ddjango

These days, no one should be faulted for feeling a certain overload of the senses and emotions. Good news seems to be hiding under big boulders somewhere. "If it isn't one thing, it's another" is a cliche that doesn't quite get at it.

It isn't just the economy or the environment or the wars and rumors of wars - it's damn near everything. "Hell in a hand basket" doesn't make the grade either. Where is the relief? Even those who hoped that things might brighten up with the ascendancy of Barack Obama are finding holes in their armor of "hope" and "change".

It's as if we were bolted into the tarmac at the intersection of several runways. Toward each one of them a massive, crippled Airbus heads in for a crash landing, landing gear up, engines aflame, air brakes screaming.

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A.C. Thompson

In New Orleans's Algiers Point, white vigilantes shot African-Americans with impunity.

In the case of one shooting victim, evidence indicates that the local police may have been complicit in his death. Eyewitnesses didn't see where the bullet came from, but when they took a bleeding Henry Glover to a police staging area hoping for medical assistance, they were met by blows instead. See A.C. Thompson's companion piece, "Body of Evidence."

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

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Stuart Littlewood

Who is holding the governments of Britain, the EU and the US to account this Christmas for aiding and abetting the deliberate starving of 1.5 million in Gaza?

Hardly anybody. Most of those in a position to do so are Friends of Israel.

What of our foreign secretary, David Miliband, our very Christian prime minister Brown and our even more pious peace envoy Mr Blair…. have they done anything at all to insist that Israel’s blockade is ended?

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Peter Chamberlin

"The Sheeple" -prepared for baptism into the
New World Order.

Basically, the Pentagon and the CIA are working in tandem to force targeted nations like India and Pakistan to accept the decision which has been made to “outsource” the terror war to them and other patsy nations like them. Agency contract hits like the Mumbai attack and bombings in FATA are blamed on “al Qaida” by the government-controlled media in the West and in the media controlled by the “patsy” foreign governments. Biased, hate-based reporting serves to drive patriotic fervor to a frenzied state. The duplicitous leaders in those countries then carry-out America’s will, to set them upon a path to war, in effect, driving their own people into a “kill trap” where unwanted war is forced upon them. This pattern prevails all over the earth, wherever the US has imperial designs. We are all being herded into a global war trap, some call it world war III.

American mini-dictator generals and crime bosses knew that their global war plans would require massive numbers of committed killers, a goal that a volunteer force could not fulfill. A conscripted army of unwilling, underpaid, over-committed soldiers, who might follow orders to commit genocide, would be unsatisfactory for the task, especially when the focus of the killing turns to their own homelands. No, the committed killers who have volunteered to be underpaid and overworked in order to gain the right to kill were too few in number, so they had to be supplemented. This is the reason that the US has created massive armies and navies of high-paying “civilian” contract killers (mercenaries).

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Jim Miles

Two recent events have prompted the ideas behind this article – in truth, the whole history of recent events have prompted the following comments, but it is two in particular that gave the push to write them down.

The first event, unknown to most of the world, was a tempest in a teapot when the opposition parties in Canada made a legal political manoeuvre under our representational parliamentary system to take over the administration of the government. Stephen Harper, Canada’s answer to George Bush, has made several critical mistakes recently, the first was an election call before his own mandated four year date, an election during which he argued that the economy was fine and they would not run a deficit budget, and then having received a minority government, proceeded to act as if he had a majority (when in reality he only had 38 per cent of the popular vote) and introduced a budget outline that was at best lousy. That budget paper incurred the wrath of the opposition parties and brought about the announcement of a coalition to defeat the government. Harper’s immature rant in response included the good old U.S. fear factor of socialism, with Harper and cronies warning everyone about the socialist hordes in the opposition (who combined held - obviously - the majority of the votes).

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Mary Shaw

I don't usually see eye-to-eye with George W. Bush, but I am grateful that he took some steps last week to bail out the auto industry.

After all, how could we bail out the Wall Street elite without also making an effort to save the largest single segment of the U.S. manufacturing industry?

In other words, how can we bail out the white collar bankers without making a similar gesture to save the blue collar auto workers who have traditionally formed the foundation of the U.S. economy?

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Eva Bartlett

Journalist and student Hamzi Shaheen
lies in his hospital bed in Gaza City
after losing both of his legs in an Israeli
air strike. (Eva Bartlett)

Salah Oukal, 46 years old, had gone outside to collect herbs for dinner, harvesting in the dark as the power was out again. It was just before 9pm and he was watering the trees next to his home in Jabaliya, when the missile struck, killing him instantly. A second missile followed immediately but did not explode. Oukal's family spent the next hour searching without success for the father of seven and the family's sole provider. Only with the headlights of an ambulance was Oukal's dismembered body finally retrieved.

The ground-to-ground missile fired from the Israeli side of Gaza's eastern border injured an additional three residents, including Oukal's son Ahmed, seven years old, who suffered rocket shrapnel wounds to his hand and head. Israeli authorities claimed that the missile was a response to rockets being fired from the area. However, Oukal's family and neighbors report all had been quiet.

"He wasn't one of the resistance fighters," his teenage daughter explained. "And there weren't any rockets being fired before he was hit. It was quiet, and the shelling was sudden," she said.

On 7 December, a legal adviser to Israel's ministry of defense, Ahaz Benari, told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that "Artillery fire is permissible only in relatively open areas," adding that "artillery fire at urban areas is problematic, if the assessment is that the chance that the shell will hit the launchers is relatively low, while the risk that many civilians will be hurt is substantial."

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Deanna Spingola

The war conspirators included a Standard Oil attorney, Henry L. Stimson (Skull & Bones), who was a Thomas Lamont ally, and partner with Elihu Root in a law firm on Wall Street, the nucleus of the powerful American Establishment. Following Washington’s proverbial revolving door collusion strategy between corporate oligarchies and government, Stimson held the following strategic positions: civilian Secretary of War under fellow Skull and Bonesman Taft (1908-1912), Governor General of the Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under Hoover (1929-1933) and civilian Secretary of War under Roosevelt and Truman (1940- 1946), where he managed the drafting and training of 12 million soldiers and airmen, and directed the purchase of 30 percent of the nations industrial output to the battlefield. He was responsible for the internment and subsequent property seizure of thousands of Japanese-American citizens.

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Elias Akleh

Richard Falk, the professor of international law at Princeton University and the UN’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, had accused Israel of violating international law, international humanitarian laws, and the Geneva Convention. He described Israel’s policies against Palestinians and its siege of Gaza as “war crimes”, “genocidal tendencies”, “holocaust implications”, and “holocaust-in-the-making”. He urged the International Criminal Court to look into the possibility of indicting Israeli leaders for war crimes.

Professor Falk had a little taste of Israel’s Nazi-like crimes and human rights violation when he traveled to Israel, last Sunday December 14th, 2008, to visit the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to report on Israel’s compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. The Israelis “detained” Professor Falk at the airport, treated his as a criminal and a threat to the state, humiliated him and deported him next day back to Geneva.

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Stephen Lendman

Obama leaves no ambiguity where he stands. From public statements, campaign pledges, policy advisors, and war cabinet selections, his positions affirm:

-- one-sided pro-Israeli zealotry;

-- continued Palestinian oppression;

-- no end to the Iraq war and occupation;

-- possibly attacking Iran and/or allying with Israel to do it;

-- pursuing an imperial agenda; targeting Pakistan, Russia and other countries;

-- expanding the size of the military; increasing expenditures for it; and

-- providing Israel annually with billions of dollars; the latest weapons and technology; the same zero interest rate loans Wall Street gets; liberal debt forgiveness; virtually anything Israel requests on the pretext of security, to wage aggressive war, or expand its illegal settlements; and

-- acquiescing and remaining silent after Israel insulted a high UN official by harassing and detaining him, then expelling him from the country.

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