Anchorage, Alaska Breaks Temperature Record at 90 Degrees Fahrenheit- Another Omen For the Future

That's 32.2 degrees Celsius to you in the rest of the world. Understand that Alaska is America's Siberia- far north and freezing cold, partly above the Arctic Circle.

But that's not hot enough to change the minds of the global warming deniers, or their cousins in denial and dishonesty, those who deny that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the cause.

Maybe if it hits 100 degrees they'll budge?

NAH! Ideology always trumps mere reality. As Ronald Reagan once said: "Facts are stupid things."

So he just made up his own. As does his GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) successor Donald J. "Jackass" Trump.

And ideology driven by economic interest has the weight of a mountain!

In case you hadn't noticed, the oil industry in particular is huge and lies at the core of the current global economic structure, as it is the main fuel for transportation, including airplanes and ships, which makes it a critical military commodity. Saudi Arabia's power is derived from petroleum, and the U.S. strongly protects Saudi Arabia, (even after the murder of a contributor to the Washington Post, the in-house organ of the power elites of the capital of the U.S. empire, Washington D.C.).

Oil corporations are hugely wealthy and politically powerful in the U.S. And in addition, plastics are derived from petrochemicals.

Reactionary polemicists for hire by the oil and coal industries are plentiful. And the U.S. media is reactionary and pro-corporate oligarchy. This power structure is already indifferent to such facts as the 50% reduction in Arctic sea ice since 1979. [1] Why would they care about a hot day in Anchorage?

So guess what? A hot day in Alaska changes nothing.

Once a happy family, now not long for this world:  polar bears. Having no habitat means extinction.

So long, fellow mammal.

1] CBS News, of all places, radio broadcast, July 6th, 2019, 11 am Eastern Standard Time.

The Irrefutable Proof That Calling Nicolas Maduro a "Dictator" is a Damned Lie: Juan Guaido Is a Free Man IN Venezuela!

Maduro is the elected president and head of state. Juan Guaido is the puppet of a hostile foreign power, who was instructed by the vice president of that power (Michael Pence of the U.S.A.) to declare himself president, and the next morning did so, self-administering a bogus oath of office to himself. Now he's running around pretending to be the president, usurping all the power he can, and that hostile foreign power has transferred control over Venezuelan government assets to Guaido.

Under what "dictatorship" would Guaido not now be undergoing severe torture in a secret dungeon?

Whatever Maduro is, he's not a dictator. And Venezuela is no dictatorship.

Unlike the U.S.' Great Friend, Saudi Arabia.

Guaido openly holds rallies. He calls on the armed forces to overthrow the government. The violent street thugs who are the tip of the spear of the opposition Guaido leads attack police, and are NOT shot dead. (Imagine if Occupy Movement participants or Black Lives Matter protesters had thrown rocks and molotov cocktails at police! There would have been a bloodbath, and the U.S. corporate media would have celebrated the massacres.) If anything, Maduro has for years been far too tolerant towards the reactionary violence, which has blockaded roads and burned people alive who were identified as government supporters.

We saw the exact same thing in Ukraine, where the neo-Nazi terrorists set police on fire (watch the youtube videos if you don't believe it!) and false flag snipers sent in by the U.S. murdered police as well as protesters. There as in Venezuela, the state failed to protect the people from terrorists, the nation from subversion by a foreign power, and itself from being overthrown because it failed to suppress terrorist violence. In both cases, the U.S. threatened the government if it cracked down on the U.S.-backed terrorists. (Obama in the case of the Ukraine, Trump and the imperialist thugs he's appointed in regard to Venezuela.)

And when I say "terrorists," I'm using the U.S. power establishment's definition of terrorism: politically motivated violence by non-state actors. They exclude state terrorism by definition. They have to, since the U.S. is the world's greatest sponsor of state terrorism, such as in Guatemala (250,000 murdered), Argentina (30,000 "disappeared"), Indonesia (one million "communists" exterminated in 1965), and numerous other places. (Sometimes the U.S. does the dirty work even more directly than merely "advising," such as the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam, in which they murdered 50,000 Vietnamese or more.)

Let's take another look at Saudi Arabia, one of many repressive tyrannies the U.S. backs to the hilt. In Saudi Arabia, there are no elections for the rulers of the country, and anyone who criticizes or protests is arrested, tortured, and some are beheaded, even crucified.

No complaints from the U.S. Government or establishment media about THAT!

The "Crown Prince," a nasty piece of word named Mohammed bin Salman, imprisoned scores of rich Saudis and forced them to turn over billions of dollars. One or two died in the process.

But Maduro is "corrupt," don't you know! And he's "stealing the assets" of Venezuela. Like the oil money.

The oil money which John Bolton announced on January 24 will be turned over to U.S. oil corporations. He said this on Fox Business tv program. He absurdly added that this would benefit the American and Venezuelan people.

How so, John? Will the U.S. oil corps fund programs for the Venezuelan people? Will they provide cut-rate heating oil to poor people in Boston, as Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor, did?

I don't think so, asshole.

U.S. propagandists aren't satisfied with branding Maduro a "dictator," which they apparently think justifies overthrowing him (never mind the scores of dictators the U.S. has supported, many of which could never have achieved power without U.S. help, and are reliant on the U.S. for staying in power), but these propagandists demand that everyone call Maduro "dictator." 

Just this morning, on the U.S. Government created and funded NPR national radio network, the host of the morning "news" show, the reactionary Scott Simon, started by griping that Senator Bernie Sanders "doesn't call himself a democrat, he refuses to call Maduro a dictator!" The fact that Sanders has been spewing anti-Venezuela propaganda mirroring that of the U.S. government and media apparently isn't good enough.

What nerve that Sanders has! Who does he think he is, to go against the political line of the U.S. Imperialist establishment! Does he think this is a free country or something? (OOPS!)

Smarmy unctuous reactionary dweeb Scott Simon, of NPR infamy

Bernie Sanders better get in line!

U.S. "friend and ally," the sinister Saudi "Crown Prince," Mohammed bin Salman. 

If you criticize him, he might cut you to pieces! (Think Jamal Khashoggi.) 

There's a dagger in that hand...

Saudis GIft U.S. With 2 Big Bribes To Buy Their Way Out of Khashoggi Murder

Saudi Arabia just gave $100 million to the U.S. Now they've pledged to up their oil production to whatever it takes to fill the void left by the Trump regime strangling Iranian oil exports. This caused the price of oil to drop 4% today October 23rd.

Determined to evade responsibility for the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi, a former adviser to the Saudi "royals" whose patrons were neutralized by the current tyrant, the "Crown Prince" Mohammed bin Salman, favorite son of "King" Salman, they have gone from issuing threats to paying bribes to the U.S. to evade sanctions.

Trump would love to help them out. For several weeks he shielded them. But he is being pulled by the political undertow of the U.S. political establishment and even Republican Senators taking a harder line.

But in the end, the most that might happen is that some of "Prince" Salman's powers will be trimmed. Even more unlikely would be his replacement by another designated heir to the throne.

Meanwhile U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven "King of the Foreclosure Fraudsters" Mnuchin went back on his promise not to attend an "investment conference" being hosted by the murderous "Prince" Salman, and went. This conference was boycotted by numerous heads of large multinational corporations and European officials. However many venal capitalists did attend, and they gave Salman a standing ovation. It's said they're mainly oilmen.

Salman the Younger Explains to Mnuchin Why They Had to Chop Up Khashoggi's Body: "He was a fat man, so we had to
cut him up into pieces no bigger than this. It would have been terrible if someone got a hernia carrying him."

Trump Opens Door to Revived Iranian Nuclear Program, Europe Confirms It's America's Bitch, and Israel and Saudi Arabia are Kvelling

Kvelling is Yiddish. It means "to be extraordinarily pleased; especially, to be bursting with pride." Certainly the Israelis and Saudis have reason to be. Both nations are eager for the U.S. to go to war with Iran, and have been pushing the U.S. in that direction for years.

Trump finally carried out his threat to kill the hard-won nuclear agreement with Iran. Two years of negotiations by the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia, all arrayed against Iran, with U.S.-imposed sanctions choking the Iranian economy, produced the best deal that could be squeezed from the theocrats ruling that nation. Iran surrendered ALL its enriched uranium, agreed to permanently shut down a reactor capable of producing plutonium, mothballed its centrifuges, and accepted extremely stringent oversight by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).  All this to last for 15 years.

If Trump wanted a better deal, he had plenty of time to negotiate one. But he has demagogically insisted for several years that the agreement was the "worst deal ever." A preposterous assertion.

The European "partners" (in reality, they're nothing more than junior lackeys to U.S. Imperialism) pleaded with and cajoled Trump to try to make him see reason, to no avail. French President Emmanuel Macron came all the way to Washington and endured demeaning treatment by Trump (Trump ostentatiously pretending to pick something off Macron's suit in front of the world press and announcing it was "dandruff," forcing Macron to submit to the insult) for absolutely nothing. Britain dispatched their foreign minister, the buffoon Boris Johnson, to Washington to pointlessly lobby various Trump regime apparatchiks on the matter.

Macron addressed the U.S. Congress, delivering a relatively honest speech which no doubt annoyed most of that body.

The Europeans are already caving in, reaffirming their status as the U.S.' bitch. This proves that the European Union is a bust. It was supposed to allow Europe to swing its proper weight. Instead it is a bad joke. The European bourgeoisie just cannot or will not free themselves from their position of slavish subordination to the U.S.

Trump has made clear that, as usual, foreign corporations must abide by U.S. "law" and conform to U.S. foreign policy. Just a day after Trump wrecked the agreement with Iran, which the U.S. got Russia, China, Germany, Britain, France, and the EU to sign on to against Iran, his Ambassador to Germany is already ordering German companies to shut down their Iranian business operations "immediately." Well, when you're the Boss of the World, you can issue such orders.

Unless companies want to quit the U.S. market, which is many times the size of the Iranian one, AND subject themselves to ruinous U.S. "fines," AND risk criminal indictments of the company and its executives, effectively confining those executives to their home countries or risk arrest and extradition to the U.S. to "face American justice" (decades in prison) for refusing to be agents of U.S. Imperialist foreign policy, these non-U.S. businesses have to knuckle under to U.S. diktat.

Some U.S. media "commentators" are fatuously saying canceling the agreement of the U.S. government was Trump "making good on a campaign pledge." As if Trump feels an obligation to keep his word on anything. And he made numerous pledges to snooker people into voting for him- all the good ones he has reneged on, only keeping the venal ones. (As I expected.)

Here are some choice excerpts that the bombastic  blustering bullyboy Trump spewed in making his announcement on May 8th:

Trump- "this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East."

He sneered at "the decaying and rotten structure of the current deal." (Reminds me of Adolf Hitler "freeing" Germany from the "shackles" of the rotten Versailles Treaty.)

Trump says the new deal he pretends he'll force on Iran "will benefit all of Iran and the Iranian people." (I'm sure he cares so much about the Iranian people! This is a guy who's trying to ban all Muslims from the U.S.) He wants to throw in "terrorism" and Iranian "meddling" in Syria and Yemen as part of new demands on Iran.

Trump threatens "any nation" that aids "Iran in its [non-existent] quest for a nuclear weapon" will also get slammed with U.S. sanctions.

Of course, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons, it was developing the capability to develop such weapons. And right now, iran isn't even doing THAT!

But the lying jackass demagogue who is president of the U.S. Empire could care less about facts, as he has shown throughout his entire adult life. Nor did the U.S. media bother informing the millions who are forced to rely on it for information that what Trump said was false. For all their bleatings about his "lies," they reinforce some of his lies.

Iran now has to decide whether to accept being completely ripped off, having surrendered its nuclear program (mainly consisting of uranium enrichment) for nothing, or restart it. Trump is making gangster threats implying violence. Many imperialists in the U.S. and Israel, and the evil, medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia, have long been urging the U.S. to bomb Iran. (Dying U.S. Senator John McCain would love to see that.)

Iran's major commodity is, of course, oil. And since oil is traded on the international market in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. Treasury Department controls dollar transactions, that makes it extremely difficult for Iran to sell its oil without U.S. permission. So the U.S. has Iran over a barrel, so to speak. (One of Saddam Hussein's fatal mistakes was floating the idea of using a medium of exchange other than the U.S. dollar for oil transactions. The U.S. tends to react violently to impingements on its power.)

The Israelis and Saudis are eager for the U.S. to wage war on Iran, especially a bombing campaign. Terrorism ("covert action") would also be part of the war. The U.S. under Obama infiltrated Special Forces teams into Iran to plant surveillance devices, including radiation monitors disguised as bricks in walls, and spy gadgets to monitor truck traffic disguised as rocks. The Israelis of course were busily assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, creating terror to discourage Iranian scientists from participating in nuclear research. And Obama infiltrated the Stuxnet malware into Iran's nuclear program computer system, destroying centrifuges.

Understand that it is official U.S. policy to overthrow the Iranian government. (This would be the second time they did that, the first being in 1953, which destroyed Iranian democracy.)  The U.S. is still bitter that the client dictator it installed in 1953, the Shah, was overthrown in 1979. And while the quarter million Iranians who died under the brutal reign of the Shah are never, ever mentioned in U.S. media, they still reference the so-called "hostage crisis," when the apparatchiks in the U.S. embassy in Tehran were  seized and held for 444 days, and the U.S. media engaged in a daily drumbeat of hysterical propaganda about it. ABC "News" even started an entire evening program devoted to the "crisis," which became "Nightline," hosted by Kissinger maven Ted Koppel. What's never said, what has been consigned to the memory hole, is why Iran seized the U.S. apparatchiks. Obviously a key part of the story. But not in the U.S. propaganda version of it.

Iran warned the Jimmy Carter regime not to give sanctuary to the fleeing. Shah. Then Henry Kissinger called the president of the U.S. and transmitted an order from David Rockefeller, a man at the apex of the U.S. ruling class, that Carter must allow the Shah in. Carter protested that there would be bad consequences, but obeyed his master. (Carter was chosen to be president in 1976 by the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission, which assigned Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter's "national security advisor." Brzezinski went on the engineer the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, something he has boasted about. Time magazine, an organ run by Trilateral Commission members, presented Carter to the American public as the second coming of JFK.)

Well, the "hostage-taking" duly followed the Shah's entry into the U.S., the resulting media-generated "crisis" ultimately cost Carter re-election. And the racist neo-fascist Ronald Reagan, running against Carter in the 1980 election, made a sub rosa deal with the Khomeini regime to only free the U.S. personnel minutes after Carter was no longer president.

Now back to the present. What of the non-U.S. lackey nations that are a party to the nuclear agreement with Iran, China and Russia? They too operate under the oppressive umbrella of the U.S.-controlled global financial system. [1]

And the U.S. has a veritable galaxy of laws, rules, and regulations that give it infinite power over the financial transactions of others. No bank that wishes to do transactions outside its home country's boundaries can defy the U.S. People and companies that have never set foot in the U.S. or done any action inside the U.S. are routinely indicted by the U.S. and either extradited or kidnapped to "face justice" inside the U.S. and ultimately be subjected to often draconian sentences imprisoned in the vast U.S. gulag. (The U.S., with about 4.7% of the world's population, holds 25% of the entire planet's prisoners. The U.S. imprisoners a higher percentage of its adult population- close to 1%- than any nation on earth. China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., has slightly fewer prisoners.)

The U.S. considers its laws binding on everyone on earth- and indeed enforces them. The railroading of the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was set up in Thailand by U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents pretending to be arms buyers for  the Colombian rebel group FARC, and who now sits in a U.S. prison, is one of many examples. (What the hell is an alleged drug agency doing setting up fake arms deals to entrap foreign citizens? Good questions.) Britain has shipped hapless citizens to the U.S. to face bogus charges, to the outrage of its own media and public.

So what does Europe do when its arms are twisted by the U.S.? It says "Uncle!" Europe is paying the economic price for U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia to punish Russia for "meddling" in Ukraine. The U.S. has fined Europe's banks billions of dollars in a shakedown racket for violating sanctions on countries the U.S. doesn't like. (Other nation's banks have been hit too. See chart.)

But the cowardly bourgeois rulers of Europe are good at one thing: punching down. They sure know how to oppress their own people, as the corrupt Spanish government of the Francoist Mariano Rajoy is doing in Catalonia, or as the remorseless British Prime Minister Theresa May is doing, deporting tens of thousands of Commonwealth citizens who came to Britain legally decades ago and are now being reclassified as "illegal" because the British government failed to issue them documents when they arrived. Theresa May, the architect of the Grenfell Towers Fire massacre who slashed funding for fire and police protection starting in her previous job as Interior Secretary. (A job in which she began the targeting of immigrants.)

Anyway, sit back and enjoy the coming war between Iran and the U.S./Israel/Saudi Arabia. Iran is not completely alone. It is fighting side by side with Russia in Syria to prop up the murderous Assad regime. It also has the loyal support of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and militia. (The Israelis have been busily bombing Iranian weapons shipments in Syria they claim are destined for Hezbollah.) Every time Iran counterattacks, except the propagandists and governments of the U.S. side to shriek "IRANIAN TERRORISM!"

Israel has wasted no time lighting the fuse. Today they bombed fifty Iranian targets inside Syria, using as justification an alleged Iranian missile fired into the Golan Heights (former Syrian territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 war). No mention in U.S. (and other "Western") media that this follows months of Israeli bombing raids on Iranian targets inside Syria, with no response from Iran at all until now, with the alleged missile. (Or 20 missiles, as CBS later asserted. CBS is virtually a propaganda arm of the Israeli government in the U.S.) Israel threatened more to come if the Iranians don't take it lying down. Russia has expressed alarm over the Israeli pummeling.

This war, if it comes, will go on for years. Like some other wars the U.S. started in the region, eh?


1]  The U.S. isn't even satisfied with controlling the world's financial system. It even has to spy on everybody and hack into bank computers. Even SWIFT, the system for international bank transactions, was hacked by the NSA. (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication- SWIFT. SWIFT has cut off Iran's banks from the rest of the world, on U.S. orders.)

Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash (Under the Cover of "Journalism")

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

Chickens Come Home To Roost In Saudi Arabia With 3 Suicide Bombings

The feudalistic regime of the House of Saud, which arrogated to itself the right to claim ownership of an entire country constituting most of the land area of the Arabian peninsula, just experienced some blowback for its spreading globally of a noxious, intolerant, extremist religious ideology, Wahhabism. The blowback came in the form of three suicide bombers, who struck in three separate Saudi cities near the end of the "holy" month of Ramadan.

One bomber took out four Saudi security guards with him, and wounded five more, outside "the prophet's mosque" in Medina, "the second holiest city in Islam," as the catechism goes. Another bomber, a Pakistani man who came to Saudi Arabia 12 years ago to work as a driver, according to the Saudi regime, blew himself up outside the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, wounding two guards. The third bomber targeted a mosque in the predominantly Shiite city of Qatif. (Wahhabism and its terrorist spawn are Sunni. Both the Saudi regime and ISIS persecute Shias. The regime executed a leading Shiite cleric in January for leading protests for more rights and democracy, and ISIS considers Shiites "apostates," abandoners of Islam, and worthy of death.)

This is far from the first time people even more extreme than the Saudis have violently attacked the regime. There have been other attacks on religious sites, shootouts with state security, and assassinations.

So repression, even the extreme repression of a Saudi Arabia, cannot totally suppress attacks by determined zealots willing to sacrifice themselves or take great risks. This is one reason the eventual overthrow of vicious regimes does not result in humane new orders. It is the fanatics who have the gumption, will, and commitment to fight repressive regimes. The decent, moral people are cowed, imprisoned, driven into exile, or killed.

All across the world, cancerous offspring of Wahhabism have sprouted. First came Al-Qaeda, then various Taliban organizations and movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose military aided and abetted the creation of terrorist organizations to use against India, and provides a haven for the Taliban, policies that in recent years have come back to bite them. (Frankenstein's monster slipping out of the control of the creator.)

In the Philippines there is Abu Sayyef, founded by a veteran of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistai anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan instigated by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and vigorously pursued by the Reagan regime in the 1980s.

Another of the numerous Sunni jihadist organizations is Jemaah Islamiyah, which also operates in the Philippines, and in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Indonesia, the major country in that region, is also the site of Islamist terrorist activities, such as the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 that targeted Australian and other tourists and killed 202 people. (A lot fewer than the approximately one million Indonesians murdered in the CIA-inspired anti-communist military pogrom of 1965.) Members of Jemaah Islamiyah were convicted in the bombings.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has wreaked havoc. (The brutality of the various Nigerian military regimes led directly to radicalizing Boko Haram.)

In Libya there is a war on against ISIS by Libyans fighting back.

In Bangladesh, the regime's tolerance of Islamofascists murdering bloggers, writers, and secularists by hacking them to death with machetes has suddenly come with a price tag, as Islamofascists just attacked foreigners in a restaurant. This is not only scaring off tourists, but is causing foreign clothing companies to consider taking their production business out of the country to saver slave-wage states.

Other attacks in just the last few days include a truck bombing in Baghdad that slaughtered over 200 people so far, and the first attack in Malaysia credited to ISIS, a grenade lobbed at a club that wounded 8 people. [1]

Egypt's tourism industry has been devastated by Islamofascist attacks there, including the destruction of two airliners in flight so far, first a Russian one, then an Egyptian.

In Turkey, the most recent bombing there, in the Istanbul airport by armed suicide bombers, is being blamed on ISIS, even though ISIS hasn't boasted its responsibility, which they usually do. (NPR and other media have been claiming the attack "has the hallmarks of ISIS" or even "all the hallmarks of ISIS." No it doesn't. Which doesn't mean ISIS didn't do it, of course.)

So while ISIS is being systematically squeezed geographically in Iraq, where it declared its "caliphate," and is being fought by the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, fanatics inspired by it have been undertaking attacks on civilians around the world.

We can expect this situation to last for years. Which is great news for the U.S. political elites of both parties, and the secret police/military combine. That combine sought and deliberately created a never-ending "war on terrorism" in order to gain huge increases in both funds and powers. They initiated this operation, with malice aforethought, by arranging to allow al-Qaeda operatives to hijack planes on September 11, 2001. In order to create "another Pearl Harbor," in the words of one of the seminal planning documents for this criminal enterprise, agents of the U.S. deep state planted demolition charges in three steel structures at the World Trade Center and detonated them on that day, as has been proven beyond doubt by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, an organization of 2,000 experts.

Thus the program to Create a More Perfect Police State continues, under both Democratic and Republican regimes.

1]  "Toll climbs to more than 200 in Islamic State’s worst-ever bomb attack on civilians," Washington Post, July 4, 2016.  "Islamic State launches first successful attack in Malaysia," CNN, July 4, 2016.

Suicide bomber goes up in cloud of smoke in Medina, presumably ascending to paradise and his reward of an orgy with waiting virgins.

 

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

U.S. Senate Votes Unanimously To Empower 9/11 Victim Families to Sue Saudis: Obama Vows Veto

 The U.S. Senate voted unanimously yesterday for the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).

The bill would limit sovereign immunity so as to allow lawsuits against foreign states for injuries, death and damages inside the U.S. stemming from a tort, including  acts of terrorism, committed anywhere by a foreign state or official. It now has to pass the House of Representatives. U.S. president Barack "DroneMan" Obama will veto it, as he insists he will. (He's true to his word when it's doing something bad.) Then the Congress will have to pass it again by at least a two-thirds majority in each chamber for the act to become law. This will enable the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government in U.S. courts, where so far sovereign immunity has shielded the Saudis from civil liability (and possible imposition of monetary damage awards) for their complicity in the attacks.

We see Obama once again protecting the Bush regime, as he did on the matter of torture. As I explained in my previous essay, dragging into public view the Saudi government role in the 9/11/01 atrocity threatens to pull the submerged role of the fascist Deep State out of the black lagoon where it lies hidden.

Obama of course is also a great friend of the Saudis, authorizing the sale of billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons to them to wage their war in Yemen. Obama also has the U.S. military aiding the Saudi war effort by providing U.S. aerial tankers to refuel the Saudis' jets, and resupplying the munitions (including cluster bombs) the Saudis are dropping on homes, hospitals, clinics, markets, mosques, and the occasion armed Houthi tribesmen. (Over 3,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed by the Saudi-Gulf-State-U.S. war coalition so far, says the UN.)

Return of the Repressed: Pulling on 9/11 Thread Threatens to Unravel U.S.-Saudi Mass Murder Conspiracy

In the last few weeks, various segments of the U.S. media, and some mostly out-of-office politicians, have been agitating for the release of a suppressed 28-page segment of the joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11/01  attacks in the U.S. that dealt with Saudi Arabian connections to the alleged al-Qaeda kamikaze plane hijackers. Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" has had it's ranters jabbering away about the outrage of withholding the section, how the government is covering up. (But for some easy-to-guess reason they didn't once say "Bush," even though he was the president at the time, the guy who insisted on "classifying" the part of the report that damns the Saudi regime, the guy who fought against even having an investigating commission, and tried to put Henry Kissinger at its helm, and insisted that he and Cheney not testify under oath, and obstructed the commission in myriad ways. I'm sure many viewers had the impression it was all Obama's doing- after all, who personifies "the government" now?) John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan regime and member of the 9/11 Commission (separate from the Congressional inquiry) has called for the release of information on the Saudi government connection. Various other media commentators besides Murdoch's minions have similarly raised the issue.

For several years former Florida Senator Bob Graham has been pushing to get more information about the Saudi government connection to the al-Qaeda kamikaze attack of September 11, 2001, into the public domain. He has been in a tug-of-war with the FBI secret police agency, which, apparently following orders from first the Bush regime and now Obama, stubbornly refuses to divulge anything and rudely rebuffed Graham as a crank. [1]

This issue is currently getting new traction because a lawsuit by relatives of some of those killed on September 11, 2001, against the Saudi Arabian regime for its complicity in the attacks on the buildings, A previous lawsuit against the Saudis was dismissed by the U.S. courts. What is different now is a change in the political climate.

The Obama regime supposedly is poised to (very reluctantly) dribble out some bits of the suppressed 28-pages from the Congressional inquiry. [2]

The chair and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former right-wing Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton (a past veteran of whitewashes) have suddenly piped up to tell people not to pay much mind to those 28-pages in the Congressional inquiry because the 9/11 Commission checked all that out and there was just one low-level Saudi contact with the hijackers. Which is a rather odd stance for them to take, because after the Commission issued its report, the two of them wrote a book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, in which they say the Commission was "set up to fail"! So then, what makes you guys think you got to the bottom of things, hmmm? These guys write that the lies of the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration were so persistent that they toyed with the idea of doing an investigation of obstruction of justice by officials from those bodies. (But they punked out, of course. Lifelong made members of the establishment nomenklatura rarely sacrifice their privileges, status, and precious "reputations" for such fluff as morality, ethics, truth, justice, yadda yadda yadda.) [3]

It has long been known that Saudi diplomats and agents provided funds to the airplane hijackers. It is also no secret that the Bush regime barred the FBI from questioning numerous Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, and that an exception to the grounding of airline flight was made to hustle the Saudis out of the country in the days after 9/11/01.

As I mentioned, Bush and Cheney refused to provide testimony to the 9/11 Commission under oath. In other words, they wanted the freedom to lie.

The month before 9/11, the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested in Minnesota after arousing suspicion in his flight-training school. He was pretext-charged with an immigration violation and held. The French secret police had informed the Americans that he was a "terrorist."

The FBI field office in Minnesota asked Washington FBI headquarters to obtain a FISA court warrant for Mousaoui's computer, and was refused, with the incredible excuse that the court would not grant such a warrant. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "court" virtually never refuses warrant requests.) Moussaoui is a French national.

Two of the hijackers lived in San Diego, California, in the home of an FBI informer. After 9/11, the FBI refused to present the informer and his FBI handler to Congress for questioning.

The CIA tracked some of the hijackers into the U.S. and kept this secret from the FBI and from Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council in the White House.

On the day of the attack the FBI immediately fingered 19 men as hijackers aboard the planes. A pristine passport for one of them magically survived the fireball and inferno of the plane crashing into one of the towers and was "found" on the ground.

These and numerous other facts indicate that the secret police were running a conspiracy to allow the attacks to occur.

But it's worse than that.

Overwhelming proof of the fact that three buildings in lower Manhattan were demolished by planted nano-thermite explosives is contained in a series of videos, ranging in length from a few minutes to over 2 hours, available on youtube. These explosives could only have been implanted, a process that would have taken days, by agents of the U.S. government. This was an act of high treason and fascist terrorism, designed to provoke an emotional reaction in the public that would be used by the culprits for their own political ends. 9/11 has elements of the JFK assassination, the Reichstag fire, and Operation Gladio rolled into one. [4]

It appears that the organizers of this conspiracy (which included Richard Cheney and to some unknown extent George Bush and other members of his family with close Saudi connections) intuited that the idea of such a crime would be literally unbelievable to people, and thus not comprehensible. Which is how they planned to get away with it. But the physical (and other) evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. (Go watch the videos.) It would be physically impossible for even one of those three buildings to collapse straight down into their own footprints, at free fall rate, because planes crashed into two of them, as experienced architects and engineers know and explain.

That's why I say exposing the Saudi connection, pulling on that thread, is a dangerous act for establishment types, who apparently still don't comprehend the truth of the matter.

My theory is the Bush clan, with its close Saudi connections, was tipped to the al-Qaeda plot by the Saudi regime. Doubtless Saudi "intelligence" had long infiltrated al-Qaeda from its birth in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, when the U.S., Saudis, Pakistan, and various jihadists including Osama bin Laden were all on the same side.

The Bush-Cheney regime and elements within the Deep State of the secret police and military saw an opportunity to create the "second Pearl Harbor" they needed to carry out their long-standing goal of invading Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein, and ramming through police state laws greatly increasing the power of the secret police agencies (something Bill Clinton and then-Senator Joseph Biden tried and failed to do.

As a side note, I suspect the journalist Michael Hastings may have been murdered for pursuing the demolition of the World Trade Center buildings.

Now the Saudis are threatening to sell out their hoard of U.S. Treasury bonds if their role is dragged into the open. This rather hysterical response is an indication of guilt. If they aren't guilty, they would just defend themselves in court against the lawsuit by the victims' families.

9/11 is the story of a conspiracy wrapped around a conspiracy. The conspiracy by al-Qaeda was used as an element in a larger conspiracy enveloping it that took advantage of the much smaller conspiracy for its own ends. Both conspiracies achieved their aims. And while Osama bin Laden, coming from an engineering and construction family, probably understood that it wasn't the hijacked planes that caused the spectacular collapse of the towers, letting the credit/blame fall on him and al-Qaeda suited his interests. It made him and his organization appear fearsome and potent, it inspired and galvanized jihadists, and it provoked an attack by the U.S. Bin Laden's strategy was to provoke a war between the Western world and Sunni Muslim fundamentalism, as he made quite clear. Jihadists having beaten the Soviets, bin Laden was overconfident. Perhaps he forgot that the U.S. had his back in that war. In any event, the U.S. is now stuck in a Middle East quagmire, so the final chapter hasn't been written yet. Now the U.S. is wrestling with an even more vicious and fanatical foe, ISIS. And the U.S. has squandered trillions of dollars, mortgaging its future, which is a victory for bin Laden.


1] "Florida Ex-Senator Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks," New York Times, April 13, 2015. Graham, a Democrat, was a chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

2] "White House poised to release secret pages from 9/11 inquiry," AP, April 24, 2016.

3] "A Warning About the Secret 9/11 Pages," New York Times editorial page editor's blog, April 27, 2016. (Of course the New York Times is a reliable partner in any government cover-up.)

9/11 Commission entry at Wikipedia.org.

4] The videos proving the controlled demolitions of the buildings were produced by architects and engineers for 911 truth. Go watch them.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.


The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.