In the years following 2003, the U.S. military dotted Iraq with over 500 military bases, many of them close to Iraqi cities. These cities suffered the impacts of bombs, bullets, chemical and other weapons, but also the environmental damage of open burn pits on U.S. bases, abandoned tanks and trucks, and the storage of weapons on U.S. bases, including depleted uranium weapons. The study now being published found an inverse relationship between the distance one lived from Tallil Air Base and the risk of birth defects as well as of levels of thorium and uranium in one’s hair. It found a positive relationship between the presence of thorium and uranium…
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The Wacky World of Internal Government Propaganda
Source: The Corbett Report July 9, 2019 James Corbett Have you ever seen IRS agents waste $60,000 of taxpayer money to film Star Trek videos about subduing a planet of anarchists. How about a DARPA video dedicated to defeating the cyber threat from the “fictional” state of “Kuracq?” Or an internal (fake) news report from a war game scenario about a bioterror attack in the US . . . four months before such an attack took place? Well then you’re in for a treat in this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch. SHOW NOTES: IRS Star Trek Parody IRS calls ‘Star Trek’ parody video a mistake Strategic Cyber Defense Episode 359 –…
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Cancer as Weapon: Poppy Bush’s Radioactive War on Iraq
If George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are still casting about for a legacy, there’s a grim one that will stay around for an eternity. At the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime. But months of bombing of Iraq by US and British planes and cruise missiles has left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and…
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If You Murdered A Bunch Of People, Mass Murder Is Your Single Defining Legacy
Think of an acquaintance of yours. Not someone you’re particularly close to, just some guy in the cast of extras from the scenery of your life. Now, imagine learning that that guy is a serial murderer, who has been prowling the streets for years stabbing people to death. Imagine he goes his whole life without ever suffering any consequences for murdering all those people, and then when he dies, everyone wants to talk about how great he was and share heartwarming anecdotes about him. If you try to bring up the whole serial killing thing, people react with sputtering outrage that you would dare to speak ill of such a…
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Fifteen Years of Forever Wars
Bush on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln: Premature Mission Accomplished. (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Lewis Hunsaker) Fifteen years ago Donald Rumsfeld said Afghanistan was pacified and George W. Bush said the U.S. mission in Iraq was “accomplished.” Fifteen years later the disastrous neoconservative assumptions are in full view, says Chas Freeman. Source: Consortium News August 20, 2018 By Chas Freeman Fifteen years ago on May 1, 2003, speaking in Kabul, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld declared that, in Afghanistan, “we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities.” Later that same day, standing…
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ISIS or U.S. Government. What’s the Difference?
Source: The Daily Bell April 30, 2018 By Joe Jarvis What does the United State and ISIS have in common? Actually… a lot. According to the New York Times, ISIS started a pretty effective government. They now appear to be on their last legs. But for a time, ISIS had all the hallmarks of a typical government. They monopolized control in a geographical area. They collected taxes and administered government services. They provided internal security, as well as a military (to attempt) to repel invaders. They even educated the youth and provided government assistance to widows. In June 2014, after it captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the Islamic State wanted…
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15 Years On, the Staggering Death Toll in Iraq Keeps Climbing
Ali Hamza, 8, sits at the graves of his brother, Mohammed, and sister Asinat, who were killed at their school when a suicide car bomb attack near Qabak elementary school in the Shiite Turkomen village of Qabak, Iraq, Oct. 7, 2013. (AP Photo) Source: Mint Press News March 16, 2018 By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies March 19 marks 15 years since the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the American people have no idea of the enormity of the calamity the invasion unleashed. The U.S. military has refused to keep a tally of Iraqi deaths. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly…
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US War on ISIS Is the Biggest Lie Since the 2003 Iraq Invasion: Here’s the Proof
Source: AntiMedia December 19, 2017 Written by Darius Shahtahmasebi On November 13, 2017, the BBC dropped a bombshell report that exposed how the U.S. cut a secret deal with “hundreds” of ISIS fighters and their families to leave the Syrian city of Raqqa under the “gaze of the U.S. and British-led coalition and Kurdish-led forces who control the city.” The convoys reportedly included some of ISIS’ “most notorious” members, as well as its foreign fighters and tonnes of weapons and ammunition. Almost a month later, Reuters reported that a high-level defector from Kurdish-led forces in Syria had revealed that the number of ISIS fighters given safe passage by the U.S.-led coalition was actually in the thousands, not…
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‘Orgy of Killing’: US-Backed ‘Liberation’ of Mosul Left 10,000 Civilians Dead
Source: AntiMedia December 4, 2017 by Darius Shahtahmasebi After the United States and its proxy armies “liberated” the Iraqi city of Mosul earlier this year, the world’s superpower unsurprisingly turned a blind eye to a massacre that took place soon after. As the Guardian aptly phrased it, the aftermath was an “orgy” of killing. The Guardian explains that it was the brutal conduct of the Iraqi Armed Forces that enabled Iraq to successfully liberate Mosul from ISIS’ dominance, stating: “One of the factors that had aided Isis’s takeover of Mosul was the conduct of the Iraqi army and security forces stationed in the city, who behaved like sectarian occupation forces,…
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War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way)
Source: counterpunch November 8, 2017 by Danny Sjursen On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave… This chamber reeks of blood… It does not take any courage at all for a congressman or a senator or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.” More than six…
