Posts filed under ‘Foreign Policy’
Is Hillary Clinton Going to Sweden to Negotiate Julian Assange’s Extradition?
Something to think about and be aware of:
Via the U.S. State Department:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will travel to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey from May 31-June 7.
[...]
On June 3, Secretary Clinton will travel to Stockholm, Sweden, for meetings with senior Swedish officials to discuss a range of issues, including green energy, Internet freedom, Afghanistan and the Middle East. In Stockholm she will also participate in a Climate and Clean Air Coalition event on short-lived climate pollutants.
Via Wikileaks:
Israeli Settlers Set Fire to Olive Trees Belonging to Palestinians
When I see images like this, I remember that I am ashamed at the U.S.’s unconditional support of Israel:
Throughout the day (Saturday, May 26, 2012), there were reports of settlers from Yitzhar trying to set fire to Palestinian olive groves near the village of Urif, south of Nablus in the West Bank. The entire area is know for its frequent confrontations between settlers and local farmers. A team from B’Tselem who arrived at the spot caught one of the attacks on camera; Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for B’Tselem who filmed the video, told me she had a very clear view of the settlers torching the field.
According to Palestinian and Israeli sources, the settlers also opened fire on several Palestinians who tried to protect their field. At least one person was injured, and the Palestinian and Israeli media is reporting that his condition is grave. You can hear (but not see) the shots at the beginning of this video, before the camerawoman runs away. According to Michaeli, she later saw an entire group of armed settlers on the hill.
So, Israeli settlers move into olive groves belonging to Palestinians and set the trees on fire and when a Palestinian is shot, well, we’ll see what happens. If history is any guide, nothing will.
That’s wrong. It’s just wrong and I don’t support the U.S. supporting the Israelis in that.
Waiting for Slash-the-Budget Righties to Have a Fit About This
Hey, I have an idea. Let’s cut food stamps, unemployment benefits, Social Security, education, environmental protections, funds for road and bridge repair, food safety programs and shit like that so we can spend a trilling dollars on new toys for the military. (BTW, I thought drones were the new new thing. Do we need fighter jets anymore?)
The F-35 Aircraft
(Image via ForeignPolicy.com)
The Jet That Ate the Pentagon
The F-35 is a boondoggle. It’s time to throw it in the trash bin.
The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next — by their count the fifth — generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It’s no secret, however, that the program — the most expensive in American history — is a calamity.
This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million — just the latest in a long string of cost increases — and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more.
[...]
First, with regard to cost — a particularly important factor in what politicians keep saying is an austere defense budget environment — the F-35 is simply unaffordable. Although the plane was originally billed as a low-cost solution, major cost increases have plagued the program throughout the last decade. Last year, Pentagon leadership told Congress the acquisition price had increased another 16 percent, from $328.3 billion to $379.4 billion for the 2,457 aircraft to be bought. Not to worry, however — they pledged to finally reverse the growth.
The result? This February, the price increased another 4 percent to $395.7 billion and then even further in April. Don’t expect the cost overruns to end there: The test program is only 20 percent complete, the Government Accountability Office has reported, and the toughest tests are yet to come. Overall, the program’s cost has grown 75 percent from its original 2001 estimate of $226.5 billion — and that was for a larger buy of 2,866 aircraft.
[...]
A final note on expense: The F-35 will actually cost multiples of the $395.7 billion cited above. That is the current estimate only to acquire it, not the full life-cycle cost to operate it. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion — making for a grand total of $1.5 trillion, or more than the annual GDP of Spain.
I crack myself up when I say I’m waiting for slash-the-budget righties to have a fit about this because that’ll never happen. The boys who are building this thing are their buddies. What’s going on here is basically another TARP program under the guise of “keeping us safe;” a trillion dollars for something we don’t know works. Who does that?
USA! USA! USA!
Romney Foreign Policy Adviser Not All That Good at Foreign Stuff
This morning the Romney campaign “organized a conference call today with three of Romney’s foreign policy advisers… During the call, Romney adviser Ambassador Pierre Prosper attacked President Obama for dealing with Russia…”
The United States has become a spectator on issues of national security. We’ve also been embarrassed by North Korea where again it continues to be a conciliatory leaning forward approach and yet the North Koreans will launch a missile surprising the United States by violating their agreement.
You now Russia is another example where we give and Russia gets and we get nothing in return. The United States abandoned its missile defense sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia, yet Russia does nothing but obstruct us, or efforts in Iran and Syria.
Oops.
From Wikipedia:
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia[1] (Czech and Slovak: Československo, Česko-Slovensko[2]) was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992. From 1939 to 1945, the state did not de facto exist because of its forced division and partial incorporation into Nazi Germany, but the Czechoslovak government-in-exile nevertheless continued to exist during this period. In 1945, the eastern part of Carpathian Ruthenia was taken over by the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Not a good sign.
I Give Richard Grenell Six Weeks
Why the Romney campaign would hire someone who has a habit of firing off nasty, seemingly-impetuous tweets as its national security and foreign policy “spokesman” is beyond me. My idea of a spokesman is someone who chooses his or her words carefully and deliberately.
(Image via The Huffington Post)
Richard Grenell, a former Bush administration official who joined the Romney campaign Thursday as national security and foreign policy spokesman, appears to have deleted more than 800 of his past tweets following scrutiny over numerous swipes aimed at the media, prominent Democratic women and the Gingriches. Grenell also apparently took down his personal site, which featured writing on politics, foreign affairs and the media.
[...]
On Friday afternoon, Grenell still featured a link to his personal site (http://www.richardgrenell.com) on his Twitter profile, which then showed that he had tweeted 7,577 times, according to a screenshot taken Friday by The Huffington Post. By Sunday morning, Grenell’s Twitter feed only listed 6,759 tweets and his personal site is no longer available.
[...]
ThinkProgress noted Grenell’s tendency to make cutting remarks about the appearances of prominent women in media and politics, including his tweet advising MSNBC host Rachel Maddow “to take a breath and put on a necklace,” and another suggesting she resembled a Justin Bieber.
In another tweet, Grenell wrote that “Hillary is starting to look liek Madeline [sic] Albright.” He discussed First Lady Michelle Obama working out and “sweating on the East Room carpet.” He also asked whether Callista Gingrich’s “hair snaps on,” and on another occasion, commented how Gingrich’s third wife “stands there like she is wife #1.” Politico flagged more examples and noted Grenell’s “old pastime” of “ridiculing the Gingriches.”
And there’s so much more. Find the whole article here.
Grenell’s a bomb waiting to go off. I give him six weeks.
No “Liberal Media,” Ahmadinejad Did Not Threaten To Wipe Israel Off the Map
Okay folks, let’s put this lie to bed once and for all:
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor acknowledged on Al Jazeera English (4/14/12) that Iranian leaders have never called for Israel to be “wiped” off the map.
Meridor agreed with interviewer Teymoor Nabili’s suggestion that the supposed remarks were never actually made; Iranian leaders, Meridor said,
come basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say “we’ll wipe it out,” you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed.
Hostile words, to be sure, but not the menacing threat endlessly reported in corporate U.S. media in recent years. (Iran, Israel and “wiped off the map” occur together more than 8,500 times in the Nexis news database in the last seven years.)
This has been a case of the U.S. media terrorizing its own citizens. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing corrections all over the place any minute now, you know, like all those corrections we saw after it turned out Iraq didn’t have any “weapons of mass destruction.” (Yeah, right.)
A Perfect Example of How the “Liberal” American Media Brainwashes Us
Wow. Here we have a perfect example of how the “liberal” American media brainwashes us into fearing or hating groups that those in power decide we should ah, fear or hate. This example is from today’s Washington Post.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has delivered a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that calls for a resumption of peace negotiations.
Got that? Palestinian Authority President Abbas wants to resume peace negotiations, but the Israeli lobby wants us to hate and fear the Palestinians (nobody bucks the Israeli lobby), so check out the photo the WaPo used to illustrate the article:
(Via.)
Amazing.
No Doubt the “Liberal Media” Will Be All Over This
That title is total sarcasm. Chances are this will get little to no coverage in the American corporate media because, after all, (1) it isn’t liberal and (2) one thing it does really well is protect our dear leaders:
(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.
But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”
Karl Rove: Any President Would Have Killed Osama bin Laden
Karl Rove is trying to rewrite history while simultaneously making President Obama look like an empty suit:
As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are.
Excuse me. George W. Bush was president for eight years while bin Laden was on the run and he didn’t get him. As a matter of fact, Bush blew a huge chance to do so:
(Via.)
And that’s the one big chance Bush blew to catch or kill bin Laden that we know of. There could have been many others over the course of Bush’s two terms.
So again, for Rove to claim “any president” would have done what Obama did — when his guy had eight years to do so but didn’t — is just typical Rove slime.
Get to Know Joseph Kony (Kony 2012)
UPDATED below.
Until I watched this now-viral (1,845,000 views in two days), devastating video about the world’s #1 war criminal, Joseph Kony, I didn’t know who Joseph Kony was. (Thanks American “news” media.)
Now I do and now I’m fighting mad. We’ve got to get him.
(Via.)
UPDATE (@6:29 p.m. ET March 8, 2012)
Over the last several days, much has been written about this video and about the video’s producer, Invisible Children. I get the controversy but I agree with the last paragraph of this “Viewpoint” post from Think Progress:
So, instead of continuing to debate the strengths and weakness of the Kony2012 video, or attack Invisible Children for their lack of financial transparency, let’s figure out how to turn this momentum into a constructive opportunity that can result in smart policies that will have a positive, real-time impact in the affected areas of central Africa. Let’s harness this energy and turn it into something productive that ensures we’re telling the right stories, inspiring well-informed advocacy, and working together across governments, academia, grassroots activists, and local populations to help bring this chapter of the LRA — and the impact in affected areas — to a close.
Imagine Rick Santorum’s Foreign Policy
This would be my Tweet of the Day:
No kidding. What a disaster.
32 Senators Formally Clear Way for War on Iran
My God:
A group of 32 senators from both parties unveiled a new Senate resolution Thursday that would establish the sense of the Congress that containing a nuclear Iran is not an option.
The resolution, which will be formally introduced later today, “strongly supports U.S. policy to prevent the Iranian government from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and rejects any policy that would rely on efforts to ‘contain’ a nuclear weapons capable Iran,” and “urges the president to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and oppose any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Lieberman emphasized that he doesn’t want to foreclose diplomatic options, but said that if Obama decided to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, he would have strong bipartisan support in Congress.
I hear the Israeli lobby and the military industrial complex speaking through these Senators. Never mind what the American people want. Just yesterday CNN released a poll showing that 82% of Americans think diplomacy or “no action” is the way to go:
Americans Favor Diplomacy Against Iran
CNN/ORC International poll released Wednesday indicates that only 17% of the public wants the U.S. to use force, with 60% saying diplomatic or economic action against Iran is the right response, and 22% saying no action should be taken at this time.
Haiti: Two Years After the Quake, the 99% and the 1%
Yesterday (January 12, 2012) marked the two-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti.
USAToday put together a slideshow marking the anniversary. Here it is: For Haitian Earthquake Victims, Recovery is Very Slow.
This is the first photo in the series:
Photo: Dieu Nalio Chery, AP
Foreign Policy magazine put a slideshow together too. Here it is: Haiti’s One Percent.
This is the first photo in that series:
Photo: Paolo Woods/Institute
There are no words.
Those Muslim Extremists What To Kill Us!
Imagine a high ranking Muslim cleric saying this:
“On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in
Iranthe United States turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.”“I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from
Russia, North Korea, or from Iranthe United States, and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bombfor Iran, you are not safe.”
In fact, that’s a quote from Rick Santorum.
The Cop Who Stopped LA Arsonist Is a Volunteer, From Iran (Yikes!)
So, all those “illegals” are killing people, raping our women and wrecking our country huh?
Get a load of this:
The reserve sheriff’s deputy who captured a man suspected of being the city’s most dangerous arsonist is a volunteer who earns $1 a year and only recently qualified to patrol alone, authorities said Tuesday.
Shervin Lalezary,
a 30-year-old Beverly Hills real estate attorney, was patrolling at 3 a.m. Monday — three hours after the official end of his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift — when he pulled over a Dodge van in Hollywood.
[...]
“He believes in the community service aspects of the reserve deputy,” Whitmore said. “This is part of the job for him and he doesn’t want to talk about himself because he believes he’s part and parcel of a larger effort.”
Lalezary was born in Tehran and moved with his family to America about 25 years ago.
[...]
“This is one of the most significant arrests anyone can make — regular or reserve,” the sheriff said Monday. “And this will follow him for the rest of his life.”
So, “they” say we should bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran but woohah, they have real people there.
Now what?
Is Iran Exaggerating its Missile Capability?
A friend sent me a link to this interesting tidbit about Iran possibly exaggerating its ballistic missile capabilities. It seems to me this is something we should bear in mind while listening to the fear mongering about nuclear this and that coming from Washington and Jerusalem. And this is from Fox no less:
At first, Iran claimed it had launched three long range missiles; a pronouncement at the end of ten days of war games in the Strait of Hormuz designed to test the patience of western nations as they weigh how to sanction Iran’s oil exports.
“We are able to announce that our shore-to-sea missile systems are so powerful that we can hit any target, any time, if it’s necessary” announced Habibulah Sayari, Iranian Navy Commander.
Seyyed Mahmoud Moussavi, Iranian Military Drills Spokesman, stated “Both missiles hit the intended targets successfully.”
It turned out the missiles weren’t that long range after all.
The Qhader missile, introduced in September, has a range of just 124 miles. The U.S. Navy’s fifth fleet in Bahrain is 150 miles from Iran. Israel is four times farther.
“We’ve seen that they’ve photoshopped, for example, photographs of missile tests before to make it look more impressive than it actually is, so I would take all this with a grain of salt. I think this is mainly posturing. It’s gamesmanship. And it’s again meant to send a message that the Iranians aren’t simply going to sit back while their oil is sanctioned,” said Michael Singh, Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Read more and see a video here.
(H/t Beth.)
How We Got Into Iraq — One Lie After Another
The good folks over at Mother Jones have put together a timeline of the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq — from August, 1992 through March, 2003.
I found it rather upsetting to be reminded of the lies and deceit but it is interesting nonetheless. How we got there and the web our Dear Leaders wove in order to convince us an invasion was necessary is something we should never forget, lest it happen again.
For example, this is the second to last entry, dated March 18, 2003:
Washington Post article headlined “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq” notes, “As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.” Story is buried on Page A13.
Makes my heart ache.
Baghdad -- March 19, 2003
Anyway, here it is if you’re interested.
(Photo via.)
Oh, and P.S. — Al Jazeera has a post up (video) titled: US Post-Iraq Legacy: The War is Finally Declared Over After Nine Years , but What are the Experiences and Lessons Learned by US Soldiers. I haven’t watched it yet but here’s a link, FYI.
Foreign Policy “News” as Reported in the U.S. By Mindless Stenographers
This is the truest article I’ve read in days:
The Language of Empire
“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”
[...]
The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”
Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”
What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.
There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Mrs. Clinton, the region should be freed.
And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.
The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.
Read the whole thing here.
A few years ago I heard someone (Noam Chomsky? Robert Fisk?) say that the gist of foreign policy reporting in the United States is, “The government said. The government said. The government said.” And that’s exactly right.
North Koreans Crying Hysterically Over the Death of Kim Jong-il
Check out this video from North Korean state television.
(Via.)
I wonder if North Koreans who don’t cry over the death of Kim Jong-il risk torture or imprisonment, or worse.
Obama Administration Issues Rote Statement About the Brutal Egyptian Military
If the United States (it contributes $2 billion annually to the Egyptian “military”) doesn’t say something stronger than this
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Sunday she was “deeply concerned” about continuing violence in Egypt and urged Egyptian security forces to respect the rights of protesters
about this,
12-17-11 -- Reuters
who will?
Heartbreak in Egypt
I remember watching the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square back in January and February — and seeing Hosni Mubarack crawl down from power — and feeling so proud of the people there.
Now it looks like it may all have been for naught.
This is the Egyptian army beating civilians yesterday:
Members of the army, once beloved by Egypt’s activists for standing by their side during the revolution in February, have sent hundreds of men and women to the hospital over the last 48 hours and have killed at least 10, some with live ammunition fired into crowds.
(Video via.)
More here, including an up-close photo of a woman in the video:
For these men to pull her black abaya above her head and expose her midriff and chest is, for Egypt, a profound and sexually charged humiliation. And there is a certain awful irony of using that abaya, a symbol of modesty and piety, to cover her face and drag her on the street that, though probably not intentional, will not be lost on Egyptian eyes.
[...]
The Egyptian military, the strongest and most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the Arab world, has taken a dramatic and dark turn since winning power earlier this year.
[...]
As protests against the military have grown, the generals have abandoned their earlier pledges to support the people and refrain from violence against civilians. The SCAF — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, a panel of top military leaders — increasingly looks like Egypt’s new dictator.
FYI, the United States supports the Egyptian “military” to the tune of $2 billion annually:
The United States has given Egypt an average of $2 billion annually since 1979, much of it military aid, according to the Congressional Research Service. The combined total makes Egypt the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel.
Obama is Causing the Problems in the Middle East?
Here is our quote of the day from Rick Perry at tonight’s ABC News/Iowa Republican debate: President Obama is “causing the problems in the Middle East.”
Photo: Examiner.com
Ah, I don’t think so Ricky. The “problems in the Middle East” have been going on for two thousand years.
“Chemical Warfare” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square Right Now
Look at these horrible tweets being sent by Sharif Kouddous from Cairo’s Tahrir Square right now (4:27 p.m. ET):
The people of Egypt are rallying because though they ousted Mubarak, the army is still in charge and they don’t want that. They want democratic elections. And this is what they get.
Oh, and a note regarding Rick Perry: At the Republican “debate” in Iowa on Saturday night, Rick Perry said, if elected, he would end civilian control of the U.S. military. What’s happening in Egypt is what happens when the military is out of civilian hands. It’s called a military dictatorship.
Dana Perino Thinks She’s an Expert on Truthiness?
A few minutes ago I received this tweet from OWillis:
You will recall that Dana Perino was George W. Bush’s press secretary.
I could guess, but I wasn’t positive who Perino was talking about, so I asked:
(Carney, as in Obama’s press secretary.)
This is Willis’ reply:
The reason I care is because Dana Perino knows a thing or two about saying untrue things. She’s in the stratosphere on that front:
This would be Perino on November 24, 2009:
“We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
(Video via.)
So, the next time you see Dana Perino sitting on her high horse, passing judgment on Fox “News,” remember this video.
Slow-News-Day Fear Mongering
Gosh, golly, gee. It seems the 24/7-what-are-we-gonna-do-to-fill-all-that-time cable “news” shows covered a “terror alert” this evening (absent a “high-speed” LA car chase), as in a “suspicious package” at the White House:
Thank God I missed it.
Think: Manufactured fear because the cables are lazy ass, cheap “news” organizations and turning a “suspicious package” into an hour’s worth of “news” is easy.
Pastor Terry Jones’ Quran Burning Results in the Death of Eight UN Workers
Remember Terry Jones, the fundamentalist Florida pastor who wanted to hold a Quran-burning ceremony on 9/11? He didn’t do it after hearing it would be seen as an act of religious warfare in the Middle East (and after a New Jersey car dealer gave him a car).
(Image via.)
Well, apparently he just couldn’t stand it any longer and on March 21 he held his long-desired Quran burning ceremony:
The controversial Gainesville pastor, who threatened to publicly burn a Quran on the anniversary of 911 last year, has gone through with it.
Last weekend, Pastor Terry Jones held a mock trial at his church that ended with a book burning.However, his latest stunt received very little publicity.On the Dove World Outreach Center website Pastor Jones announced a trial date.”International judge the Quran day. Yes. We are going to do it,” Jones said.
Last Sunday, Jones’ Gainesville church was converted into a courtroom, complete with prosecutor, defense attorney, witnesses and Jones as the judge.Jones accused Islam’s holy book of promoting violence. So he put it on trial.
The pastor created an international incident last September when he planned to burn Qurans on the 911 anniversary.He backed down and promised to never put a match to the book. But this trial had a different set of rules.”The Quran, if found guilty, can be burned,” said Jones.
And after six hours of testimony in front of 30 spectators and a crew from an Orlando film school, it was burned.
And today: UN staff beheaded in Afghan attack sparked by US pastor’s Quran burning:
At least eight foreign United Nations workers were killed Friday, two of them reportedly beheaded, in an attack on a U.N. compound in Afghanistan by demonstrators protesting the burning of a Quran by a U.S. pastor.
[...]
The U.N. workers — including five guards working for U.N. and two other people employed at the complex, the AP reported — were killed in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif when the protest there suddenly turned violent.
As many as 20 in total were thought to have been killed, according to the Guardian, and one report said the dead included Norwegian, Romanian and Swedish employees.
A U.N. spokesman Dan McNorton said that details remained unclear, but that the top U.N. representative in Afghanistan, Staffan De Mistura, was traveling to the area to handle the matter, CNN reported.
But according to Reuters, more than a thousand protesters had flooded into the streets of the normally peaceful city after Friday prayers when violence broke out. A small group then attacked the U.N. compound, throwing stones and climbing on blast barriers to try and enter.
Watch the video at the link above (photo of protest poster is a screenshot from it). They. Are. Furious.
Tragic that people are dying due to the actions of a madman.
CNN’s John King Inadvertently Tells The Truth America’s Third War (It’s a War for Oil, Again)
CNN’s John King inadvertently told the truth just now about what’s going on in Libya (@6:38 p.m. EDT). He was standing in front of a map, explaining why most of the air strikes are taking place in the northern part of the country.
Why are they concentrated there, he asked. “This is where the oil and gas resources are.”
Photo: Corbis-Bettmann
Bingo.
Reports: Members of the Libyan Military Are Defecting
From what I’m hearing and reading about what’s going on in Libya, it sounds like hell on Earth. Al Jazeera/English is reporting that military planes have been ordered to fly over protesters in Tripoli and fire on them. See the chyron below:
They also say that some of the pilots have flown to the island of Malta and asked for political asylum because they refuse to fire on their countrymen. See these chyrons:
The bravery of the people there — to keep fighting for their freedom despite all this — is just amazing. And bravo to those pilots. This just might be a turning point (fingers crossed).
More from the indispensable Juan Cole, who is my go-to guy for all things Middle East:
I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to strafe civilian crowds, has deployed heavy artillery against them, and has occupied the streets with armored vehicles and strategically-placed snipers. One man is shouting that “the gates of Hell have opened” in the capital and that “this is Halabja!” (where Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered helicopter gunships to hit a Kurdish city with sarin gas, killing 5000 in 1988).
Peaceful Protesters in Bahrain Shot in Cold Blood
(Via.)
The United States gave Bahrain $19 million for weaponry in 2010. Bahrain wants $19.45 million this year.
We probably paid for that tank and those bullets. You know, to “spread democracy around the world.”
