Archive for June 1st, 2009
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
In the video here, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks radio show on Sirius claims he does not know who Col. Ralph Peters is, but tells us he has to run a clip from Fox News because Peters calls for murdering detainees held at Gitmo. It’s fodder for Uygur’s liberal mill, an example of how crazy those right-wingers are.
Ralph Peters is a neocon, not a right-winger (a rather ambiguous term to say the least, usually employed as a pejorative). Peters was in military intelligence and he not only appears on Fox News but PBS and CNN as well (there really is no difference between these corporate propaganda networks).
In 2006, he called for redrawing borders in the Middle East and earlier this year said Afghanistan is a waste of time and the U.S. should go “punitive” on the natives. Last month he advocated killing “partisan” journalists. Peters is a neocon’s neocon — to say nothing of a psychopath — and has no reluctance in speaking his mind when it comes to mass murder and engaging in crimes against humanity.
In a segment with Fox’s Neil Cavuto, Peters says the “terrorists” now at Gitmo should have been slaughtered in the field. “Just like in the movies,” says Peters, “monsters deserve to die.”
Cavuto reminds Peters that some of the detainees might be innocent, but Peters will have nothing of it. Sure, he says, there will be “miscarriages of justice” but we shouldn’t let that get in the way of killing Muslims. “We are better off killing known terrorists on the spot,” he argues. A “dead terrorist poses a lot less legal problems down the road.” In other words, kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.
“In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda,” the New York Times reported on June 21, 2004. “They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization’s inner workings.”
Even the CIA admitted the detainees were not only at best low-level recruits but “innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war,” in other words they happened to live in the country when the United States invaded and attacked the CIA-ISI created Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As it turns out, according to military tribunal documents released under an Associated Press FIOA, many of the men currently at Gitmo were sold to the United States for bounties. Most are completely innocent of any crime.
You might think Col. Peters is a throwback to Bush and his neocon troglodytes. But think again. Obama is more deadly than Bush when it comes to Afghanistan and now Pakistan. “Simple arithmetic reveals that the eleven days under the Obama clock were 18-50% more deadly for Afghan civilians than the twenty days under the Bush regime,” writes Marc W. Herold. Obama is a victim of “rotten advice,” Herold claims, but this is wrong because Obama decides nothing, he is merely a good-looking guy our rulers need to read the teleprompters.
Over at the Pentagon, there is no shortage of Col. Ralph Peters who’d like nothing better than to mow down the Gitmo detainees and put an end once and for all to the touchy issue. It’s a public relations problem at this point and one they hope will go away soon. Ralph Peters, on the other hand, is retired and can speak his mind. It’s easy to do since the corporate media repeatedly characterizes all of the detainees — the vast majority of them innocent — as evil al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists.
Obama tells us they are all terrorists too. But he’s not about to call for them to be lined up against a wall and shot. He has more finesse. Instead Muslims will be slaughtered in great numbers half around the world and the complicit corporate media will not report it – or will cover it up with more blather about terrorists who hate us for our freedoms. Monsters will be killed, just like they are in the movies, and too bad for the men, women, and children who have nothing to do with the contrived GWOT.
Obama is a front man for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He takes on Bush’s legacy — more than a million innocent Iraqis killed, millions more made homeless and subjected to never-ending misery — and Obama moves to the next level: killing an increasing number of innocents in Pakistan. Obama and his puppet masters are directly responsible for the massive humanitarian crisis now unfolding in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. More than two million refugees need urgent help, according to the Red Cross. For our rulers, this is merely another scene played out on the bloody stage of the Theater of the Macabre.
Since an appreciable number of these refugees likely support or at least accept the rule of the Taliban, maybe the United States should carpet bomb the Lahore Refugee Camp in Swabi. After all, as Peters says, there will be “miscarriages of justice.”
Psychedelic rock booms through The Toker’s Bowl. Young and some not-so-young people smoke pot through a variety of devices in the store’s Vapour Lounge. And owner Marc Emery stands in the middle of it all, proclaiming his goal of defeating the U.S. war on drugs.
Known as the Prince of Pot, Emery has sold millions of marijuana seeds around the world by mail over the past decade. In doing so, he has drawn the attention of U.S. drug officials, who want him extradited to Seattle. Emery has agreed to plead guilty in Seattle to one count of marijuana distribution in exchange for dismissal of all other counts, and the U.S. District Attorney is pressing for a sentence of five to eight years in a U.S. prison.
The case is the latest twist in Emery’s two-decade-long fight against the prohibition of marijuana in North America. To his supporters, he is a brave crusader for the use and sale of a drug with both recreational and medicinal value. To drug officials, he is a criminal and the biggest purveyor of marijuana from Canada into the United States.
Emery sits “right smack in the middle” of the North American debate over marijuana prohibition, said Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, D.C. St. Pierre predicted that Emery’s trial would “kick-start it all again.”
But drug officials say they are simply going after one of the world’s top 50 drug traffickers. U.S. authorities claim Emery’s seeds have grown $2.2 billion worth of pot.
“We’ve been very clear it had nothing to do with Mr. Emery’s political stand,” said Emily Langlie of the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Seattle.
Emery himself, a two-time candidate for mayor of Vancouver who has never shied away from publicity, seems almost gleeful about the legal saga. He calls it the greatest platform he could have in his crusade, and his Facebook page notes that these days he hums the chorus from Canadian musician Baron Longfellow’s “I’m Going to Need a Miracle Tonight”. He predicted he will be in a U.S. jail by August, and will then ask supporters to push for his transfer to a Canadian jail.
“I do have millions of supporters in the U.S. and Canada,” he said, unburdened by false modesty. “It’s my job as leader of the cannabis culture to thwart the United States government.”
KABUL — The U.S. military in Afghanistan is launching a Facebook page, a YouTube site and feeds on Twitter as part of a new communications effort to reach readers who get their information on the Internet rather than in newspapers, officials said Monday.
The effort, which officials described as a way to counter Taliban propaganda, represents a sea change in how the military can communicate its message.
“There’s an entire audience segment that seeks its news from alternative means outside traditional news sources, and we want to make sure we’re engaging them as well,” said Col. Greg Julian, the top U.S. spokesman in Afghanistan.
The military on Monday announced the death of U.S. service member the previous day from non-combat-related injuries in southern Afghanistan by posting the news on Twitter hours before announcing it in a more formal press statement.
The military is also encouraging troops to post stories and photos on Web sites in an effort to portray daily life in Afghanistan, including stories about development projects that may not make the news.
Many military commands and individual troops have long used social networking sites. The Air Force and Army have Facebook pages, as does Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq. But the new effort in Afghanistan is the first in an active war zone to attempt to harness the power of social networking sites as a primary tool to release information.
So far the military’s Facebook and Twitter sites in Afghanistan have been in a testing phase only. Officials hope to attract thousands more users after a formal launch this week.
U.S. officials here have long said that the military is losing the information war to the Taliban, which routinely makes false claims about how many U.S. soldiers its forces have killed or how many civilians might have died in an airstrike. Taliban militants post claims on Web sites, and spokesmen send text messages to reporters.
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