sinne auf die Wirkung, dass man uns von den Nachkommen des JFK-Attentäter ausgeschlossen hat. (John F. Kennedy.) Ich habe immer gedacht, die Attentäter waren Teil unserer Regierung und seines Bruders Ermordung folgten recht, wenn er über diese Position zurückzuerobern war. Eugene McCarthy folgte eine weitaus prinzipiellen Weg, aber RFK war eher gewählt werden. So, dann wurde er mit extremer predjudice eliminiert.



          
Lyndon Johnson ersetzt JFK und tat das Gebot des Assassinen Lager. Während erklärte er, er wisse nicht, dass wir "sollte" im Krieg in Vietnam, war er vorsorglich darauf hinweisen, bevor er, dass er sagte, "sollte nicht", nicht ", würde nicht" gestorben. Ein extremer Streitpunkt, auch heute noch, war, ob JFK würde aus Viet Nam gezogen haben.


JFK war kein Roosevelt in innere Angelegenheiten, aber er hatte das starke Gefühl über eine Reihe von innenpolitischen Themen. Es war in der Außenpolitik, aber, dass er den größten Einfluss hatte. Er erbte ein CIA mit all seinen Plänen und einer FBI, die ihre eigene Welt war. Die CIA plante die Bay of Pigs and JFK war wütend, als er, wie er in die Irre, indem sie und die gelernt "außenpolitischen Experten." Er weigerte sich, Kuba während dieser Invasion bombardieren und das war, was führte zu der Bay of Pigs Scheitern.
Dies ist immer noch unklar, und dies ist einer der Gründe: http://www.gwu.edu/ ~ nsarchiv/news/20121207 / Wenn Castro übernahm, verstaatlichte er alle großen Business-Immobilien, sondern versucht, die Unternehmen zu erstatten. Sie sagten, dass die Eigenschaften wurden mehr wert als die. Er sagte, er würde dafür bezahlen, dann, wenn sie zurückgezahlt Steuern auf ihre eigene Schätzung. Sie sagte nein. So nahm er sie. Big Business gemacht, dass niemand wusste, aber dass sie wusste, dass er a, Keuchen, Kommunist. (Eigentlich war er nicht - mehr sozialistisch.)


Während so genannte Embargo, verschworen er und RFK, zusammen mit Chruschtschow, so ziemlich am Ende der schlimmsten Phase des Kalten Krieges, obwohl Kredit für Vermeidung eines Atomkriegs an der Zeit, einem sowjetischen U-Boot-Kapitän, der zum Angriff weigerte gehen sollte die US-Flotte an der Zeit. Von diesem Zeitpunkt an begann er, die meisten der Eisenhower / Nixon / Dulles Personal (und dass Probleme verursacht) zu beseitigen. RFK machte immer Hoover Bericht zu ihm, als Attorney General, anstelle des Präsidenten direkt. Hoover nicht freundlich zu, dass und lebte, um zu sehen RFK sterben.



          
So hinterlässt das Viet Nam. Wenn JFK getötet wurde, hatten wir 20.000 Soldaten dort alle sogenannten Freiwilligen. Er hatte in seiner Antrittsrede über "kommunistische" Bedrohungen da und redeten Ich wusste dann, dass es Zeit für die Forschung auf dem Viet Nam Ausgabe beginnen, bevor ich eingezogen als indentured Diener in den Killing Fields war. Es stellte sich heraus, dass Viet Nam hatte bei konstanter Krieg für über 1.000 Jahren, dass die Französisch die letzten, sie zu besetzen waren, dass wir Munition dort am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs oder Korea (nicht sicher, welche) versteckt, und dass sie einfach wäre nicht friedlich besetzt werden oder besiegt - je. Es scheint, dass JFK zu dem gleichen Schluss kam, oder dass die Parteien des "militärisch-industriellen-Komplex" hatte entschieden, dass er tat und somit musste er gehen. Immerhin, dessen Land ist das? Big Business oder die Menschen? Er musste gehen.



          
LBJ hat auf den meisten JFK-Programme (Bürgerrechte, Medicare, etc.) zu tragen, aber hatte vereinbart oder beschlossen, Viet Nam in Übereinstimmung mit den Wünschen des Complex eskalieren. Er genoss es auch das Lesen der salacious Klatsch stetig, die ihm von Hoover zugeführt. Die Leute waren wütend. Er führte sie zu keinen Krieg glauben. Sein Gegner, Barry Goldwater, versprach Bombardierung Vietnams in die Steinzeit. Es war eine klare Wahl. Eigentlich hatte Goldwater geholfen LBJ wiedergewählt. Alles war nach Plan.



          
Die Leute waren wütend. Sie waren nicht geradezu angelogen in so lange, und JFK war eine emotionale Idealismus in ihnen eingeflößt, dass sie nicht akzeptieren, was passiert war. Viele hatten die Frieden Crops beigetreten, wenn sie von Sergeant Shriver ausgeführt wurde und bevor es in eine Abdeckung für die CIA eingeschaltet. Sie hatten wenig Erinnerung an Nixon und McCarthy wurde die Depression in der Vergangenheit, sie glaubten, in der Regierung, wurde sogar patriotisch, und dann kam der Golf von Tonkin Resolution, etwas LBJ herumgetragen in seiner Tasche für sechs Monate, bevor er es herausgezogen.



          
Nach 4 Jahren der Eskalation, und McCarthy Überraschung Unterstützung bei den Vorwahlen gegen ihn, trat LBJ. Dann RFK trat in der Kampagne. Er war zu ermordet. Die Konvention, um eine neue demokratische Kandidat nennen fand in Chicago von 1968.



          
Es war eine Menge mit Frieden, Liebe, Hass, Wut gefüllt - nur etwa jede Emotion man sich vorstellen kann fast jeder Charakter man sich vorstellen kann. Viele von denen ich wusste, verstreut, um Ecken des Parks. Viele von denen, die ich traf, wusste ich nicht identifizieren erst viel später. Die einzige, die ich selbst entsprach zuvor war Tom Hayden und ich habe ihn nicht gesehen. Norman Mailer war, gab eine Selbst-fördernden Rede, und ging zu schreiben, seine Version von dem, was passiert ist. Hunter Thompson war da, aber ich wusste nicht, wer er war. Abbie Hoffman war überall, und es gab keine Möglichkeit, etwas über ihn zu folgen oder vorherzusagen, was als nächstes passiert.



          
Ich wuchs in Chicago und versucht, die Leute von der Polizei erzählen, warnen Gassen, sondern, wie es in jenen idealistischen Tag üblich, hörte niemand. Es wurde lauter und lauter und ich endlich würde bis weit nach einem besonders blutigen Polizei blitzkrieg beobachtete den Rest im Fernsehen. Ich wusste, wenn der Angriff kurz vor dem Start war um ein paar Minuten, und aufgewickelt schließlich entkommen hinunter zum Ufer des Sees. (Niemand suchte dort, zumindest nicht tragen eine Plakette und Durchführung einen Stock und eine Pistole.) Sah ich den Rest auf TV. Es war genug, um zu sehen, Reportern in der Kongresshalle geschlagen und das Band um 30 Minuten verzögert. Kurz gesagt, haben alle, die den Wahlprozess widersprochen durch die Ermordung der Folgezeit diktierte der blutigen Scheiße Beat outta sie.



          
Einige von ihnen würden sich vor Gericht ein paar Jahre später, und dass-Studie ist eine Geschichte alle in sich. Auch die Transkripte des Zeugnisses sind lebhaft Lesen. Der federführende Verteidiger gegeben wurde 4 Jahre im Gefängnis wegen Missachtung Gebühren allein. Hoover war längst aus dem Kampf gegen die organisierte Kriminalität zu töten "Kommunisten" gedreht. Ich habe immer vermutet, dass der Mob ihn cross-dressing gefangen und die Hitze auf ihn.



          
Das führte zu Richard Nixon gewählt zu werden. Ich denke, man kann es von dort. Seitdem war jeder Präsident schlimmer als die vorherige. Carter schien zu versuchen, die Dinge umzudrehen, aber der Iran Deal mit Ronny Raygun tat ihm in. Seit sie die Spaltung zwischen Reichen und allen anderen ist größer geworden.



          
Um das alles zusammenzufassen, gibt es keinen Grund zu idealisieren JFK oder um ihn anzugreifen. Ja, er war auf Schmerzmittel, Geschwindigkeit, war hypersexuelle, und so weiter. Und ja, hatte Bobby herumlaufen und aufräumen nach ihm. Und ja, habe Jackie süchtig als gut. Und ja, half Joe viel in immer ihn gewählt und seine Verbindungen beteiligt waren. Der Punkt ist jedoch, dass er ins Büro ging mit der Vorstellung zu tun, was das Beste für das amerikanische Volk und rannte gegen die sogenannten "Military-Industrial-Complex", dass Eisenhower gewarnt. Eisenhower war in einer super Lage zu wissen, wie er in der Mitte war es alles und konnte nichts tun. Die Dulles-Brüder waren die Mundstücke für alles und die CIA und FBI waren in ihren Händen.



          
Kennedy lief in eine Vielzahl von Problemen mit dieser Menge sind, wobei sich immer wieder von Dingen, die sie auf, dass sie vor ihm geheim gehalten werde gestolpert. Als er erfuhr, begann er Hausputz. Diese Menschen nicht gefallen, dass zu viel Geld und Macht zu verlieren, und so hielt ihn der effektivste Weg, sie konnten. Drohungen und Erpressung hat nicht funktioniert, so dass sie einfach tötete ihn - und mit ihm eine Chance gab der Bewegung dieses Land in eine vernünftige Richtung. Wir brauchen nicht das dumme Klischee "von" Conspiracy Theory ", wie es in klingende verrückt und daher falsch manipuliert worden. Die Tatsache, dass es eine Verschwörung, dh eine Gruppe von Interessen kooperieren bei der Beendigung JFK Reformen, bleibt aber - es klingt wie du willst - haben Sie immer noch mit den Ergebnissen leben.



          
Eines der Ergebnisse ist die seltsame Veränderung in einigen Präsidenten, wenn sie sich ins Büro. Natürlich war Reagan von GE und Bush von den Ölgesellschaften produziert, aber wir sahen einen großen Unterschied zwischen Obama der Kandidat Obama und dem Präsidenten. Ich denke, diese internationale Interessen, die inzwischen fest verankert sind, machte ihm ein Angebot, das er nicht ablehnen konnte früh, gleich nachdem er die Papiere Schließen Gitmo unterzeichnet.

Monday, January 28, 2013

#Egypt become a US style Democracy


THE ABSURD TIMES



    Well, if Egypt wanted a U.S. style revolution, now they have it.  All the good, secular candidates beat themselves up, two parties remained, one won.  Now he is busy beating the shit out of everyone who dares oppose him.  It kinda reminds me of Chicago, 1968, or Kent State, Nixon era.

    Fortunately, NSNBC covers that (below) so I've been busy working on why we have such a stupid system for people to emulate, not on why the people are stupid to emulate it.






Egypt in Turmoil: Mursi´s “Revolution” Backfires.

by nsnbc
Egypt in Turmoil: Mursi´s "Revolution" Backfires. Christof Lehmann (nsnbc) - After the effective hijacking of the "Arab Spring" by a well prepared, well connected and not least well financed Muslim Brotherhood, the Mursi "Revolution" as even some so-called liberals like international lawyer Franklin Lamb called it, is about to backfire. In spite of Egypt being [...]
nsnbc | January 26, 2013 at 14:41 | Categories: World | URL: http://wp.me/p1sRhy-4sU

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Davos and Rusia and Syria and Bullshit




THE ABSURD TIMES
This is from NSNBC, one of the few independent sites around.  Christof Lehmann alone tells more truth in a single article than you can find on all of corporate media in a month.

I'll have a permanent link for contributions to his effort installed soon.  Meanwhile, contribute here: DONATIONS - CLICK HERE


Davos: The Syria War Continuum and the Tripartite Energy War.

Christof Lehmann (nsnbc) – The energy security stall mate after the Russia – EU Summit in Bruxelles in December 2012 continues in Davos. Russian – European relations with regard to energy security have suffered considerably since the onset of the war in Syria. With the United States, using its political leverage to drive a wedge in between Russia and Europe, and with the cause of the Syria war still not being discussed openly and constructively, both Russia, Europe and the US-Dollar may be heading toward a deep freeze.

Russia is currently delivering between 22 and 26 % of the gas that is consumed in the EU. The main routes of delivery are the North Stream pipeline from St. Petersburg to northern Germany and the South Stream pipeline from the Caspian Sea to southern Europe.

After the discovery of the worlds largest known gas reserves, the PARS gas fields in the Persian Gulf in 2007 the global energy dynamics have changed considerably. This change has ultimately led to the war on Syria.

The PARS gas fields are situated between Qatar and Iran. Two pipeline projects were proposed. A Qatar, US, Saudi cartel proposed the Nabucco pipeline project. Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia proposed the PARS pipeline project, which has proven to be more competitive. The PARS gas fields, together with the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean are estimated to contain sufficient gas to sustain the energy requirements for Europe and the Middle East for the coming 100 -120 years. Thai is, even though the consumption of gas increases at its current rate. The PARS pipeline, almost completed to Damascus, is planned to end near Tartus, Syria.

If the pipeline is completed, the EU would begin to receive 40 – 50 % of its gas directly or indirectly controlled by Russia, with Iran being a major stakeholder too. This development is unacceptable for the USA for a variety of reasons.

The primary reason is that loosing out on the competition has critically weakened the value and security of the US-Dollar. The other reason is, that the USA fears to loose political leverage in Europe if the energy sectors and market economies of the EU and Russia become increasingly integrated.

Finally, Israel, the USA, and some of the European governments fear that Iran would gain more political leverage with respect to Palestine and nuclear energy issues if the PARS pipeline goes online. With 40 – 50 % of its gas provided by Russia and Iran, many EU members governments may become more sympathetic toward ending 60 years of occupation in Palestine, and less aggressive toward Iran.

The war in Syria is a direct consequence of this dispute. However, non of the parties in Davos has so far approached the primary problem constructively.

One of the most controversial provisions of the EU´s Third Energy Package is that all transit infrastructure must be handed over to operators who are independent from energy generating mineral and gas-producing companies.

The permanent Russian representative to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov however, said that the enforcement of this provision has basically led to the nationalization of pipelines in some East European countries.

In December 2012 however, the representative of the EU Trade Commission Karl De Gucht, accused Russia for failure to fulfill its obligations within the World Trade Organization, WTO, blaming Russia for not having sufficiently increased its import of motor vehicles, and for having violated treaties by banning the import of certain kinds of cattle from EU countries because they did not meet Russian requirements.

With unwillingness from both the USA and the EU to find a peaceful resolution to the Syria crisis, and with the recent French – NATO pivot into Mali, a wider energy war becomes increasingly likely. This also directly affects the Russian import of motor vehicles from the EU due to Russian security concerns. The cancellation of the further Russian import of armored IVECO cars from Italy for the Russian military may be a direct consequence of Russian concerns about the possibility of a war.

The Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev disagreed with the EU position on the Third Energy Package and called it a revision of existing agreements.  ”As to anti-monopoly structures, we are not against different procedures if they occur by a law, but we think that the EU´s position on the Third Energy Package is wrong. Even if it pursues positive goals. It has a significant impact on existing ties and means a rejection of current agreements” , Medvedev said on 23. January, adding that he thinks that this is a violation of existing Russian European agreements.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed the hope that a compromise could be reached while he also said that it would be unacceptable if the provisions of the Third Energy Package were retroactively applied with effect on current contracts between Gazprom and its consumers.

The stall mate between the EU and Russia is bound to continue, bound to negatively affect both Russian and European economies and energy security, bound to aggravate the crisis in Syria,and bound to threaten security globally, as long as the core issues, including the role of the USA in destabilizing Russian European relations and the US role in forcing European policy makes into going along with the aggression against Syria are not being addressed.

Christof Lehmann

24.01.2013

Related article:

Was das Dritte EU-Energiepaket mit dem Krieg in Syrien zu tun hat.

Russia – E.U. Meeting in Bruxelles: Risk of Middle East and European War increased.

Syria, Turkey, Israel and a Greater Middle East Energy War


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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Sundance, Afghanistan, Scahill, Rowley


THE ABSURD TIMES

Ok, for all you patriotic idiots out there who voted, this is what is being done in your name.  Now that the cheap spectacle of the inauguration is over and the cable channels have milked it for every cent, here is what is really going on:



TUESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2013

Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare

Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield" follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars. We’re joined by Scahill and the film’s director, Rick Rowley, an independent journalist with Big Noise Films. "We’re looking right now at a reality that President Obama has essentially extended the very policies that many of his supporters once opposed under President Bush," says Scahill, author of the bestseller "Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army" and a forthcoming book named after his film. "One of the things that humbles both of us is that when you arrive in a village in Afghanistan and knock on someone’s door, you’re the first American they’ve seen since the Americans that kicked that door in and killed half their family," Rowley says. "We promised them that we would do everything we could to make their stories be heard in the U.S. ... Finally we’re able to keep those promises." [includes rush transcript]
GUESTS:
Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the documentary film Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival. He is national security correspondent for The Nation, author ofBlackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Richard Rowley, director of the documentary film Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival. He is an independent journalist with Big Noise Films.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.DONATE >

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: We have flown from Washington, D.C., from the inauguration, to Park City, Utah, to cover the Sundance Film Festival. It’s the 10th anniversary of the documentary track. And we’re going to start off by getting response to President Obama’s inaugural address. On Monday, President Obama declared a decade of war is now ending and that lasting peace does not require perpetual war. But he never mentioned the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan by name.
There was also no mention about the secret drone war that’s vastly expanded under President Obama. On the same day he gave his inaugural address, a U.S. drone strike killed three people in Yemen east of the capital, Sana’a. Also Monday, President Obama officially nominated John Brennan to be director of the CIA, succeeding retired Army General David Petraeus, who resigned. Nicknamed the "assassination czar" by some, Brennan was the first Obama administration official to publicly confirm drone attacks overseas and to defend their legality. Four years ago, John Brennan was a rumored pick for the CIA job when Obama was first elected but was forced to withdraw from consideration amidst protests over his role at the CIA under the Bush administration. Obama also officially nominated Chuck Hagel to head defense and John Kerry to become secretary of state on Monday.
Well, joining us here in Park City, Utah, is Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine. He is featured in and co-wrote the new documentary Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. Jeremy’s latest book, with the same title, is due out in April.
We’re also joined by Dirty Wars director Richard Rowley, independent journalist with Big Noise Films. The film premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. documentary competition section. And when we flew into Salt Lake City last night, we went directly to the Salt Lake City Library, where there was a packed, sold-out crowd to see the—a showing of Dirty Wars. We want to congratulate you, Jeremy and Rick, on this absolutely remarkable film.
RICK ROWLEY: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: And I think it’s very appropriate to begin our four days of broadcasting here at Park City, on this day after the inauguration of President Obama, to begin with Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.
Jeremy, talk about President Obama’s first four years and where we’re going now. You got a chance to hear his inaugural address; what you thought of it?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, I think if we look back at the—at the first term of the Obama administration, what we saw was you had this very popular Democratic president that had—who had campaigned, in terms of his broader rhetoric during the presidential campaign against John McCain, on the notion that he was going to transform the way that the U.S. conducted its foreign policy around the world. And, you know, he then proceeded to double down on some of the greatest excesses of the Bush administration. If you look at the use of the state secrets privilege; if you look at the way the Obama administration has expanded the drone wars; has empowered special operations forces, including from JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, to operate in countries where the United States is not at war; if you look at the way in which the Obama administration has essentially boxed Congress out of any effective oversight role of the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy, what we really have is a president who has normalized, for many, many liberals in the United States, the policies that they once opposed under the Bush administration. And, you know, this really has been a war presidency.
And, you know, yesterday, as the—as President Obama’s talking about how we don’t need a state of perpetual war, multiple U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, a country that we’re not at war with, where the U.S. has killed a tremendous number of civilians. Rick and I have spent a lot of time on the ground in Yemen. And, you know, to me, most disturbing about this is John Brennan, who really was the architect of this drone program and the expansion of the drone program—these guys are sitting around on Tuesdays at the White House in "Terror Tuesday" meetings, discussing who’s going to live and who’s going to die across the world. These guys have decided—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "Terror Tuesday" meetings?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, that’s what they’re referred to. You know, senior—when this first came out, senior White House officials said that they internally refer to them as "Terror Tuesdays," where they meet and they go over the list of potential targets. And they have them, you know, on baseball cards in some cases. And they’re identifying people that they want to take out and that are on the U.S. kill list. And we have an ever-expanding kill list. You know, after 9/11, there were seven people on the U.S. kill list, and then we had the deck of cards in Iraq and Saddam and his top people. I mean, now there are thousands; it’s unknown how many people are on this kill list. And U.S. citizens—three U.S. citizens were killed in operations ordered by the president in late 2011, including, you know, as we reported on Democracy Now!before, the 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.
And, you know, so the appointment of Brennan to CIA, to me, is the greatest symbol of how deeply invested in covert war and an expansion of wars around the world and the notion that was popularized under the neocons of "the world is a battlefield," that notion that the United States can strike in any country across the world, wherever it determines that terrorists or suspected militants may reside. The most disturbing part of this policy, to me—and I think also to people within the intelligence community who are looking at this—is that there are regions of Yemen or Pakistan where President Obama has authorized the U.S. to strike, even if they don’t know the identities of the people that they’re striking, the so-called "signature strike" policy. The idea that being a military-aged male in a certain region of a particular country around the world, that those people become legitimate targets based on their gender and their age and their geographic presence, that those are going to be legitimate targets is—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, this was something that started under the Bush administration, and when President Obama first took office, he was briefed on this by the then-director—the outgoing director of the CIA, Michael Hayden. And he described to him this policy that they had developed called "signature strikes," where they were looking at patterns of life. If an individual had contact with certain other individuals, if they were traveling in a certain area at certain times, if they were gathering with a certain number of people, that there was a presumption that they must be up to no good, that they are suspected militants or suspected terrorists and that the U.S. could take preemptive action against those people—and by "preemptive action," I mean killing them with a missile—that there was authorization to do that. In some cases, the president has actually pre-cleared theCIA to authorize these strikes without being directly notified.
But President Obama, my understanding from sources, you know, within the intelligence and military world, has really sort of micromanaged this process. And, you know, Brennan has been—Brennan is basically the hit man of this administration, except he never has to go out and do the hitting himself. He orders, you know, planes and missile strikes and AC-130 strikes to, you know, hit in Somalia, in Yemen, in Pakistan. You know, we’re looking right now at a reality that President Obama has essentially extended the very policies that many of his supporters once opposed under President Bush. And I think it says something about the bankrupt nature of partisan politics in this country that the way we feel about life-or-death policies around the world is determined by who happens to be in office. I mean, that’s—that, to me, is a very sobering reality.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a first clip of your film, Jeremy and Rick. The story of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki features prominently in Dirty Wars. His 16-year-old son became the third U.S. citizen to be killed in a drone strike in Yemen in October 2011. President Obama called the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki a, quote, "milestone."
JEREMY SCAHILL: Aden—Yemen’s ancient port city was nothing like Kabul. In Afghanistan, life was defined by the war. Everything revolved around it. But in Yemen, there was no war, at least not officially. The strikes seem to have come out of the blue, and most Yemenis were going about life as usual. It was difficult to know where to start. The Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strikes, saying they had killed dozens of al-Qaeda operatives. But it was unclear who the targets really were or who was even responsible.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jeremy Scahill in Yemen in the film that has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival called Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. Jeremy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: So what we were seeing there was a scene where we’re first getting into what’s happening on the ground in Yemen, and we learn about these—this series of missile strikes, cruise missile strikes, that had happened in December of 2009, the first time that Yemen had been bombed by the United States in seven years. And in the process of looking at who the targets were, we understood that Anwar al-Awlaki, that there had been an attempt to kill him, and in fact that the—that it had been announced that Awlaki had been killed. And that’s how we discovered that Anwar Awlaki was in fact on the kill list. And, of course, Anwar Awlaki is a U.S. citizen.
The first bombing that happened, on December 17th, 2009, where President Obama directly authorized the strike, was on this village of al-Majalah in southern Yemen, and 46 people were killed, including two dozen women and children, in that strike. And so, what Rick and I did is we went down to the heart of where these strikes were happening, and we met with people on the ground, and we interviewed survivors of these—of these missile strikes. And we gathered evidence, and we actually filmed the cruise missile parts. And the U.S. had—did not claim responsibility for those strikes; in fact, the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strikes. And we know from the WikiLeaks cables that were released that General David Petraeus essentially conspired with senior Yemeni officials, including the former president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to cover up the U.S. role in what would become a rapidly expanding U.S. bombing campaign inside of Yemen. And, you know, this administration has continued to pummel Yemen.
Today or—I think today, they claimed for probably the dozenth time in the past couple of years to have killed Said al-Shihri, one of the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And, you know, maybe he has been killed this time; maybe he hasn’t. But what we saw on the ground is that the United States and Yemen claim to be killing al-Qaeda leadership—and they’ve killed a handful of them in Yemen—but for the most part, it seems that the drone strikes are hitting in areas where they’re killing civilians. And what it’s doing is it’s turning people in Yemen that might not be disposed, have anything against the United States, into potential enemies that have a legitimate grudge against America. And that’s—we saw that repeatedly.
AMY GOODMAN: Rick Rowley, your filmmaking is truly remarkable, and you’ve shown that in your previous films, for example, Fourth World War. But in Dirty Wars, that you take this one camera, and you and Jeremy travel the world, as you’ve been covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, going to places that the entire U.S. press corps—I mean, with their armed guards—has rarely been, if ever at all, to track what has been secret until now. Talk about that journey through Yemen.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah, I—the global war on terror is the most important story of our generation, you know, and it’s a story that’s been completely not covered. It remains invisible and hidden from most Americans. I mean, this is a war—this is the longest war in American history. It’s a war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. But it’s happening in the shadows. And so, Dirty Wars — in Dirty Wars, Jeremy and I are trying to make this invisible war that’s being fought in our name, but without our knowledge, visible to the American people. And in order to do that, we had to leave the safety of the Green Zone and go out to where—where the war takes place, talk to the civilians on the ground in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen about how this war is affecting their lives.
So, in Yemen, as a result of the—all these drone strikes, as the backlash against these drone strikes in the south was huge, when we arrived in Yemen, an entire province in the south had been taken over by an al-Qaeda-affiliated organization because of the massive popular anger over the drone strikes and the government’s complicity in the strikes, which, you know, turned the south of Yemen into a terrifying place. I mean, these missile strikes, these night raids destabilize the countries that they happen in, and they turn them into places where it becomes very dangerous to move and to operate. So, in Yemen—I mean, in Afghanistan, as well, Jeremy and I had to travel—it was only possible for us to work as a crew of two, because we had to keep a low profile and try to travel under the radar. We couldn’t roll—I mean, rolling around with security would only make it more dangerous for us.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Rick had to actually—he had to train one of the—our Afghan colleagues in how to use a second camera, so that we could have someone filming me while Rick was filming, you know, the people that we were interviewing, because we wouldn’t have been safe to bring more people than that. So Rick actually was training people on the fly in multiple countries on how to do other things, because of some of the limitations, for security purposes, of having to travel very lightly.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that humbles both of us is that, you know, when you arrive in a village in Afghanistan and knock on someone’s door, you’re the first American they’ve seen since the Americans that kicked that door in and killed half their family. And yet, time and time again, those families invited us in, welcomed us and shared their stories with us, based on—you know, we promised them that we would do everything we could to make their stories be heard in the U.S. And so, it’s actually really—it’s amazing to be here at Sundance, because finally we’re able to keep those promises.
AMY GOODMAN: Afghanistan, Gardez, Jeremy, talk about one of the central focuses of Dirty Wars.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, you know, we—when we began working on this film, it was a very different film. And, you know, I mean, Amy, we—both Rick and I have been onDemocracy Now! I mean, I feel like I grew up atDemocracy Now! On my Facebook page, I list Democracy Now! as my university, and really, really view it that way. And you know, because we were talking to you at the time, that we had started on a very different journey. And we had read about this raid that happened in Gardez, in Paktia province, because a very, very brave reporter named Jerome Starkey, who’s a correspondent for The Times of London, who now is in Africa covering the latest sort of expansion of the not-so-covert war in Mali—
AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll talk about that in a minute.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And we’ll talk about that, yeah. So we had read about this night raid that took place, and it was a horrible massacre. And what happened in Gardez was that U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that there were—you know, a Taliban cell was in a—was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid this house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and another person that they killed in the house, Mohammed Daoud, turned out to be a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S., including by the mercenary—or the private security company MPRI, Military Professional Resources Incorporated. They weren’t even Pashtun, the dominant—the almost exclusive ethnicity of the Taliban. They spoke Dari. And they’re—and what was happening that night was not preparing a suicide bomber; they were celebrating the birth of a child. And they were dancing and had music, and they had women without head covers on.
And they—and so the soldiers raid this house, and they kill these people. And instead of realizing that they had made a horrible mistake and that the intelligence was wrong and it resulted in these people being killed, they actually covered up the killings. And we interview the survivors of this raid, including a man who watched, while he was zip-cuffed, soldiers, American soldiers, digging bullets out of his wife’s dead body. And they then tried to—
AMY GOODMAN: And they did that because?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, so just to finish this part of it, they kill the people, they dig the bullets our of the bodies, then they take into custody all of the men of the house, including a man who has just watched his sister and his wife and his niece killed, and they fly them to a different province, and they’re interrogating them, trying to get them to give up some information that would indicate that the Taliban had a connection to that family. I mean, it shows you how horrid the intelligence is. I mean, these people weren’t even Pashtun. You have a senior police commander. They’re dancing, playing loud music, and they have women without head cover in the house. And what happened is that NATO then issues a press release and made statements anonymously in the media where they said that the U.S. forces had stumbled upon the aftermath of a Taliban honor killing, and they implied that the family—that the women were killed by their own murderous families.
And so, in the course of the film, we investigate that night raid, and we learn that the individuals who did that raid were members of the Joint Special Operations Command. And we know that because the then-head of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Admiral William McRaven, showed up in this village with scores of Afghan soldiers and U.S. forces. And they—there’s a scene, and we show this in the film, where they offload a sheep, and they offer to sacrifice the sheep to say—you know, ask for forgiveness. It’s an Afghan cultural tradition, and it was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. And they offload the sheep, and they’re offering to sacrifice it in the very place where the raid had taken place. And then Admiral McRaven goes into the home and says his men were responsible for killing the women and the police commander, and he asks for forgiveness from the head of the family, Haji Sharabuddin. Had a brave photographer named Jeremy Kelly not been there to snap the photographs that you see in our film of Admiral McRaven in Gardez, we may never have known who the actual killers were that day.
And both Jerome Starkey and I have filed Freedom of Information Act requests. We’ve tried to get information out of the U.S. military. My requests have been bounced all around the military. And the most current update I have is months old from them. They said that it’s in an unnamed agency awaiting review. We don’t know if anyone was disciplined for the action. We don’t know if anyone was ever held accountable for the action. All we know is that Admiral McRaven and a bunch of soldiers showed up with a sheep and said, "We did this, and we’re sorry."
AMY GOODMAN: And tried to destroy Jerome Starkey’s reputation, meanwhile, back in Kabul in a news conference.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean, Jerome Starkey—there’s a couple of journalists in our film who really emerge as the heroes of the story that we’re telling. Another one is currently in jail in Yemen right now, and we can maybe talk about him, named Abdulelah Haider Shaye—and we’ve talked about him on the show before—in jail because President Obama intervened, when he was about to be pardoned, to keep him in jail after he exposed the role, U.S. role, in certain missile strikes.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean he intervened, if you could just say for a moment?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, there was—the journalist who first exposed the missile strike I was talking about earlier in al-Majalah, Yemen, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, had taken photographs of the U.S. missile parts, and that’s how we first learned that it was in fact U.S. cruise missiles. And Yemen doesn’t have cruise missiles. And so, after he did his reporting and continued to report on the expanding U.S. air war in Yemen, he was snatched from his home by the U.S.-backed Yemeni counterterrorism units and then was put on trial for allegedly being an al-Qaeda facilitator or propagandist and was sentenced to five years in prison. There was huge protests as his trial was denounced as a sham by international human rights and media organizations. And he was about to be pardoned by the Yemeni president, because there was tremendous pressure in the country, and then President Obama called President Ali Abdullah Saleh and expressed his concern over the release of Abdulelah Haider Shaye.
AMY GOODMAN: The reporter.
JEREMY SCAHILL: The reporter. And then the pardon was ripped up after that. And his lawyers say, clearly, that he’s in jail because of Obama’s intervention, that he would have been released. And lest you think this is some kind of a conspiracy theory, you can hop onto the White House website and see the readout of the phone call from that day. The White House put it openly. When I called the State Department to ask them about the case, they said, "We stand by President Obama’s position on—initial position on this," regarding this journalist. They don’t even refer to him as a journalist, "regarding this individual." He had worked with ABC News, The Washington Post — you know, very small, unknown media outlets. And I heard from a very—someone inside of a very prominent news organization in the U.S. told me that they had been called by the administration when they were working with Abdulelah Haider Shaye and told that "You should stop working with him, because he takes his paychecks and gives them to al-Qaeda." I mean, they tried to slander this journalist behind the scenes and in front.
But you asked about Jerome Starkey. When Jerome Starkey first exposed the cover-up of Gardez, NATOpublicly attacked him by name and accused him of lying. And then, when more information started to come out about who did it, then they changed their story, but they never apologized to Jerome Starkey.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Rick Rowley, you have this remarkable footage. Aside from you both going to Gardez and interviewing survivors, talk about the video footage you retrieve there and the hands of the U.S. soldiers that you see.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah, one of incredible things in Gardez, the family gave us cellphone videos that they had taken the night of the raid. And there was one clip in particular. It was early in the morning. It’s a shaky video. And we just thought it was just another sort of shaky video of the bodies. But then you can hear voices come over it, and they’re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night’s killings, getting their story straight. And, I mean, you hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.
AMY GOODMAN: And you see their hands.
RICK ROWLEY: And you see their hands moving the corpses around and photographing the bullet holes. But we never get to see their faces. All we have are their voices. We spent a long time actually trying to analyze the audio to figure out, because a name is mentioned in one part of it, but it’s too thin and distorted on the cellphone to find out. I mean, these are the—these are the scraps and pieces that we have to use to reconstruct the story of these wars, because everything is systematically hidden from us. I mean, all we had to go on were these pictures that Jeremy Kelly took, this cellphone video, and that—
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Kelly is the photographer, videographer for Jerome Starkey.
RICK ROWLEY: For Jerome, yes, who is now the Kabul bureau chief—
JEREMY SCAHILL: Afghan correspondent.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah. All we had were these tiny little scraps of clues that weren’t even supposed to exist, and pictures of a person who was unknown at the time. I mean, Admiral William McRaven, you know, no one knew who he was. I mean, that was the first sort of shock here—looked at him, see his rank, read his name. But he’s not—he wasn’t from the NATO command. He wasn’t from the Eastern Regional Command that owns that battle space. He was not even—I mean, why was this elite force operating, kicking in the doors on farmers? I mean, that is the sort of the—the mystery that begins the investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: And then you take this forward, Jeremy, back to the United States and show McRaven a photograph.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. And so, you know, after—after we learn that this figure, William McRaven, was the leader of this raid, it sort of—our film was sort of in the—this journey was sort of like pulling on the tail of an elephant that’s behind a hidden wall. And you’re pulling on it, and you’re pulling on it, and the cracks start to show this behemoth that’s behind a wall, and you realize that this is part of a much bigger story. And really, that kicked off a journey that took us to Yemen and Somalia and elsewhere.
And, you know, for us, I mean, the sort of—just this incredible looking-glass moment happened when Osama bin Laden was killed. And all of a sudden, everyone is talking about JSOC. It’s everywhere. I mean, we had spent so much time embedded in this story, where there was very little being written about it, except for a small circle of journalists. And all of a sudden, the people that—whose journey we’d been tracking had become national heroes. And Disney tried to trademark SEAL Team 6, and, you know, the Hollywood producers got in bed with theCIA to make their version of the—you know, the events, the sort of official history.
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re saying that’s the film...?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Oh, Zero Dark Thirty. I mean, it’s—and we can talk about that film later. But, I mean, the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood over this issue is one that I think needs to be very, very thoroughly debated. And I’m thankful that we are debating it. And, you know, one great thing that has happened as a result of Zero Dark Thirty is that people are actually talking about torture and what has happened in the past. But for us to see, you know, McRaven sitting in front of Congress and JSOC being talked about publicly was really an incredible experience, because we had seen this other side. Our film is about all these things that these same units did that almost never get talked about. What Americans know about JSOC is overwhelmingly limited to what happened in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And, you know, Rick often points out sort of the irony of the way that that’s covered versus the role these forces play around the world.
RICK ROWLEY: Yeah, I mean, we’re flooded with details about one raid, the—on May 2nd, 2011. We know everything about it. We know how many SEALs were in the helicopters. We know what kind of helicopters they were. We know what kind of rifles they were carrying. We know that they had a dog with them that was a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. We know everything about this raid. But that same year, there were 30,000 other night raids in Afghanistan. So, we know everything about this, but those—those are all hidden from us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to a pair of remarkable investigative journalists, whose investigations are now a film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, that has just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival in its 10th year. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: The great Somali Canadian, K’naan, singing "Somalia," his home country. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, and we’re with two great journalists: Rick Rowley and Jeremy Scahill. Jeremy, a longtimeDemocracy Now! correspondent and national security correspondent for The Nation. Rick Rowley, videographer, filmmaker, who has been in Iraq and Afghanistan for many years. They have now put together this film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. And it has premiered here. In fact, K’naan was here celebrating the first night. And I want to talk about Somalia and Mali, but let’s start with a clip of this film in Somalia. Jeremy, can you introduce it?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, we—what we discovered in Somalia was that the U.S. had been for years outsourcing its kill list in Somalia to local warlords. And in our film, you meet two of those warlords: Mohamed Qanyare and Indha Adde. And Indha Adde at one time was protecting people who were on the U.S. kill list, and he was an ally of the al-Qaeda and al-Shabab figures within Somalia. And he has been flipped and is now working with the U.S. So, here we meet Indha Adde, this notorious warlord who’s working on the side of the U.S.
JEREMY SCAHILL: In an earlier life, Indha Adde had been America’s enemy, offering protection to people on the U.S. kill list. But the warlord had since changed sides. He was now on the U.S. payroll and assumed the title of general.
So he’s saying that the fiercest fighting that they’re doing right now is happening right here.
The men fired across the rooftops, but it didn’t make sense to me what we were doing here—or what the Americans were doing here in Somalia, arming this warlord-turned-general for what seemed like a senseless war.
UNIDENTIFIED: We’ve got to move.
JEREMY SCAHILL: So these were Shabab fighters you buried here.
GENINDHA ADDE: [translated] If recapture fighters alive, we give them medical care, unless they are foreigners. The foreigners, we execute.
JEREMY SCAHILL: If you capture a foreigner alive, you execute them on the battlefield?
GENINDHA ADDE: [translated] Yes. The others should feel no mercy.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S.-backed Somali warlord Indha Adde. Journalist Jeremy Scahill there in Somalia, Rick Rowley filming. Jeremy, talk about Somalia and Mali, as we—the world learns about Mali now, with the French attacks on Mali and what’s happened in Algeria, and how that ties into the central theme of your film about JSOC.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, one thing that’s interesting, you know, we have some people from within the JSOC community whose identities we protect in the film, and we’re talking to them. And we actually, you know, two years ago, were considering going to Mali, because we were hearing from our sources that there were covert operations that were happening inside of Mali tracking these—the spread of these al-Qaeda affiliates. And, you know, this is something that we’re seeing throughout the Horn of Africa and in places throughout the Sahel and North Africa, where these groups are getting stronger and stronger. And so, you know, the U.S. is increasingly getting itself involved in these dirty wars in Africa. And, you know, we could have easily gone to Uganda or Somalia or Mali and reported on this, but there’s—you know, since AFRICOM was created as a full free-standing command, like Southern Command and Central Command, AFRICOM has been expanding these wars.
AMY GOODMAN: And McRaven, where he is now?
JEREMY SCAHILL: McRaven is the commander of the Special Operations Command. He is—William McRaven is the most powerful figure in the United States military. He is an incredibly brilliant man. He is very shrewd. He understands media. And he is in charge of the most elite force the U.S. has ever produced, and he has been givencarte blanche to do what he believes is right around the world, empowered much more under President Obama than they were under President Bush. In fact, you see someone who has worked within JSOC saying that to us in our film. And out of Camp Lemonnier, which is in Djibouti, the U.S. has been expanding these covert wars in Africa. And most of what—most Americans, what they know about Somalia is Black Hawk Down. And I think in our film you’re going to see a very different reality, and you’re going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war.
AMY GOODMAN: Is it too cynical to say—I mean, this is the fourth anniversary of President Obama promising to close Guantánamo. It hasn’t happened. There’s still scores of men there, 166 men. Something—more than 80 of them have been cleared, yet they’re still there. Is it too cynical to say that this "dirty war," as you call it, the targeted killings, are a way to end all of these prisons? Because you don’t detain prisoners, you simply kill them.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, that’s what people like Jack Goldsmith and other, you know, former Bush legal advisers and national security team—I mean, the irony of these guys, who have no moral standing to talk about these issues, are saying, "Well, Obama is just killing these people. At least we stuck them in some sort of a prison." I mean, it’s devastating that this is what these Bush people are saying about Obama. That’s what they’re alleging.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, devastating is your film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. It has premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival, has just been picked up IFC, Sundance Selects, which means it will go out to scores of movie theaters around the country. This is just the beginning. And I congratulate you both, Jeremy Scahill, Rick Rowley, of Big Noise Films and The Nation magazine and Democracy Now! What an amazing film. This is our first day at the Sundance Film Festival. I thank all for all the work they’ve done.

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