"There are hundreds of millions of people who have a tragic intimacy with the twisted and brutal soul of American imperialism. Okinawans. Guatemalans. Cubans. Congolese. Brazilians. Argentines. Indonesians. Iranians. Palestinians. Panamanians. Vietnamese. Cambodians. Filipinos. South Koreans. Taiwanese. Nicaraguans. Salvadorans. Afghans. Iraqis. Yemenis. Somalis. They can all tell us who we are, if we can listen.Quote by Chris Hedges on America's covert dirty war which in the end just leads to more blowback.
But we do not. We are as ignorant, gullible and naive as children. We celebrate fictitious red-white-and-blue virtues while our clandestine armies, which at times achieve short-term objectives but always finally plunge us deeper into violence, have steadily weakened and discredited the nation as well as the purported values for which it stands. These clandestine armies travel the globe, awash in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, sowing dragon’s teeth that rise up later, like the warriors in the myth of the Golden Fleece, to become mirror images of our own monstrosities."
Quote by Glenn Greenwald from article US Drone Strikes Target Rescuers in Pakistan – and the West Stays Silent by Glenn Greenwald,via Information Clearing House Aug. 20,2012 Today's topics: *Chris Hedges on the immorality of America using covert operations"At least six militants were killed when US drones fired missiles twice on Sunday in North Waziristan Agency.
"In the first strike, four missiles were fired on two vehicles in the Mana Gurbaz area of district Shawal in North Waziristan Agency, while two missiles were fired in the second strike at the same site where militants were removing the wreckage of their destroyed vehicles."
An unnamed Pakistani official identically told Agence France-Presse that a second US drone "fired two missiles at the site of this morning's attack, where militants were removing the wreckage of their two destroyed vehicles".
(Those killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan are more or less automatically deemed "militants" by unnamed "officials", and then uncritically called such by most of the western press – a practice that inexcusably continues despite revelations that the Obama administration has redefined "militants" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone".)
*Glenn Greenwald on US Drone attacks on first responders, rescuers and "Good Samaritans"
*Julianne Assange narrowly escapes being unlawfully arrested by British Police after he was granted asylum by Ecuador Embassy.
We begin with the fate of Julianne Assange as he is granted asylum by the nation of Ecuador in defiance of the British and American governments.
To realize how serious this is imagine a foreign government using force to remove someone given asylum by the British or American Embassy -we should note wars are fought over such an egregious violation of another nation's sovereignty.
A dozen or so Latin American countries have given their support to Ecuador and its sovereign right to grant asylum.
Assange demands that the Obama administration give up on its war on Whistleblowers and its witch-hunt of employees and supporters of Wikileaks.
Even someone posting documents obtained by Wikileaks can be targeted as an enemy combatant or a traitor and giving aid and comfort to the enemy .
As we have seen in the US even well respected humanitarian groups and relief agencies are treated as suspects because they give aid to both sides in any conflict. Relief agencies such as even the Red Cross and Red Crescent and human rights watchdogs and journalists are refused entry into areas of conflict so they are unable to help those in need or to document human rights violations committed by either side in a conflict.
America doesn't mind when criticisms over human rights violations are made about America's enemies but are outraged whenever anyone speaks about human rights violations and war crimes committed by US personnel or those of her allies.
As Chris Hedges points out the hyocrisy of the USA and NATO and their allies who use the same sort of covert tactics as those used by those America's deems as Terrorists. So the USA engages in murders, assassinations, bombing civilians, using torture to terrorize all who dare speak out about America's on going dirty wars .
Glenn Greenwald notes that one definition of a terrorist' attack is its brutality and barbarism in what's referred to as :the second tap"- first an area is bombed and when rescuers and other civilians rush into help those injured a second bomb goes off manually triggered by the same terrorist or by a second terrorists. The USA has now become notorious for using similar tactics against suspected terrorists by using Drones to bomb a village or neighborhood and launching a second or third attack once first responders, good Samaritans and the curious rush into the area where the first bomb exploded.
Attacking civilians or medical personnel or fire fighters and so forth is considered a serious War Crime and a Crime Against Humanity and those who took part and those who gave the orders no matter how far up the line of command including the Commander in Chief must be held accountable for these crimes.
But Americans need not fear since according to their successive governments and presidents such rules no longer apply to the USA or its allies and there is nothing other nations can legally do about it.
If the rest of the nations were to stand up to the USA forming a unified front that might dissuade the USA . Another course of action which I have suggested before is abolish the use of a veto in the UN Security Council or hold a general vote at the UN to chastise the USA by a temporary ban form the UN followed by imposing sanctions on the USA .
This is problematic because the United Nations is located in the USA but that can be changed by having the UN temporary quarters set up in a more neutral nation.
The UN is not just a building in New York for it is also an idea and an ideal and a vision of nations not reflexively going to war without considering other courses of action.
'War on whistleblowers must end!' - Assange speech at Ecuador Embassy
also see transcript at Official Statement by WikiLeaks' Julian Assange From the Ecuadorian Embassy, By Julian Assange, WikiLeaks | Public Statement, Aug. 20,2012 Also of note today are the next two articles accusing the USA of war crimes and Crimes against humanity.
Chris Hedges accuses the USA of using tactics similar to the so-called Terrorists. The US uses covert operations to destabilize nations to fund mercenaries to carry out murders, assassinations, plundering, raping and torture all in the name of Capitalism and Democracy . The USA has created hundreds of new agencies to deal with the Global War on Terror. Most of these agencies have no accountability and are just told to get the job done as they did in Chile in 1970-1973 which ended with the American sanctioned murder of the popular reformer Pres. Allende and the murder of thousands of unarmed Allende supporters all overseen by the USA and Britain and other countries.
The War in the Shadows By Chris Hedges August 21, 2012 "TruthDig" via Information Clearing House
...The killers and the paymasters, the spies and gangsters, the terrorists and jihadists, on all sides of the divide, have grown in numbers to carry out a vast war in the shadows. They are determined to perpetuate the senseless violence and mayhem that are the currency of their profession. And they make peace and diplomacy impossible. That is their goal. Sen. Frank Church in 1975, after chairing a Senate committee investigation into U.S. intelligence activities, defined “covert action” as a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”
The multitudes of crimes these killers, torturers, kidnappers, propagandists, special operations units and spies have carried out in our name are well known to those outside our gates.
There are hundreds of millions of people who have a tragic intimacy with the twisted and brutal soul of American imperialism. Okinawans. Guatemalans. Cubans. Congolese. Brazilians. Argentines. Indonesians. Iranians. Palestinians. Panamanians. Vietnamese. Cambodians. Filipinos. South Koreans. Taiwanese. Nicaraguans. Salvadorans. Afghans. Iraqis. Yemenis. Somalis. They can all tell us who we are, if we can listen. But we do not. We are as ignorant, gullible and naive as children.
...We celebrate fictitious red-white-and-blue virtues while our clandestine armies, which at times achieve short-term objectives but always finally plunge us deeper into violence, have steadily weakened and discredited the nation as well as the purported values for which it stands. These clandestine armies travel the globe, awash in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, sowing dragon’s teeth that rise up later, like the warriors in the myth of the Golden Fleece, to become mirror images of our own monstrosities.
US Drone Strikes Target Rescuers in Pakistan – and the West Stays Silent by Glenn Greenwald,via Information Clearing House Aug. 20,2012
Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration
But attacking rescuers (and arguably worse, bombing funerals of America's drone victims) is now a tactic routinely used by the US in Pakistan. In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that "the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals." Specifically: "at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims." That initial TBIJ report detailed numerous civilians killed by such follow-up strikes on rescuers, and established precisely the terror effect which the US government has long warned are sown by such attacks:
"Yusufzai, who reported on the attack, says those killed in the follow-up strike 'were trying to pull out the bodies, to help clear the rubble, and take people to hospital.' The impact of drone attacks on rescuers has been to scare people off, he says: 'They've learnt that something will happen. No one wants to go close to these damaged building anymore.'"
Since that first bureau report, there have been numerous other documented cases of the use by the US of this tactic: "On [4 June], US drones attacked rescuers in Waziristan in western Pakistan minutes after an initial strike, killing 16 people in total according to the BBC. On 28 May, drones were also reported to have returned to the attack in Khassokhel near Mir Ali." Moreover, "between May 2009 and June 2011, at least 15 attacks on rescuers were reported by credible news media, including the New York Times, CNN, ABC News and Al Jazeera."
In June, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, said that if "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime." There is no doubt that there have been.
(A different UN official, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, this weekend demanded that the US "must open itself to an independent investigation into its use of drone strikes or the United Nations will be forced to step in", and warned that the demand "will remain at the top of the UN political agenda until some consensus and transparency has been achieved". For many American progressives, caring about what the UN thinks is so very 2003.)
The frequency with which the US uses this tactic is reflected by this December 2011 report from ABC News on the drone killing of 16-year-old Tariq Khan and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed, just days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest US drones:
"Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed's deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack."
Not only does that tactic intimidate rescuers from helping the wounded and removing the dead, but it also ensures that journalists will be unwilling to go to the scene of a drone attack out of fear of a follow-up attack.
This has now happened yet again this weekend in Pakistan, which witnessed what Reuters calls "a flurry of drone attacks" that "pounded northern Pakistan over the weekend", "killing 13 people in three separate attacks". The attacks "came as Pakistanis celebrate the end of the holy month of Ramadan with the festival of Eid al-Fitr." At least one of these weekend strikes was the type of "double tap" explosion aimed at rescuers which, the US government says, is the hallmark of Hamas:
"At least six militants were killed when US drones fired missiles twice on Sunday in North Waziristan Agency.
"In the first strike, four missiles were fired on two vehicles in the Mana Gurbaz area of district Shawal in North Waziristan Agency, while two missiles were fired in the second strike at the same site where militants were removing the wreckage of their destroyed vehicles."
An unnamed Pakistani official identically told Agence France-Presse that a second US drone "fired two missiles at the site of this morning's attack, where militants were removing the wreckage of their two destroyed vehicles". (Those killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan are more or less automatically deemed "militants" by unnamed "officials", and then uncritically called such by most of the western press – a practice that inexcusably continues despite revelations that the Obama administration has redefined "militants" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone".)
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