The sun never sets on the US empire, where once that was said of the British Empire, they would be envious of the global reach of the US. As would the Romans. From an article by Tom Engelhardt:
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).
At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.
The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.
And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.
Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.
But do not "stop here". There's more and a link to a resource being developed by Mother Jones. Here is the front page:
Introduction: Mission Creep
Bush and Rumsfeld may be history but America's new global footprint lives on.
By Michael Mechanic
Mapping the Pentagon's Global Footprint
Exclusive: In a yearlong project, the Mother Jones editorial team investigated US military activity around the globe, country by country. Presenting our new primer of the post-Bush world order.
America's Unwelcome Advances
The US military's foreign overtures are running into a world of public opposition. Plus: Hot buys at the PX!
By Chalmers Johnson
US Troops Retake the Dragon's Lair
Filipinos thought they'd sent the GIs packing, but the Pentagon found a way in through the back door.
By Herbert Docena
Homesick for Camp Justice
Exiled to make way for a US military base, the islanders of Diego Garcia have convinced the British courts of their right to return. But the UK is fighting tooth and nail to keep them from coming back.
By David Vine
How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years
Is there a way for US negotiators to finagle permanent bases without permission from Congress? Yep. It's called a SOFA.
By Frida Berrigan
What Permanent Iraq Presence?
What the Beltway crowd said way back when about how long we'd be in Baghdad.
Brzezinski Talks Bases
The former national security adviser on the Bush Pentagon's spending binge: "Do we really need that for our security?"
Interview by Michael Mechanic
My Bases Are Bigger Than Your Country
Our roundup of the Pentagon's latest basing stats—plus a few we dug up ourselves.
By Celia Perry
More From the Experts
Additional articles on the Pentagon's overseas strategy, plus, coming soon, a series of related dispatches from more than a dozen US military thinkers and authors.
A large and growing resource but appropriate for analyzing a voracious monster which seems likely to implode.
Managing such a vast enterprise is a challenge, so how have the present overseers done? A retrospective of "highlights" of the Bush years. The opening quote:
"You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you’re gone." —W.
Hardly an auspicious start. But what will the end be like?
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G'day Phil, an example of US meddling - Jim Lobe on Somalia.
US counterterrorism policies and support for the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia have helped create an increasingly desperate humanitarian and security situation in the East African nation, whose population has become increasingly radicalized and anti-US, according to a new report by a major US human rights group.
The report, authored by Ken Menkhaus, a Davidson College professor who is regarded as one of the foremost US experts on the Horn of Africa, calls for a thorough reassessment of US policy, including its support for the TFG and the primacy it has given to its "war on terrorism" in Somalia.
"US counterterrorism policies have not only compromised other international agendas in Somalia, they have generated a high level of anti-Americanism and are contributing to radicalization of the population," concluded the report, entitled "Somalia: A Country in Peril, a Foreign Policy Nightmare."
"In what could become a dangerous instance of blowback, defense and intelligence operations intended to make the United States more secure from the threat of terrorism may be increasing the threat of jihadist attacks on American interests," the report stressed.
There's that blowback - and what will it mean? More spending on defence? Further erosion of the freedoms and right US citizens? One could almost think they planned it that way.
Chris Floyd follows up Lobe.
But perhaps we are being too cynical in suspecting subtle Machiavellian ploys behind U.S. policy in Somalia. It could be as brutally simple as this: the bipartisan imperial elite want to have their way -- they want to crush anyone they have designated as an enemy, they want to have their own clients and puppets in power, they want to "project dominance" over strategic regions, they want to frighten other nations into compliance with Washington's wishes, etc., etc. -- and they don't care what it costs. In other words, perhaps they have not deliberately set out to destroy a nation and grind its helpless people into the dust....but if that's what it takes to get their way, then by God, that's what they'll do. It's not their fault if these darkie Muslims won't play ball.
This is of course a gangster mentality: "If you do what we want, nobody gets hurt. Hey, we might even send you a turkey at Christmas, or get your nephew a job or something. But if you cross us, then you'll get what's coming to you -- and it'll be your own damn fault."
Gangster mentality is apt. Thugs with very big guns. And very little sense.
G'day Phil, of course when you have tentacles everywhere you must keep an eye on what happens in the far flung reaches ... Such as with friendly "sovereign" governments.
"Groundbreaking" new covert techniques, and not the troop "surge," was behind the drop in violence in Iraq, he writes. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, along with his staff, were these techniques' guinea pigs, and were wrapped tightly in a web of next-generation spying.
Employing these unspecified techniques against Maliki and aides allowed US forces to "hear every word he says," states a Thursday night report from the Washington Post.
Reaction:
The Iraqi government reacted sharply Friday to published allegations that the U.S. spied on Iraq's prime minister, warning that future ties with the United States could be in jeopardy if the report is true.
The excerpt from Woodward's book emerged as the two governments are in delicate negotiations over the future of American troops in Iraq. Those talks have already extended past their July 31 deadline and have drawn sharp criticism from Iraqis who want an end to the U.S. presence.
Critics may well use the allegation to step up pressure on the government not to sign a deal or hold out for the most favorable terms.
Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Baghdad will raise the allegations with the U.S. and ask for an explanation. But if true, he warned, it shows a lack of trust.
"It reflects also that the institutions in the United States are used to spy on their friends and their enemies in the same way," al-Dabbagh said in a statement.
"If it is true, it casts a shadow on the future relations with such institutions," al-Dabbagh added, referring to the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
And another example of how to treat friends:
A ground assault by US Special Forces troops on a Pakistani village on Wednesday threatens to expand the escalating Afghanistan war into its neighbour. Pakistan is already confronting a virtual civil war in its tribal border regions as the country’s military, under pressure from Washington, seeks to crush Islamist militias supporting the anti-occupation insurgency inside Afghanistan.
The attack, which left up to 20 civilians dead, marks a definite escalation of US operations inside Pakistan. While US Predator drones and war planes have been used previously to bomb targets, Wednesday’s raid was the first clear case of an assault by American ground troops inside Pakistani territory. The White House and Pentagon have refused to comment on the incident but various unnamed US officials have acknowledged to the media that the raid took place and indicated that there could be more to come.
The attack was unprovoked. US troops landed by helicopter in the village of Jalal Khei in South Waziristan at around 3 a.m. and immediately targetted three houses. The engagement lasted for about 30 minutes and left between 15 and 20 people dead, including women and children.
A US official acknowledged to CNN that there may have been women and children in the immediate vicinity but when the mission began “everyone came out firing from the compound”. Even this flimsy justification for a naked act of aggression is probably a lie. “It was very terrible as all of the residents were killed while asleep,” a villager Din Mohammad told the Pakistan-based International News.
The newspaper provided details of the dead and injured: nine family members of Faujan Wazir, including four women, two children and three men; Faiz Mohammad Wazir, his wife and two other family members; and Nazar Jan and his mother. Two other members of Nazar Jan’s family were seriously wounded.
The US and international media have described the Angoor Adda area around the village as “a known stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda” but offered no evidence to support the claim. A villager, Jabbar Wazir, told the International News: “All of those killed were poor farmers and had nothing to do with the Taliban.”
Reaction:
The attack has provoked outrage in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement branding the attack as “a gross violation of Pakistan territory” and summoned US ambassador Anne Patterson to provide an explanation. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) governor Owais Ahmed Ghani declared that “the people expect that the armed forces of Pakistan would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country”. He put the number killed at 20.
Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said the raid was “completely counterproductive” and risked provoking an uprising even among those tribesmen who have previously supported the army’s operations in the border areas.
More on winning friends and influencing people:
The bearded, turbaned men gather beneath a large, leafy tree in rural eastern Nangarhar province. When Malik Mohammed speaks on their behalf, his voice is soft but his words are harsh. Mohammed makes it clear that the tribal chiefs have lost all faith in both their own government and the foreign soldiers in their country.
Such disillusionment is widespread in Afghanistan, feeding an insurgency that has killed 195 foreign soldiers so far this year, 105 of them Americans.
"This is our land. We are afraid to send our sons out the door for fear the American troops will pick them up," says Mohammed, who was chosen by the others to represent them. "Daily we have headaches from the troops. We are fed up. Our government is weak and corrupt and the American soldiers have learned nothing."
A strong sense of frustration echoed through dozens of interviews by The Associated Press with Afghan villagers, police, government officials, tribal elders and Taliban who left and rejoined the religious movement. The interviews ranged from the capital, Kabul, to the rural regions near the border with Pakistan.
The overwhelming result: Ordinary Afghans are deeply bitter about American and NATO forces because of errant bombs, heavy-handed searches and seizures and a sense that the foreigners do not understand their culture. They are equally fed up with what they see as seven years of corruption and incompetence in a U.S.-backed government that has largely failed to deliver on development.
Even with more foreign troops, Afghanistan is now less secure.
"It certainly is a mess. Security is the worst that it has been for years. Corruption is out of control. It impacts every single Afghan," says Doug Wankel, a burly 62-year-old American who coordinated Washington's anti-drug policy in Afghanistan from 2004 until 2007 and is now back as a security consultant. "What people have to understand is that what ordinary Afghans think really does matter."
The fear and fury is evident among the neighbors at Akhtar Mohammed's walled home deep within Nangarhar province, reached by a dirt road along a dirty brown canal. A dozen men lie on traditional rope beds beneath a thatched roof. Some wear the full-bodied beard of the devout, with a clean-shaven upper lip. Others have dyed their gray beards a flaming orange with henna to show that they have made the pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca.
They live barely an hour's drive from an errant bombing last month that hit a wedding party and killed about 50 people. Khiel Shah says his home was raided two months earlier, and troops killed his nephew, a high school student.
An old man sits by moaning, "No, no, they weren't Taliban. They were going to the bathroom. They weren't even carrying guns."
Villagers want to know why people who give false information are not arrested, and they say American soldiers still can't sift the good intelligence from the bad.
"But now this is seven years. I am hopeless. They haven't learned until now," says Akhtar Mohammed.
They're Merkins, they don't have to learn, just keep dropping the bombs ....
"They hate us for our freedoms!" ...
.. subtitle: The US is out'a all control.
-=*=-
G'day Bob,
bit short on time, have to be brief.
The US citizens - sheople almost all, are deliberately kept in the dark by their 'MiniTrue,' the corporate, corrupt & venal MSM. That the public broadcasters are effectively indistinguishable from the MSM proves that the brainwashing - of their own people - is bipartisan, which also just so happens to be *totally* undemocratic. Just in case anyone's wondering, the same MiniTrue process is also embedded in Aus. (Damn you, AusBC & SBS!)
The US warfare State - warned about by "Ike," is now rampant, they make themselves "free" - to bomb practically anywhere in the world.
The US "leadership" and their MiniTrue work hand-in-glove - not to spread democracy, their own as well as ours, UK's, Israel's - even F's & D's - are all effectively sham, with the people not 'just' deliberately misinformed but also psychologically manipulated, and the representatives 'working' far more against the sheople's interests as for. The 'Enlightenment' has been junked, the world is the rapacious US capitalists' oyster - and we are basically passengers. All we can do is point out the filthy (mainly) US depredations, hoping (against hope) that sometime, somewhere, true leadership - working *for* mankind (as opposed to for already obscenely rich and largely criminal fat-cats) will arise. Some hope.
G'day Phil, to your "deliberately kept in the dark" add - and told fairy stories. Such as about success in Iraq, for instance? Here's Tom Engelhardt presenting a piece by Michael Schwartz Who Lost Iraq?
Tom's introduction:
Recently, Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has shown striking signs of wanting to be his own man in Baghdad, not Washington's (as has Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul). What happens when parrots suddenly speak and puppets squawk on their own? The answer, it seems, is simple enough: You listen in; so, at least, the lastest revelations of journalist Bob Woodward seem to indicate. "The Bush administration," reports the Washington Post, "has conducted an extensive spying operation on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his staff and others in the Iraqi government, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. 'We know everything [Maliki] says,' according to one of multiple sources Woodward cites about the practice." This is perhaps what is meant when it's claimed that President Bush and Maliki have a "close working relationship."
An Iraqi government spokesman responded to the revelation with shock: "If it is a fact, it reflects that there is no trust and it reflects also that the institutions in the United States are used to spying on their friends and their enemies in the same way. If it is true, it casts a shadow on the future relations with such institutions."
"Trust"? Please... Wasn't that always just a synonym for electronic eavesdropping?
As for "success" in Iraq, which we've been hearing quite a lot about lately in the U.S., here's one way to measure the administration's trust in its own "success": The Pentagon, we now learn, has just "recommended" to President Bush that there should be no further troop drawdowns in Iraq until a new president enters office in January 2009 -- and even then, possibly in February, that no more than 7,500 Americans should be withdrawn, and only if "conditions" permit. So the administration's "success" in Iraq could, in terms of troop levels, be measured this way: The U.S. invaded and occupied that country in the spring of 2003 with approximately 130,000 troops. According to Thomas Ricks in his bestselling book Fiasco, by that fall, its top officials fully expected to have only about 30,000 troops still in the country, stationed at newly built American bases largely outside major urban areas.
In January 2007, when the President's desperate "surge" strategy was launched, there were still approximately 130,000 U.S. troops in the country, and, of course, tens of thousands of hired guns from firms like Blackwater Worldwide. Today, there are approximately 146,000 troops in Iraq (and the U.S. is spending more money on armed "private security contractors" than ever before). By next February, according to Pentagon plans, there would still be about 139,000 troops in Iraq, 9,000 more than in April 2003, as well as more than early in Bush's second term, as Juan Cole pointed out recently -- and that's if everything goes reasonably well, which, under the circumstances, is a big "if" indeed.
As Michael Schwartz indicates below, for all the talk over the years about "tipping points" reached and "corners" turned, it's just possible that -- while the Bush administration and the McCain campaign are pounding the drums of "success" -- the U.S. might be heading for an unexpected and resounding defeat. Moreover, it might well be administered by the very government Washington has supported all these years, whose true allies may turn out to be living not in Camp Victory, the huge U.S. base on the outskirts of Iraq, but in Tehran. Let Schwartz, whose superb new history of this nightmare, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context, is due out later this month, explain to you just how the Bush administration is likely to wrest actual defeat from the jaws of self-proclaimed victory.
As long as the MSM play the game then the sleepers will not awake and the spin can keep painting the nightmare as a dream. Reps/Dems, the brothers Grim.
On the Brothers Grim and policies and machinations:
Chris Floyd;
Stephen Zunes;
William Blum.
Physician heal thyself.
Good idea in the last paragraph.
G'day Bob,
starting at your Floyd citation, 'skipping' via Cole to here, one can get an appreciation of 'what they really mean' when they try to feed us on lies. Also shows that the UK lies did not stop with Blair's exit.
G'day Bob,
starting at another of your excellent citations, namely Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Is American Success a Failure in Iraq? and following Schwartz to another Cole, A Social History of the Surge then reading that (including all comments), one might get an appreciation of 'what they really mean' vis-à-vis the controversy over whether the "surge" "worked." Instructive, recommended.
My (gratuitous!) comment: It's *still* the oil. This illustrates why GWBush&Co, the neoCon s**ts, the Israeli Lobby, and all of the involved USrael citizens will suffer total, utter and unmitigated condemnation for their combined criminality down through the years - and here recall the prime perpetrators B, B & H. The very idea, of illegally invading a country to steal its oil, will damn them all forever, because it was that very specific, Oh, such a stupid act, that drew attention to the brutal, murderous criminality of the whole stinking lot, criminality that has been going on at least since the equally illegal and ghastly A-bombing on the one hand, and the Zionist invasion of now sadly mostly ex-Palestine on the other, unalloyed disasters both. Shame! (As if the US could get away with being responsible for 1,255,026 dead Iraqis, etc. - 'just' to steal their oil.) But far more than shame: string 'em *all* up!
G'day Phil, and while they were sleeping ...
Every day, the shame mounts, the lies grow more brazen and more brutal, and the dishonor spreads and deepens -- ineradicable, like a white garment soaked with blood.
The atrocity in Azizabad, an Afghan village hit by an American airstrike on the night of August 22, is by no means the worst depredation of the so-called "War on Terror," which has left more than million innocent people dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia over the past seven years. But the mass death visited upon the sleeping, defenseless citizens of Azizabad encapsulates many of the essential elements of this global campaign of "unipolar domination" and war profiteering: the callous application of high-tech weaponry against unarmed civilians; the witless attack that alienates local supporters and empowers an ever-more violent and radical insurgency; and perhaps the most quintessential element of all -- the knowing lies and deliberate deceits that Washington employs to hide the obscene reality of its Terror War.
In the days following the attack, the American-backed Afghan government, local officials with long-standing relationships with American forces, and representatives of the United Nations declared that at least 90 civilians, most of them women and children, had been killed by American bombs in Azizabad. The Pentagon and White House adamantly denied the eyewitness accounts of their own allies on the scene. Washington claimed that "only" five to seven civilians had been killed in what the Pentagon claimed was a successful Special Forces operation against a Taliban stronghold. [Think of that: "only" five to seven civilians killed! How far have we become steeped in blood, when the obliteration of half a dozen innocent human beings can be dismissed as a trifle.]
What's more, the Pentagon then claimed that the reports of a wider slaughter were being faked by the villagers, at the behest of the Taliban. The American brass even accused the survivors of the attack of creating fake graves to fool the good-hearted U.S. military inspectors who, it was claimed, quickly visited the scene to ascertain the truth.
Darned cell phones.
Cell-phone footage shot by a doctor in a makeshift morgue in Azizabad, Afghanistan, showing rows of dead Afghan civilians, including several children, has led to a renewed inquiry into an American-led airstrike that occurred Aug. 22. American officials had previously insisted that only seven civilians had been killed in the attack, but they’re now having to face the possibility that the actual figure could be as high as 90.
From DemocracyNow!
Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited the affected village of Azizabad on Thursday. He paid his respect to the mourners and condemned the air strikes.
PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI: [translated] I have been working day and night over the past five years to prevent such incidents. But I haven’t been successful in my efforts. If I had succeeded, the people of Azizabad wouldn’t be bathed in blood.
AMY GOODMAN: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also ordered a review of whether the US and NATO should be allowed to use air strikes and carry out raids in villages.
The August 22nd attack is only one in a series of US and NATO air strikes that have caused high numbers of civilian deaths. According to a new report from Human Rights Watch, the increased use of air strikes has tripled civilian deaths in Afghanistan over the past year. Last week, hundreds protested an air strike in Kabul that reportedly killed three members of a family: a man named Noorullah and two of his infant sons, one of whom was only eight months old. This is Salman Shah, a relative of the three victims.
SALMAN SHAH: [translated] Are those two children al-Qaeda or Taliban? Do they have guns to fight? Why should they be killed? This proves that these Americans, these Christians, are here to kill a generation of Afghans.
On the matter of Pakistan.
And they were warned.
The National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community's focal point for estimating future developments, warned the George W. Bush administration last month that a decision to launch commando raids by U.S. troops against al-Qaeda-related targets in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier region would carry a high risk of further destabilizing the Pakistani military and government, according to sources familiar with the intelligence community's response to the issue.
That blunt warning was conveyed to the White House in an oral briefing by a top official of the NIC two or three weeks ago, according to Philip Giraldi, former operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist in the CIA Directorate of Operations, who maintains contacts with the intelligence community.
Another source, who has been briefed by NIC officials on the issue, confirms that the NIC message, representing a consensus in the intelligence community, was conveyed to the Bush administration in August, just as an intense debate over whether to carry out commando raids against al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan was still under way.
Hanging is too good for them.
the 3 Ps of house-hunting ...
.. position, position, position - but nowhere near oil, please!
-=*=-
G'day Bob,
these silly Afghans, Iraqis and Muslims and/or Arabs in general - they obviously must'a failed to note that v.important 3Ps-principle; one may accuse them of having deliberately chosen to live over - or even just near our (the West's) oil on purpose. (Apart from oil, particularly pernicious, are those who previously chose to dare inhabit the Zionists' desired bit'a real estate.)
The silly oil-owners almost everywhere, plus the hapless Palestinians, also appear to have failed to realize that all it takes these days, to be struck by a bomb or a missile out'a an otherwise clear, blue sky - to actually be blown to bloody shreds and bone-splinters - is to merely be a suspected militant. (No justice, please - we're Merkins.)
I have heard a rumour that one US strategy is to deliberately instigate insurrections (using black-ops, say, like blowing up a mosque, or car-bombing a market), so that as they try to defend their families and lands by attacking the illegal invaders (or even just thinking about it), suspected militants may then be slaughtered wholesale; the US-Imperial forces charmingly refer to this process as 'pacification.' When all is quite - the population perhaps having been decimated by the removal of such 'trouble-makers' (look up the definition of genocide), then the filthy, mainly US capitalists can move in, to harvest the victims' sovereign resources (or build pipelines) with (relative) impunity. This process, they tell us (via, and often actually assisted by the corrupt and venal MSM, the lies spewing mainly out'a our wide/flat-screen TVs), is called 'securing our (the West's) resource/energy supplies.' What charming language; what an 'enlightened' way of describing criminal, mass-murdering theft.
G'day Phil, and presidential elections - more on Pakistan.
KARACHI - Seven years after the United States led the invasion of Afghanistan in search of al-Qaeda and to topple the Taliban government, US President George W Bush has added neighboring Pakistan to the list of countries that are "a major 'war on terror' battleground", while also announcing a "quiet surge" of troops into Afghanistan.
Bush, in remarks prepared for delivery to the US National Defense University and released by the White House late on Monday, said Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan "pose unique challenges for our country" in the worldwide conflict against terror and that it is in Pakistan's interests to "defeat terrorists and extremists".
What Bush didn't spell out is that it is also in the US's interests
that Pakistan get tough on militants, and that the US is increasingly taking matters into its own hands inside Pakistan. In the the latest incident on Monday, at least 25 people were killed in a missile attack by unmanned Predator drones on a Pakistani village near the Afghan border.
The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier has moved into the Persian Gulf. Contrary to comments by US officials that it is to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, Asia Times Online has learned it is part of a new task force, separate from the Lincoln, which will allow the US to increase air sorties in the South Asian war theater. The Bush administration, critics say, is desperate to notch up a major terror success ahead of the presidential elections in November.
Given their track record, innocents will die in order to help elect McInsane.
Robert Parry on the "surge".
And from Tomdispatch, Andrew Bacevich on the last seven years.
Some catching up.
G'day Bob,
re: your fpif/Walden Bello/Toward a New American Isolationism citation, it's not only the last paragraph, pretty-well the whole thing is worth a read. This, for example:
«Some have been quick to call China's international economic policies "imperialistic." However, exploitative relations between China and other developing countries have not acquired an imperial structure and lack the element of force and coercion that accompanied the imposition of European and American economic power on weaker societies.»
Look at some'a the keywords: exploitative, force and coercion.
Well may the (criminal) septics say "They hate us for our freedoms!"
G'day Phil, first, Glenn Greenwald follows up Floyd's Azizabad article from the media perspective.
There are numerous vital issues raised by this episode relating both to the bombing and particularly how the U.S. Government so frequently issues false claims, but in light of all the recent uproar over what is and is not "appropriate journalism," I want to focus for the moment on Fox News' role in this. When the U.S. military originally was denying the villagers' claim, the Pentagon claimed it had had conducted an investigation and that an unnamed "independent journalist" who happened to be with them confirmed their account that large numbers of Taliban were among the dead and only very few unarmed civilians were. But then this was revealed:
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was a[ Marine] colonel.
That "independent journalist" is the same person who, in 1986, proudly went before Congress and boasted: "I will tell you right now, counsel, and to all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress," and then justified that lying -- and to this day still justifies it -- on the ground that it was for a greater good. That behavior -- which led to multiple felony convictions that were ultimately overturned because he had received immunity in connection with his testimony -- hasn't prevented North from being employed as a "reporter" by the serious, legitimate news arm of Fox News, nor from appearing regularly on Brit Hume's Serious News Show as a journalist, nor being cited as an "independent journalist" by the U.S. military to confirm its claims and accuse Afghan villagers of lying about the number of their dead.
Nothing like having reliable sources ... and that is nothing like a reliable source.
Tom Engelhardt on Azizabad.
In a little noted passage in her bestselling book, The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offers us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve-gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reports Mayer, went underground. He literally embunkered himself in "a secure, undisclosed location," which she describes as "one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock…" That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, "the Commander in Chief's Suite."
Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, "he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."
When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn't exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime president -- forget the vice-president -- including Abraham Lincoln when southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation's capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?
On the other hand, the well-armored Vice President and his aide David Addington played a leading role, as Mayer documents in grim detail, in loosing a Global War on Terror that was also a global war of terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war, "the gloves came off," "the shackles were removed" -- images much loved within the administration and, in the case of those "shackles," by George Tenet's CIA. In the process, no price in human abasement or human life proved too high to pay -- as long as it was paid by someone else.
Recently, it was paid by up to 60 Afghan children.
And the winner is ...
Flashpoint.
If most Americans think Iran and Georgia are the two most volatile flashpoints in the world, one can hardly blame them. The possibility that the Bush administration might strike at Tehran's nuclear facilities has been hinted about for the past two years, and the White House's pronouncements on Russia seem like Cold War déjà vu.
But accelerating tensions between India and Pakistan, coupled with Washington's increasing focus on Afghanistan, might just make South Asia the most dangerous place in the world right now, a region where entirely too many people are thinking the unthinkable.
Chomsky on Ossetia and such.
Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston. “No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because Funston occupies that summit himself... [he is] satire incarnated.”
It is a thought that often comes to mind, again in August 2008 during the Georgia-Ossetia-Russia war. George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from international institutions “by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with” their principles. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored, they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of others too long and familiar to mention.
Yes, well.
But when they take this approach to planning ....
The chimp said that?
No wonder they're in a mess.
even one dead 'collateral' ...
.. is already too much.
-=*=-
Such eff'n, bloody hypocrisy.
G'day Bob, the Azizabad story ties together a murdering Pentagon, lying politicians, the venal MSM (principally here Faux news), a known criminal (Oliver North), a resource war (not so much *against* the 'we (the US) can carpet you with gold or bombs' Taliban as *for* a pipeline); it is a truly, truly saddening thing. Then there is this:
«And yes, that last, best hope for newspapers is Rupert Murdoch. The world will be listening as he presents the 2008 Boyer Lectures on the ABC later this year. As Michael Wolff recently put it, Murdoch "may be the last person to love newspapers".»
[Mark Scott, managing director of the AusBC]
My comment: I'm ground down, almost into catatonia, by the utter hopelessness of the situation, the sheer, callous criminality of the perpetrators - who are actually agents for evil, and inveigled themselves into occupying the position of 'leaders' of the world, a world with no mention of 'free' or any other qualifier except 'hapless.' The traitorous, corrupt and venal MSM transmits the M/I/C-plex (military/industrial/congress complex) lies, often amplifying those lies by adding their own (recall Miller, Parkinson, Fran Kelley; such are almost everywhere). And the AusBC and SBS are far too often indistinguishable from the corporate MSM (even one time is already too much!) For the 'boss' of 'our' AusBC to be championing Murdoch and Sky News (Murdoch also owns Fox) just adds another 'brick in the wall.' Bias is less of a problem at the AusBC than being outright traitorous accessories to criminality.
G'day Phil, you might not need this ... but here is Chris Floyd looking at blustering fools and history repeating itself ... same old slaughtering ways. Only the hardware changes ... to more effectively kill the innocent.
G'day Phil, Chris Floyd has more on Somalia.
Glenn Greenwald on differing attitudes to privacy.
ome adolescent criminal (in mentality if not age) yesterday hacked into a Yahoo account used by Sarah Palin for both personal and business email, and various sites -- including Gawker -- posted some of the emails online. While the bottom layers of the right-wing noise machine (the kind that make you run for the shower after reading them) are moronically describing the hacker(s) as "liberals" and "left-wing," nobody actually has any idea of their identity, let alone their political leanings (if any). The available evidence strongly suggests the hacker is loosely part of an assorted band of Internet pranksters ranging from the juvenile to the psychopathic. Conventional political agendas ("Vote Obama!") don't exactly appear to be their interest. Either way, whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.
Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.
The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.
But some are taking action against the main abusers.
Privacy advocates are trying to shut down the US government's "shadow network of surveillance devices" used to spy on its citizens with a lawsuit aimed at President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, the National Security Agency and dozens of current and former government officials.
Plaintiffs who had been pursuing a suit against AT&T have shifted their focus to government officials to circumvent Congress's grant of immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is continuing to pursue its case against AT&T.
Is the economic sun setting? From TomdispatchSteve Fraser on how the rules have changed.
Wonder if some unprincipled cur will post this article elsewhere and think he's being clever?
Who is next?
As the Dow sheds another 450 points and credit markets are turning blue from the strangulation effects, there are two main questions being asked on Wall Street now. The first is, which investment bank will be next? The second is, will the Fed be able to handle the effective nationalization of AIG, on top of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the $30 billion of Bear Stearns securities it took responsibility for in March?
The optimists say the Fed will just print more money if it needs to—and to that end, the Treasury department has said they'll provide the Fed a temporary Supplementary Finance Program by auctioning an extra $40 billion worth of Treasury Bills. They also say that this 'witch-hunt' to bring down another firm is the result of panic and fear.
" ... panic and fear"? So much for economics as a rational science.
G'day Phil, Chris Floyd back to a matter close to the neocon and Zionist hearts - Iran.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made an unremarkable, indeed redundant, statement on Thursday. Repeating a sentiment that he has expressed many times before, he declared that Iran is a "friend of the Jewish people" and that neither he nor the Iranian government had any desire to destroy the Jews living in Israel or force them to leave the land.
He did reiterate Tehran's commitment to "regime change" in Israel, and in remarks on the Holocaust, exposed once more a view of modern history that is every bit as ignorant and tendentious as the one held by his counterpart in Washington. Again, there was nothing new in this either.
But the New York Times seized on Ahmadinejad's umpteenth denial of hostility toward the Jewish people -- offered up in support of similar remarks made recently by his vice president -- as newsworthy. Of course, the only thing new about the statement was that the Times decided to report it.
Naturally, this reportage came filtered through the usual prism of Beltway conventional wisdom, which can admit of no let-up in the relentless push to punish the evil Persians. For example, the story managed to get in the old blood libel about Ahmadinejad's alleged vow to "wipe Israel off the map." This egregious and deliberate mistranslation has been one of the most effective and potent propaganda devices of our time, right up there with the "smoking gun--mushroom cloud" gambit that was instrumental in the slaughter of a million innocent people (and counting) in Iraq.
And there is still a very good chance that the "map-wiping" ploy will lead to another dose of mass death itself. For as that Terror War triumvirate of George, John and Barack never cease to remind us, war with Iran is "always on the table." The only apparent difference between these macho men is that Barack seems willing to entertain the possibility of perhaps giving Iran a bit more time to knuckle under to American demands before he pulls the trigger.
They create their own monster to go forth to destroy.
More on Pakistan.
Tensions between the United States and Pakistan continued to deteriorate today after Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisted that the United States has the right to launch attacks into Pakistani territory. Pakistani Prime Minister Raza Gilani released a statement shortly after the news broke insisting that the American attack were “counterproductive,” and saying that his government had warned the United States in no uncertain terms that there would be no compromise on the issue of cross border attacks.
The US alliance with Pakistan has been under considerable strain since the US began a policy of escalating attacks into the tribal regions along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik insists that there has been no agreement between his government and the US which would allow the cross-border attacks.
Despite a promise from Admiral Michael Mullen yesterday to respect Pakistan’s sovereignty, the US strikes have continued unabated, with the latest coming just hours after Mullen’s assurance killing seven in South Waziristan. Some sources claim that an unnamed al-Qaeda commander was killed in the attack, but Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Mehmood Qureshi insists that the US did not inform the government before the attack.
"With all these promises you left for me" which segues to something completely different, from Chris Floyd.
G'day Phil, well it wasn't the surge, analysis says so but ... and below is a spoiler - the last paragraph of this article.
"Geographers and social scientists find it increasingly difficult to intervene in debates about vital matters of public interest, such as the Iraq war, because of the ideological polarization and lack of respect for empirical analysis that have afflicted US politics in recent years." Emphasis added.
We see it everywhere.
More from Frida Berrigan on the money to be made ...
The successful surge is in defence industry profit margins.
Gordon Prather on possibilities ...
Perhaps the want to continue their run of success ... oh!
G'day Phil, doing my bit ... Chris Floyd says noone cares about Somalia. So, here are two pieces from him about the matter to try to remind people of what is happening.
Yesterday.
In the recent presidential "debate," both candidates expressed their eager, unstinting, even feverish support for the so-called "War on Terror" being waged by Washington and its proxies around the world.
Indeed, throughout the entire campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain have repeatedly pledged their fealty to the Terror War, and all that it entails: an even larger war machine (with even more public boodle for war profiteers); a continued military presence in Iraq (under one guise or another); a substantial expansion of the hate-fomenting war in Afghanistan (with a concomitant raise in "collateral damage"); an extension of that war into Pakistan (destabilizing and radicalizing a fractious state with a nuclear arsenal); pressing ever closer to the threshold of war with Iran (with bellicose threats, blockades and demonizing propaganda); establishing even more military satrapies to exercise dominion over the regions of the earth (including new proconsular commands for Africa and the United States itself); and -- as we have noted here over and over -- the bloody rendering of Somalia into a boiling, hellish cauldron of slaughter, suffering and chaos.
Somalia is the invisible third front of the Terror War, an American-backed "regime change" operation launched by the invading army of Ethiopia and local warlords in December 2006. In addition to helping arm, fund and train the army of the Ethiopian dictatorship, the United States has intervened directly into the conflict, carrying out bombing raids on fleeing refugees and nomads, firing missiles into villages, sending in death squads to clean up after covert operations, and, as we reported here long ago, assisting in the "rendition" of refugees, including American citizens, into the hands of Ethiopia's notorious torturers. [See note below for more links.]
Together, the American Terror Warriors, the Ethiopians and the warlords (some of them directly in the pay of the CIA) have created the worst humanitarian disaster on earth. Thousands have been killed in the fighting. Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes, many fleeing to northern Kenya, where more than 215,000 people are languishing in a single refugee camp in Dadaab; 45,000 people have poured into the camp this year alone, says the UN. In some of the camps, Somali refugees are living without any shelter at all: "The BBC's Mark Doyle, who has recently visited the camps in Kenya, says some refugees do not even have a basic plastic sheet to protect them from the sun and rain."
In just the last two weeks, more than 18,500 people have fled the capital of Mogadishu, which has already been decimated by the warfare. Many were sent on the run by one of the Ethiopians' favorite tactics: mortar and artillery fire into civilian areas believed "sympathetic" to the insurgents.
The United States is not only backing the Ethiopians and the Somali transitional government (TGF) propped up by the occupation; Washington has also provided "robust financial and logistical support to armed paramilitaries resisting the command and control of the TGF," according to a major new study of the conflict by the human rights organization, Enough. In addition to these freebooters, it turns out that the wide-ranging Somali pirates -- who last week hijacked a shipload of heavy weapons being funneled into African conflicts by Ukrainian war profiteers -- are supported by "backers linked to the Western-backed government" in Mogadishu.
In other words, the United States is sponsoring a hydra-headed conflict that spews fire and destruction in every direction, and is trampling an already ravaged people deeper into the dirt. It is by any measure -- even the mass-murdering standards of our day -- a sickening abomination, a war crime of staggering proportions. Yet it goes on, day after day, without the slightest comment, much less criticism, from the entire bipartisan political establishment, and almost all of the media -- including most of the "dissident" blogosphere. The Somalis are simply non-people, a nation of ghosts, unseen and unseeable.
Today.
"They hate us for our values."
G'day Phil, there is the legacy to consider ...
Not long ago, the head honchos of the Bush administration probably sat down in the Oval Office. Long faces prevailed around the room. The agenda: "Moving from Plan A to Plan B."
Plan A was the dynasty plan. The plan posited a continuation of Bush policies, notably the radical conservative game plan laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy, under the next Republican administration. Plan B was the legacy plan, designed to lock in as many Bush policies as possible before losing the presidency to the Democrats.
No matter that six years after the unveiling of the National Security Strategy, the majority of the U.S public rejected nearly all the basic premises of the doctrine. Although most Americans now weighed in against the Iraq War, for adherence to international law and institutions, and against the role of the United States as global cop, the dynasty plan assumed that what was needed was a deepening of the same policies that had been applied over the previous eight years. Given the concentration and expansion of executive powers achieved during George W. Bush's two terms of office, this could be done without explicit agreement from the citizenry.
To put the dynasty plan in place simply meant passing the torch to Republican Party candidate John McCain. In the beginning, this plan seemed relatively easy. There were no major differences between the outgoing and incoming executives. The de facto powers of state — defense and oil companies, neoconservative global architects — would hardly be disturbed. There was even talk of putting Jeb Bush on the ticket in the number-two spot, but some worried about the obvious dynastic implications of having a Bush on the ballot seven out of the last eight national elections. In any case, McCain could keep the seat warm for brother Jeb in 2012.
There's no clearer formulation of this plan than the 2008 Republican platform. Not only does it affirm the most controversial aspects of the Bush doctrine, it also insists on unchecked presidential powers to order the pre-emptive strikes and unilateral measures that characterize the security strategy.
Lessons unlearned.
Crazy? Here's really crazy.
According to the Guardian, a few months ago President Bush put the kibosh on Israel's plan to take out, in a preventative strike, Iran's nuclear facilities, despite all being duly subject to a Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required by the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Because Bush deemed such an attack to be immoral? To be contrary to the UN Charter? A violation of UN Security Council Resolution 487? Would further undermine the IAEA-NPT nuke proliferation-prevention regime?
No, No. Bush was reportedly concerned that the Iranians might retaliate for the dastardly Israeli deed and that said retaliation might disrupt oil shipments from the Persian Gulf, causing gasoline prices in America to go sky-high, just before the election.
Now comes a seemingly authoritative report that Russia's crushing retaliation for the Georgian attack on South Ossetia has put the kibosh on Israel's alternative plan; to launch that "preventative strike" from airfields in Southern Georgia.
Perhaps those reports are all true. How else to account for the spectacle of various neo-crazies and Likudniks, running around in circles of diminishing radius, muttering to themselves or shrieking incoherently.
Take Frank Gaffney, for instance, for the last 30 years or so a lickspittle of Likudnik Grand Pooh-Bah Richard Perle.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, Gaffney essentially warned that "any day" now, Iran could detonate exo-atmospherically, somewhere over Kansas, a specially designed multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon, which could wipe out our entire electricity grid, causing a "catastrophic disaster."
"Such an attack could really cripple our 21st-century society, and I would suggest sort of push us back into preindustrial society in the blink of an eye. It would translate over time – not immediately but over time – into the deaths of perhaps as many as nine out of 10 Americans, because our society simply can't be sustained without electricity and all of the infrastructure that supports our urban settings."
So, Gaffney appears to have gone from Likudnik neo-crazy to just plain crazy. What could conceivably have moved Gaffney to make such charges?
The Senate occasionally gets something right.
G'day Phil, Tom Engelhardt on intel and predicting the future ...
Chris Floyd - The Wounded Shark.
Don't tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief -- the "good war" in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand -- is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire -- not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan -- will only lead to disaster.
Who says so? America's biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan -- Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan -- both said that the war was "unwinnable," and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy "doomed to fail."
The biggest headlines went to the comments by Cowper-Coles, whose frank assessment was quoted in a secret French diplomatic cable that was published by a muckraking French magazine last week. Cowper-Coles put it plainly:
The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust....The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.
These are indisputable facts that have been glaringly obvious to most sentient observers for many years. Yet the diplomat's acknowledgement of reality has been greeted as a shocking breach of decorum by his fellow professional liars in Anglo-American officialdom. His brief outburst of truth (which, to be fair to the good knight, was meant to be in secret; he didn't mean to tell the public the truth!) was quickly disavowed in Washington and London. Although the cable's authenticity was not in question, the UK Foreign Office said that their ambassador's comments "did not reflect official British policy."
That is certainly the unvarnished truth, for "official British policy" has long been to "do whatever the hell the Americans tell us to do." Cowper-Coles was upfront about this too:
Acknowledging that there is no option other than supporting the Americans in Afghanistan, the ambassador reportedly added, "but we must tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one.” The American strategy, he is quoted as saying, “is destined to fail.”
Hint: You can't maintain an empire by losing wars.
['snip' for today, URL courtesy of BobW, g'day:]
«But as Margolis notes:
...the current war is not really about al-Qaida and "terrorism," but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West.
III.
Yet beyond these more immediate, gritty concerns, there is also the blind, iron logic of perpetual war that drives any imperial power. Like a shark, it must keep moving, must keep the water churning, obscured with clouds of blood and fear -- or else it will stand revealed as the naked, brutish, pointless thing that it is: a bestial lust for domination, a secretion of the chemical mud that lies in the lower swamps of our misfiring, imperfect brains. Every imperial project bedecks itself with high-flown rhetoric and shining, self-glorifying, emotion-rousing ideals. These are internalized by millions of individuals, who are then unable to see the world in any other way. Whatever is done in the name of these ideals is rational, reasonable and right; anything that threatens their primacy and authenticity is evil, insane and worthy of destruction.
(This dynamic doesn't apply solely to imperialism, of course. Any all-consuming mythology of meaning and explanation can generate this kind of blind, partisan passion -- as the current presidential campaign illustrates so well, on both sides.)
That's why an empire must keep marching, and roaring in the thought-obliterating noise of war and fear. Peace gives space for reflection, for questioning, for the development of a more human, more humane response to reality. And all of these are deadly to the mud-brain lust for domination, and to the inflated rhetoric that cloaks it. For when empires stop -- or are stopped -- the meaninglessness of the entire project is laid bare.»
Worth reading the lot (as usual) and now, something different:
The Danish and the Germans (who else? Aus?) - anyway, both countries have banks 'deep in distress,' and have tried to reassure their 'savers,' i.e. the people who actually have money on deposit via the various banks, that their saved money is (still) safe. On hearing this, I imagine any saver would immediately think "S**t! Straight down to the bank, gimme my money!"
The 'masters of the (financial) universe' dismantled the laws implemented after 1929, and set about being 'free,' as in 'free market.' They may well have now brought down the whole house of cards - the same house of cards that they oh, so brilliantly fabricated.
I have extreme difficulty in trying to imagine what would cause any person presumed to be sane and rational to 'support' the US, given what we can quite easily see - brutal, murder-for-spoil wars and ruinous, predatory financial fraud. Such a 'supporter' could perhaps only do so, a) because they actually profit from this horrid US madness, or b) are not actually sane at all, but are possessed of an unreasoning, erring ideology. Beats me.
Finally for now, I present the best bit of idiocy seen for a while - actually of course, the worst: NZ is preparing to 'negotiate' an FTA with the US:
"Here shark, nice shark, won't you let me swim in your pool?"
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