http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56940.htm
The Pentagon’s 20-Year Killing Spree Has Always Treated Civilians as Expendable
At the Pentagon, meanwhile, the bloody-thirty feast of the war profiteers continues unabated.
Top U.S. officials want us to believe that the Pentagon carefully spares civilian lives while making war overseas. The notion is pleasant. And with high-tech killing far from home, the physical and psychological distances have made it even easier to believe recent claims that American warfare has become “humane.”
Such pretenses should be grimly laughable to anyone who has read high-quality journalism from eyewitness reporters like Anand Gopal and Nick Turse. For instance, Gopal’s article for The New Yorker in September, “The Other Afghan Women,” is an in-depth, devastating piece that exposes the slaughter and terror systematically inflicted on rural residents of Afghanistan by the U.S. Air Force.
Turse, an incisive author and managing editor at TomDispatch, wrote this fall: “Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.”
Those deaths have been completely predictable results of U.S. government policies. And in fact, evidence of widespread civilian casualties emerged soon after the “war on terror” started two decades ago. Leaks with extensive documentation began to surface more than 10 years ago, thanks to stark revelations from courageous whistleblowers and the independent media outlet WikiLeaks.
The retribution for their truth-telling has been fierce and unrelenting. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is in a British prison, facing imminent extradition to the United States, where the chances of a fair trial are essentially zero. Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning spent seven years in a military prison. Former U.S. Air Force analyst Daniel Hale, who revealed murderous effects of U.S. drone warfare, is currently serving a 45-month prison sentence. They had the clarity of mind and heart to share vital information with the public, disclosing not just “mistakes” but patterns of war crimes.
Such realities should be kept in mind when considering how the New York Times framed its blockbuster scoop last weekend, drawing on more than 1,300 confidential documents. Under the big headline “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes,” the Times assessed U.S. bombing in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan—and reported that “since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.”
What should not get lost in all the bold-type words like “failure,” “flawed intelligence” and “imprecise targeting” is that virtually none of it was unforeseeable. The killings have resulted from policies that gave very low priority to prevention of civilian deaths.
The gist of those policies continues. And so does the funding that fuels the nation’s nonstop militarism, most recently in the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act that spun through Congress this month and landed on President Biden’s desk.
Dollar figures are apt to look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had “only” asked for $12 billion more than President Trump’s last NDAA, but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Actually, factoring in other outlays for so-called “defense,” annual U.S. military spending is in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Efforts at restraint have hit a wall. This fall, in a vote on a bill to cut 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, support came from only one-fifth of the House, and not one Republican.
In the opposite direction, House support for jacking up the military budget was overwhelming, with a vote of 363-70. Last week, when it was the Senate’s turn to act on the measure, the vote was 88-11.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending—while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations for local, state and national government agencies. It’s a destructive trend of warped priorities that serves the long-term agendas of neoliberalism, aptly defined as policies that “enhance the workings of free market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership.”
While the two parties on Capitol Hill have major differences on domestic issues, relations are lethally placid beyond the water’s edge. When the NDAA cleared the Senate last week, the leaders of the Armed Services Committee were both quick to rejoice. “I am pleased that the Senate has voted in an overwhelming, bipartisan fashion to pass this year’s defense bill,” said the committee’s chair, Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island. The ranking Republican on the panel, Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, chimed in: “This bill sends a clear message to our allies—that the United States remains a reliable, credible partner—and to our adversaries—that the U.S. military is prepared and fully able to defend our interests around the world.”
The bill also sends a clear message to Pentagon contractors as they drool over a new meal in the ongoing feast of war profiteering.
It’s a long way from their glassed-in office suites to the places where the bombs fall.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/omicron-the-lockdowners-last-stand/5765219
Omicron: The Lockdowners’ Last Stand
Just as President Biden’s unconstitutional vaccination mandates were being ripped up by the courts, authoritarian politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media, announced a new Covid variant to justify another round of lockdowns and restrictions. The things that didn’t work last time would be a good idea to do again this time, they claim.
For these authoritarians, the timing of omicron’s emergence was perfect.
The variant was first discovered in South Africa, with the US and European media running endless scare stories. Authoritarian politicians used the manufactured fear to justify another attack on liberty.
South African health officials reported that the variant seemed to be more contagious but far milder than previous variants, as usually happens with such viruses. But the lockdowners would not hear of it. From Boris Johnson in the UK to DeBlasio in New York City, the variant was perfect cover for them to put their boots back on the necks of terrorized citizens.
As to be expected, Fauci reveled in the emergence of the new variant, warning of “record deaths” for the unvaccinated. Similarly, President Biden warned that this would be a “winter of death” for the unvaccinated.
But here’s something the media isn’t reporting about the omicron outbreaks: they are taking place among the fully vaccinated. Cornell University, with 97 percent of the campus fully vaccinated and a mask mandate, has announced that it would return to online only instruction after a massive Covid outbreak.
The vaccine is not working to prevent infection or transmission of the virus: cases are raging in states with the highest vaccine levels. Yet the “experts” continue to maintain that the only thing that can stop the spread of omicron is vaccines! More people are catching on that this makes no sense. If vaccines don’t stop the spread, how can vaccines stop the spread?
Meanwhile, South Africa, with one of the lowest rates of vaccination, has just announced that they are only seeing a tiny fraction of hospitalizations with omicron compared to previous variants. South Africa’s Covid response authority has written to the health minister recommending an end to containment efforts, contact tracing, and quarantines.
Unvaccinated South Africa is ending Covid restrictions while the hyper-vaccinated North is locking down. Something doesn’t add up.
Fauci loves to say that to question him is to question science, but this has nothing to do with science. It’s about power. Fauci, the political authoritarians, and the corrupt Big Pharma billionaires are trying to make a last stand, desperate to push omicron as a justification for further tyranny and profits. But actual science is not cooperating.
Omicron is spreading and vaccines are not stopping it. Thus far nearly half of omicron infections are asymptomatic. Some experts are predicting that omicron will spell the end of Covid-19. But we know that as long as people like Fauci are around, Covid-19 will never end. Unless, of course, we repudiate the charlatans and profiteers and reclaim our liberty!
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/fauci-biden-pathological-liars/5765246
The Omicron Delusion: Fauci and Biden Are Pathological Liars
Both are alleging without providing a speck of evidence that 97% of Covid cases/hospitalizations/deaths are the unvaccinated. This is a total lie.
Information from every country shows that it is the vaccinated who are suffering injuries and deaths.
The “Omicron variant” is being used to create a new wave of public fear and government control over civil liberties and citizens’ bodies–essentially rape with a needle–despite the known fact that the variant is rarely harmful. Hospitals are falsely reported to be full of Omicron patients.
The presstitute media stresses that the more or less harmless variant is highly contagious, and are creating fear out of the ease of catching it. People are urged to protect themselves by taking the jab even though it is a known fact that the Omicron variant is immune to the “vaccine.”
Acquaint yourself with the facts:
In Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths were in the vaccinated. Boosters are merely boosting COVID infections. Some 40,000 deaths have occurred in the USA, UK and EU following vaccination but Omicron is mild. The UK Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated but the vaccinated are at greatest risk.
It was clear from the first cases in South Africa and now in the UK and EU that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease and very few deaths [not from Covid but] “with COVID”. Indeed South African experts have advised stopping stop-and -trace and quarantining because most of the infected have no symptoms.
More evidence of the failure of vaccines in the face of new infections comes from the USA where one of the largest US outbreaks of the new Omicron variant to date is believed to have occurred at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where almost all 930 cases over the past week are believed to be of the variant.
All of the confirmed Omicron cases in the Cornell University case are among people who are fully vaccinated, and some of them are in people who’ve also had the booster.
The booster is of course more of the same in the hope that the
third dose will do what the first two doses were supposed to do! And the
new variant, “omicron”?
Most of the Omicron cases in the United States have been among the vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on Friday 10/12/21. Most patients have experienced mild symptoms.
See this.
When the media of the entire Western World lends itself to blatant lies in order to boost Big Pharma profits, enhance governments’ destruction of civil liberty, suppress dissent, and perhaps facilitate a depopulation agenda, the Western World is lost. It is the corrupt Western media that has conspired with governments to destroy freedom and nazify the Western World to the point that Australia has concentration camps for the unvaccinated and Germany and Austria intend to imprison the unvaccinated–all of this for a “vaccine” that all evidence proves beyond any question does not protect against a virus, a virus moreover that has a very low death rate and is easily cured and prevented with HCQ and Ivermectin.
Western peoples need to understand that their enemies are not Russia and China but their own governments and their own “public health” officials. It is these people who are the enemies of mankind.
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