American War Crimes

 

American Government Willfully Supported The Islamic State [ 10 August 2015 ]
That is what Michael Flynn, lately the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency says You might think that he knows. Making war, using other people's armies of course makes sense to the psychopaths who run
Israel.

 

US Dropping Weapons To Arabs In Iraq [ 10 August 2015 ]
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The US and NATO are supplying the militants in Iraq and Syria with weapons and ammunition to fight against the Damascus and Baghdad governments, media reports said.......

In March, Qasim al-Araji, the head of the Badr Organization in Iraq, told parliament he had evidence the US has deliberately armed the Islamic Army, according to a report carried by the Arabic language Almasalah. The London-based organization Conflict Armament Research previously reported that ISIL fighters are using “significant quantities” of arms including M16 assault rifles marked “property of the US government.”
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It all sounds like Vietnam again albeit Iraq is about power, the power to control Oil. Who controls Obama? Who is using Obama to steal Oil? Try the Zionist crazies running Israel.

 

Colin Powell - Hero Or Hooligan?
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The Man Who Sold The War
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is dead at the age of 84. His enduring legacy will always be his role in pushing the Iraq War. 42 days before the invasion, Powell held up a vial to symbolize anthrax in front of the U.N. and lied:

The facts on Iraqis’ behavior–Iraq’s behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort–no effort–to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Powell’s remarks. He was a retired four-star general and probably the most respected member of the Bush administration. Here’s Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell’s chief of staff at the time, in an op-ed from 2018:

Following Mr. Powell’s presentation on that cold day, I considered what we had done. At the moment, I thought all our work was for naught — and despite his efforts we did not gain substantial international buy-in. But polls later that day and week demonstrated he did convince many Americans. I knew that was why he was chosen to make the presentation in the first place: his standing with the American people was more solid than that of any other member of the Bush administration...........

An NYT article about Powell’s connection to the Iraq War published shortly after his death refers to him as a “reluctant warrior.” This vision of Powell as a courageous man temporarily hoodwinked by Bush only makes sense if you know very little about his military career.

The NYT obituary also doesn’t mention the My Lai Massacre. Back in 1968 Powell was a young Army major serving as an assistant chief of staff of operations for the Americal Division. He was tasked with investigating a letter written by Tom Glen, a solider in the 11th Light Infantry Brigade. Glen didn’t mention My Lai specifically, but he detailed how the barbaric treatment of Vietnamese civilians had shocked him.

“It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs,” wrote Glen. “What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated.”

If you want to read a brilliant (and maddening) book about the reality that Glen described, I can’t recommend Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves highly enough. If you want some insight into how atrocities like My Lai were whitewashed, you could do worse than Colin Powell’s report on Glen’s letter.

“There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs,” concluded Powell, “but this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division..in direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

Here’s Norman Solomon and the late Robert Parry writing about Powell’s report in 1996:

Powell’s findings, of course, were false. But it would take another American hero, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed American comrades who had participated in the massacre.

On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG’s office conducted an aggressive official investigation and the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.

But Powell’s peripheral role in the My Lai cover-up did not slow his climb up the Army’s ladder. Powell pleaded ignorance about the actual My Lai massacre, which pre-dated his arrival at the American. Glen’s letter disappeared into the National Archives — to be unearthed only years later by British journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sims for their book Four Hours in My Lai. In his best-selling memoirs, Powell did not mention his brush-off of Tom Glen’s complaint.

On Israel/Palestine Powell was basically as awful as everyone else. He annoyed some in the pro-Israel crowd by talking about an eventual Palestinian state, but he certainly didn’t do anything to upset the apple cart. This stayed the same long after he left office. In a 2017 speech to the World Jewish Congress he praised the IDF: “I came to know and admire fellow soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. I came to understand the commitment of blood we had with Israel. I was a student of the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. And an American professional soldier, I marvel at the professionalism and successes of the Israel Defense Forces.”

In that same talk he championed the Zionist cause: “The vision and prophecy of Theodor Herzl has become real so many years after his death. And America’s dedication, America’s alliance and America’s support of the democratic State of Israel has never wavered and never will.”

Powell was obviously a very intelligent person and maybe there’s reason to believe he was simply going through the motions with some of this stuff. An email leak from 2016 revealed his true feelings about Iran’s nuclear program. He knew that the fear mongering around the country mirrored the Iraq narrative he helped sell. He also acknowledged something U.S. lawmakers can’t reference in public: the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Powell wrote those emails to Democratic Party donor Jeffrey Leeds about Benjamin Netanyahu, after the former Israeli prime minister blasted the nuclear deal in a 2015 congressional speech.

“Negotiators can’t get what he wants,” Powell told Leeds. “Anyway, Iranians can’t use (a nuclear weapon) if they finally make one. The boys in Tehran know Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran, and we have thousands.”

“Can’t get enough sanctions to break (Iran),” he wrote later. “Lots of BS around about their progress. Bibi likes to say ‘a year away,’ as do our intel guys. … (It) ain’t that easy to do.”

Rereading Powell’s actual thoughts on this stuff, I was reminded of a story from Andrew Cockburn’s Donald Rumsfeld book where George W. Bush asks his dad what a neoconservative is:

Though he refused to read newspapers, he was aware of criticism that his administration had been excessively beholden to a particular clique, and wanted to know more about them. One day during that holiday, according to friends of the family, 43 asked his father, “What’s a neocon?” “Do you want names, or a description?” answered 41 “Description.” “Well,” said the former president of the United States, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.”

There were a number of questionable Powell tributes this week, but the most telling might belong to Joy Reid [ ugly black ]. The MSNBC host is a consistent critic of most Republicans, but not Powell. Emphasis mine:

“General Colin Powell’s death is so shocking and heartbreaking,” she tweeted. “He had some tough moments around our wars, but was a fundamentally good and decent man and a great American we could all be proud of. I know my Caribbean-American fam certainly are. Wishing peace to his soul & family.”

I’ve seen a lot of strained euphemisms implemented in the service of our imperial project, but this one is certainly up there.

Aqeel Al-Rubai is a 42-year-old cosmetics shop owner in Baghdad. His cousin was killed in the war and he blames his dad’s fatal heart attack on the invasion. “What does that remorse do for us?,” he asked Al Jazeera after Powell died, referring to the late statesman’s public regrets. “A whole country was destroyed, and we continue to pay the price. But I say may God have mercy on him.”

People like Aqeel constitute the painful blot in Powell’s career. There’s millions of stories like his, but they don’t add up to much more than some tough moments for a reluctant warrior.

Victory in San Francisco
You might recall that Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube denied their services for an event featuring Leila Khaled at San Francisco State University (SFSU) last fall. The tech giants took action in response to a campaign waged by pro-Israel groups, who insisted that the companies were providing a platform for terrorism.

“This is a dangerous attack on free speech and academic freedom from Big Tech: Zoom cannot claim veto power over the content of our nation’s classrooms and public events,” said Palestine Legal director Dima Khalidi in a statement at the time. “The threat to democracy is elevated by the fact that Zoom’s decision to stamp out discussion of Palestinian freedom comes in response to a systematic repression campaign driven by the Israeli government and its allies.”

The university didn’t exactly sit this one out. Here’s David Spero writing about the situation at our website recently:

Instead of providing an alternative platform, SFSU posted defamatory articles about the open classroom on their websites and falsely warned Professors Abdulhadi and Kinukawa that they could themselves be criminally liable for holding this virtual open classroom. The University is bound by contract, law, and AAUP policy to protect academic freedom; and by allowing outside tech corporations to shut down a for-credit class, SFSU has jeopardized academic freedom for any teacher with a counter-narrative.

This all led to a probe from a campus faculty rights panel. Late last month that panel ruled that the school failed to protect the professors from censorship. “This is a huge victory not only for us, but for everybody speaking about Palestine and for our ability to teach about Palestine as part of the indivisibility of justice,” Abdulhadi told The Electronic Intifada’s Nora Barrows-Friedman. “After the pain and the anguish for over a year that we have suffered, by being vilified by character assassinations, by being chased by Zionists, by the hate mail, by all the nastiness that has happened, by the fact that our university did not have our backs, we were vindicated.”

If SFSU president Lynn Mahoney ends up vetoing the decision, the complaint will go to legal arbitration.
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Powell helped the My Lai Massacre and was a major help with the  Iraq War.