New CIA Director John Brennan Cheers Torture

US lost more troops to suicide than combat in 2012

PressTV

11, the U.S. military lost 165 soldiers to suicide, a record that narrowly beat the 2009 level of 160. This year things have gotten much, much worse, and up to the end of November the suicide deaths are up to 303.

Putting this in perspective, that’s actually quite a bit more than the number of U.S. troops slain in combat so far in 2012. That figure is 212, though the overall U.S. death toll in Afghanistan is 307, including non-combat deaths.

The military has been desperate to get a handle on the rising suicide rate, making several very public efforts, none of which seems to have accomplished much of anything.

The latest on that is a number of Congressmen pushing for a new law allowing the military to ask “unstable” troops whether they own any personal guns, though as with most of the legislative “solutions” to this problem it seems focused more on adding to the stigma of being considered “at risk” than actually encouraging people to seek help. Antiwar

FACTS & FIGURES

The U.S. military has been struggling to deal with the suicide crisis since numbers began rising in 2004. This year, the average is nearly one soldier suicide a day. NPR

Military and medical leaders have been searching for answers to what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta describes as an "epidemic" of suicides ever since the numbers began increasing among soldiers and Marines. USA Today

As many as 12 active-duty soldiers committed suicide in November, pushing the Army above last year’s record number of suicides, military officials said in December. Army Times

The Army has now had 177 suspected suicides among active-duty soldiers this year. Last year’s total of confirmed suicides was 165. Army Times

Earlier this year, a high-ranking army official wrote, “Suicide is the toughest enemy I have faced in my 37 years in the Army.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has described suicide in the army as “one of the most frustrating problems.” Think Progress

AHT/DT

RT uncovers plans for US False Flag against IRAN

'Did We Just Kill A Kid?' — Six Words That Ended A US Drone Pilot's Career

Business Insider
Robert Johnson

The New Mexico desert gets blistering hot, but inside the small windowless container where Brandon Bryant worked as a drone operator for the U.S. Air Force it stays a cool 63 degrees all year long.

Nicola Abé at der Spiegel spoke with Bryant, no longer in the Air Force, who relays a disturbing and tragic scene from his time inside that isolated container in the American desert.

Sixty-three finger numbing degrees and Bryant describes sitting with a group of other pilots looking at more than a dozen computer monitors. The crew are directing drones over Afghanistan 6,250 miles away and the screens jump with a two to five second delay, as infrared video sent from the UAVs whips through the air to New Mexico.

When the order to fire on a target arrives, Bryant paints the roof of a hut with the laser that will guide in a Hellfire missile released by the pilot beside him.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says to Abé.

No doubt, because on this occasion Bryant says a child walked from behind the building at the last second. Too late for him to do anything else but ask the other pilot, "Did we just kill a kid?"

From der Spiegel:

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

The article follows another widely publicized story from the Marine Times about children killed by Americans on Afghan soil published just weeks ago. While obviously a tragedy for the victims and their families, Bryant describes the incredible toll taken on U.S. troops required to obey orders producing such dire results.

From his mother's couch in Missoula, Montana Bryant talks of his 6,000 Air Force flight hours and says he used to dream in infrared. "I saw men, women and children die during that time," he says. "I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all."

The three part article digs deeply into the life of a troubled former servicemember and the war-fighting policies that don't look to be changing anytime soon.

Outrage Over Children Killed in Cold Blood

US Recognition of Opposition Syrian Coalition Contradicts Geneva Statement

Woodshed Series with Ryan Dawson Continues for Pat Condell

US troops secretly return to Iraq

PressTV

Over 3,000 U.S. troops have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait for
operations pertaining to the recent developments in Syria and
northern Iraq, Press TV reports.

According to our correspondent, the U.S. troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province.

Reports say the troops include U.S. Army officers and almost 17,000 more are set to secretly return to Iraq via the same route.

All U.S. troops left Iraq by the end of 2011, after nine years of occupation, as required by a 2008 bilateral security agreement between the two countries. The troops left Iraq for the neighboring Kuwait.

Washington decided to pull out all its troops from Iraq after Baghdad refused to grant legal immunity to the remaining U.S. soldiers.

Washington claims that the only U.S. military presence left in Iraq now is 157 soldiers responsible for training at the U.S. Embassy, as well as a small contingent of Marines protecting the diplomatic mission.

FACTS & FIGURES

In 2003, the U.S. led the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The initial invading force in Iraq was around 130,000 soldiers.  This number was expected to be dropped down to under 50,000 within a year.  Two years later, there were 150,000 U.S. soldiers in the country.  One of the interesting Iraq war facts is that as of November 2009, there were around 115,000 U.S. soldiers still stationed there. iraqwarfacts.com

In October 2004, a CIA report concluded that former Iraqi dictator did not possess weapons of mass destruction at the time of U.S. invasion in 2003.

There is no agency that keeps track of accurate numbers of Iraqis killed but some local sources put the number well over one million.

Most of the Iraqis displaced post-2006 have not returned home, and an estimated 1.5 million live in neighboring countries. undispatch.com

The direct cost of the Iraq war to the United States Treasury was $1 trillion. That excludes the “downstream” costs of things like veteran benefits and long-term care for the wounded. One trillion divided by the U.S. population of 307 million equals a cost of over $3,200 per American citizen taxpayer. undispatch.com

According to icasualties.org, the total number of U.S. military fatalities, as a result of the 2003 attack and the following occupation, stands at 4,486.

Op-Ed: US-UK Genocide Against Iraq 1990-2012 Killed 3.3 Million-Including 750K Children

Denis Campbell's U.K. Progressive
Sherwood Ross

Approximately 3.3 million Iraqis, including 750,000 children, were “exterminated” by economic sanctions and/or illegal wars conducted by the U.S. and Great Britain between 1990 and 2012, an eminent international legal authority says.

The slaughter fits the classic definition of Genocide Convention Article II of, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and who in 1991 filed a class-action complaint with the UN against President George H.W. Bush.

The U.S. and U.K. “obstinately insisted” that their sanctions remain in place until after the “illegal” Gulf War II aggression perpetrated by President George W. Bush and UK’s Tony Blair in March, 2003, “not with a view to easing the over decade-long suffering of the Iraqi people and children” but “to better facilitate the U.S./U.K. unsupervised looting and plundering of the Iraqi economy and oil fields in violation of the international laws of war as well as to the grave detriment of the Iraqi people,” Boyle said.

In an address last Nov. 22 to The International Conference on War-affected Children in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Boyle tallied the death toll on Iraq by U.S.-U.K. actions as follows:

The slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis by President Bush in his illegal 1991 Gulf War I.
The deaths of 1.4 million Iraqis as a result of the illegal 2003 war of aggression ordered by President Bush Jr. and Prime Minister Blair.

The deaths of 1.7 million Iraqis “as a direct result” of the genocidal sanctions.
Boyle’s class-action complaint demanded an end to all economic sanctions against Iraq; criminal proceedings for genocide against President George H.W. Bush; monetary compensation to the children of Iraq and their families for deaths, physical and mental injury; and for shipping massive humanitarian relief supplies to that country.

The “grossly hypocritical” UN refused to terminate the sanctions, Boyle pointed out, even though its own Food and Agricultural Organization’s Report estimated that by 1995 the sanctions had killed 560,000 Iraqi children during the previous five years.

Boyle noted that then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright was interviewed on CBS-TV on May 12, 1996, in response to a question by Leslie Stahl if the price of half a million dead children was worth it, and replied, “we (the U.S. government) think the price is worth it.”

Albright’s shocking response provides “proof positive of the genocidal intent by the U.S. government against Iraq” under the Genocide Convention, Boyle said, adding that the government of Iraq today could still bring legal action against the U.S. and the U.K. in the International Court of Justice. He said the U.S.-U.K. genocide also violated the municipal legal systems of all civilized nations in the world; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and its Additional Protocol 1 of 1977.

Boyle, who was stirred to take action pro bono by Mothers in Iraq after the economic sanctions had been imposed upon them by the Security Council in August, 1990, in response to pressure from the Bush Senior Administration. He is the author of numerous books on international affairs, including “Destroying World Order” (Clarity Press.)

How to Prosecute the 9/11 War Crimes - Panel Discussion at the 9/11 Revisited Conference in Malaysia

Insurance companies for American and United Airlines notified about controlled demolition evidence

9/11 Blogger
Mark Graham

(Sacramento, CA)  9/11 Truth activist Mark Graham sent a letter to the 12 insurance companies for the airline defendants sued by Larry Silverstein informing them about evidence of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and Building 7 and offering to put them in touch with building experts who could provide expert testimony.

In 2004 Larry Silverstein, who owned Building 7 and had signed a 99 year lease on the Twin Towers just six weeks before 9/11, sued United and American Airlines ¹ and companies providing security at the airports (the "airline defendants").  Silverstein claimed that the airline defendants ² had been negligent in allowing the hijackers to board and hijack the planes and fly them into the Twin Towers.  He claimed that the plane crashes and fires "proximately caused the total destruction" of the Twin Towers, Building 7 and the other buildings in the World Trade Center.  (Complaint in Case 1:08-cv-03722-AKH Document 1 Filed 04/17/08, page 2)  ³

No mention has been made of the fact that it would have been impossible for those plane crashes and fires to have destroyed the buildings or the abundant evidence of controlled demolition.  The defense attorneys could make an affirmative defense of this argument and exculpatory evidence.

Graham sent his letter via certified mail to the heads of 12 insurance companies who insured the airline defendants including Lloyd’s of America, Travelers Cos, Swiss Re, Zurich American, Global Aerospace and U.S. Aircraft Insurance Group and to their attorneys.
As Graham’s letter pointed out, Silverstein’s theory that the plane crashes and fires destroyed these buildings, which also happens to be the U.S. government’s theory, has not been tested in court via expert testimony, scientific facts and evidence.  Nor has Silverstein’s theory been proven in the official building reports.  It has been proven to be fraudulent by 9/11 Truth activists yet it has been assumed true by the parties and the Court. ^{5 6}

Silverstein has already recovered $4 billion from his own insurance companies.  He is seeking $8.4 billion from the airline defendants for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and lost business income.

On September 5 Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that there will be a trial in these lawsuits.
On November 21 Judge Hellerstein ruled that United Airlines, whose flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, was not responsible for the destruction of Building 7.  That opinion followed a simple principle:  a defendant should not be held legally and financially liable for damage that he did not cause.  (“Judge Rules United Not Liable for 9/11 Collapse”, by Reuters, published in the New York Times)  Similarly, the airline defendants should not beheld legally and financially liable for damage that they did not cause.
Graham’s letter framed the issue like this:

There is exculpatory scientific evidence, including expert testimony, proving two separate claims.  Potential settlements ⁴ should take these claims and supporting evidence into account.  The defense attorneys should make an affirmative defense based on these claims and this evidence.  The claims are:

#1)  That it was impossible for the impact of the hijacked airplanes and the resulting fires to destroy the Twin Towers and / or Building 7 of the World Trade Center.  This would have been against the laws of physics.  It could not have occurred and did not occur.

#2)  That the cause of the building collapses was the detonation of explosive demolition charges in a timed sequence placed in the buildings that destroyed the steel columns supporting the buildings.  This is known as “controlled demolition” and it is an organized, systematic process for deliberately for taking down steel framed skyscrapers.

It follows that even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the airline defendants were negligent in allowing the hijackers to board and hijack Flight 11 and Flight 175 and fly them into the Twin Towers starting fires in the Twin Towers those plane impacts and fires did not cause or even contribute to the total destruction of the Twin Towers.

Exculpatory evidence is evidence that would absolve of liability, exonerate, or clear of blame, as in a defendant in a lawsuit. 
Those of us in the 9/11 Truth movement are familiar with the evidence that controlled demolition using explosives caused the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7.  The letter named some of this evidence and referred to the NIST final report on Building 7 and the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth website.

Assuming that American Airlines Flight 11 caused or contributed to the destruction of floors 93 through 110, or 18 floors of the North Tower and that controlled demolition caused the destruction of floors 1 through 92, American Airlines should be held liable for no more than 18 / 110 or about 16.4 per cent of the value of the property damage to the North Tower.

Assuming that United Airlines Flight 175 caused or contributed to the destruction of floors 77 through 110, or 34 floors of the South Tower, and that controlled demolition caused the destruction of floors 1 through 76, United Airlines should be held liable for no more than 34 / 110 or about 31 per cent of the value of the property damage to the South Tower. 
As Graham wrote, “Legal and financial liability for the damage to the floors below should be properly assigned to those who planned and carried out the controlled demolitions.  I do not know who those individuals are.  They are as yet publicly unidentified terrorists.”
If the airline defendants make the affirmative defense that they were not responsible for the total destruction of these buildings because controlled demolition took them down it would surely surprise a lot of people and call into question the official conspiracy theory of the government and mass media that blames Arab hijackers for all of the damage.

                                                            ###

Niloufer Bhagwat presents to the 9/11 Revisited conference in Kuala Lumpur

Corbett Report


 Niloufer Bhagwat, Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at University of Mumbai, presents to the “9/11 Revisted: Seeking the Truth” conference in Kuala Lumpur on November 19, 2012.

 

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky Presents 9/11 Revisited: Seeking the Truth

The Highway of Death

A short film about the atrocities that took place along the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait to Basra. Iraq on February 26th & 27th, 1991.

Does Israel’s Zionist Project Require the Destruction of Palestine?

Interview with Gregory Harms

Global Research
Kourosh Ziabari

American journalist and scholar Gregory Harms believes that the recent 8-day Israeli war on the Gaza Strip might have been waged to distract public attention from the internal socioeconomic crises and problems the Israeli regime faces, especially ahead of the January 2013 legislative elections. He believes that launching airstrikes on Gaza may serve to give Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party a secure vote in the upcoming elections.

“[P]ushing the Gaza button focuses Israelis on matters of security. The population in Israel is highly manipulated and taught to be fearful… Israel’s isolation is bad for the country and its people; it cultivates a very unhealthy national psychology. As a result – and quite similar to Americans – the public is easily turned around. When things are too calm, the people begin focusing on domestic issues and the economy. This has been a serious issue in Israel, with massive protesting occurring over housing costs and income disparity. Israel’s economy is better than most, but there are serious grievances, and when the Arab Spring took hold of North Africa and the Arab Middle East, its effects were felt in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv,” he said in a recent interview with me after the announcement of ceasefire between Hamas and Israel on November 21.

Gregory Harms is an independent scholar specializing in U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. He lectures, keeps a blog on Facebook, and publishes articles on CounterPunch, Truthout, and Mondoweiss. Harms has traveled throughout Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and has been interviewed on BBC Radio.

His first book “The Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Basic Introduction,” 3rd ed. (Pluto Press, 2012) is brief and general summary of the history of Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the establishment of the Israeli regime in 1948.

I conducted an interview with Gregory Harms a few days after the conclusion of the Operation Pillar of Defense which claimed the lives of at least 170 Palestinians and caused serious damages to the infrastructure and civilian buildings in the besieged Gaza Strip. Following is the text of the interview.

Kourosh Ziabari: Ceasefire has now been declared between Hamas and Israel, but through the eight-day attacks and air-strikes of Israel against the Gaza Strip, some 180 Palestinians, many of whom innocent civilians, have been killed. Why do you think Israel renewed its assaults on Gaza?

Gregory Harms: The question of why is a matter of speculation; but we can make some reasonable guesses. It’s hard to imagine that the upcoming January elections in Israel are not a factor. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely looking to focus the country on security issues as well as consolidate Likud’s coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. He and Likud are the expected victors, but the elections are too near for this not to be a consideration.

Another possible factor is Hamas’s increased regional prestige. Because of the new leadership in Cairo under President Mohamed Morsi, the strong presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian politics, and Hamas’s severing of ties with its former sponsor in Damascus, relations between Hamas and Cairo have progressed. Hamas’s growing ties with Qatar and Turkey also signal the Islamist organization’s increased status. Israel’s strategic take on this is difficult to discern, but if this development did factor in the recent violence, it is Tel Aviv acting on its longstanding impulse of using the military first. One possible benefit, from Israel’s perspective, is that now that Morsi and company have played a key role in achieving a truce, Gaza has been pushed closer to Egypt. For Tel Aviv, the best-case scenario is that Gaza becomes Cairo’s problem altogether, as it was before 1967.

Iran could very well be a possible motive. If Tel Aviv plans on attacking Tehran’s nuclear facilities anytime soon, it will want Hamas’s weapon supplies diminished. If this is indeed a rationale, it raises the question of Hizballah’s caches and preparedness in Lebanon. Whether Iran is a factor is difficult to say. The Obama White House has to-date shown no interest in direct armed intervention in Iran, which in turn makes a unilateral Israeli operation an unpopular notion among the majority of Israelis. Furthermore, Iran is a very large country that can fight back, automatically making it a less likely candidate for US-Israeli action.

There is also the fast-approaching bid on the part of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to seek nonmember observer-state status for Palestine at the United Nations. By roughing up Gaza, there might be a hope of getting the Palestinian Authority to shift course. Israel’s foreign ministry has already talked of removing Abbas from power in the event the PA makes headway at the UN General Assembly – which is almost guaranteed. As stated in a foreign ministry paper, quoted in the Guardian (Nov. 14),

Ben Swann: "No Country Would Tolerate Missiles From Outside

When Propaganda Masquarades as News

Global Research
Prof. James F. Tracy

The week-long Israeli onslaught against largely defenseless Palestinians in Gaza that began on November 14 provides a basis for assessing how Western corporate media whitewash the war crimes of America’s foremost ally in the Middle East. There are three often intertwined techniques consciously applied to such news coverage—historical context, sourcing, and objectification of the enemy to be targeted. Such practices can readily transform journalism into propaganda that acts to abet such crimes while at the same time allowing journalistic institutions to still claim the mantle of “objectivity.”

Such methods are on full display in the reportage of Israel’s most recent operation in Gaza. The use of such propaganda fits within a broader campaign of media disinformation that subdues potential outrage—particularly in the US—over Israel’s overwhelming use of force against an oppressed and vulnerable people, most of whom are civilians.

Meaningful historical context for understanding Israel’s aggression is almost entirely absent from most Western news coverage of the event. If present, such context would illuminate Israeli government officials’ true motivations for a military venture that involved 750 airstrikes in four days alone. “’Operation Pillar of Defense,’” Nile Bowie observes,

launched just months away from Israel’s elections, is a calculated component of the Netanyahu government’s strategy to topple Hamas and continue absorbing Palestinian territory. Decades of occupation and apartheid have shaped the current scenario; Israel has dehumanized an entire people by seizing their land and forcing them into prison-like ghettoes. Adherents to political Zionism have shown contempt for a genuine political solution to the Palestinian conflict, and the Netanyahu administration is poised to crush all opposition to the Jewish state.[1]

Major Western media focused instead on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) November 14 assassination of Hamas leader and Palestinian hero Ahmed al-Jabari, while blatantly omitting the fact that he was also a major figure in negotiations for a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel freshly brokered by Egypt. Hours before Hamas strongman Ahmed Jabari was assassinated,” Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported the day following the assassination, “he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”[2]

Apart from Western alternative media such critical details were quickly dispatched to the memory hole. Major news outlets almost systematically relied on Israeli government, military, and intelligence sources to shape its coverage, where Jabari was reviled as “the commander of the military wing of Hamas.” Reuters, for example, proceeded to source an IDF spokeswoman who proceeded to lay out the dominant frame for the coverage. “This is an operation against terror targets of different organizations in Gaza,” she declared. “Jaabari [sic] had ‘a lot of blood on his hands.’ Other militant groups including Islamic Jihad were on the target list.”[3]

A similar report in the UK Telegraph taking the tack of Israeli official pronouncements beings with the lead, “Ahmed Jabari probably didn’t event hear the missile that killed him, launched from a drone in the skies over Gaza City as he drove an ordinary saloon car through a quiet residential street.”[4] Emphasis on Jabari’s military status and alleged criminal and terrorist activities invariably legitimates Israel’s flagrant barbarism. Further, by holding Jabari up as a dangerous renegade supposedly representative of the Palestinian people the stage is set for attacks on civilians that are much more readily rationalized in the public mind.

Honest contextualization of the crisis leading readerships to greater understanding would involve consulting and publicizing both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives—an undertaking Western journalists are now adept at through their routine discussions with Syrian “activists” reporting on the alleged atrocities committed by the Syrian Army against Syrian citizens and the gallant Free Syrian Army “rebels” in that close by theatre.

Palestine Defended on the BBC (a rare moment)

A Look at How Israeli War Crimes Affect Palestinians

Israel's War on Truth | Brainwash Update