The Guerrilla Campaign

Pakistan Counts the Toll of the Bush-Obama Drone War Written by Chris Floyd April 11, 2009 http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1738-death-by-the-numbers-pakistan-counts-the-toll-of-the-bush-obama-drone-war.html As we all know, the Terror Warriors in the White House (of whatever political stripe) don't do body counts. They just kill people, make unsupported claims of "clean hits" on "militants," backtrack a bit later when eyewitness reports confirm extensive civilian casualties, promise "investigations" that kick the PR can way down the road -- and carry on killing. But strangely enough, the people who are being killed by these well-wadded, massively protected elites do count how many of their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers are being slaughtered by American ordnance. Imagine that! It's almost like they are real people or something! Pakistan is the latest target of the Terror Warriors; the progressive, anti-war, last-best-h...

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling by Johann Hari Monday, 5 January 2009 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side. Pirates have never been quite who we think they...

March 23, 2009 Posted by Jeff Huber http://www.atlargely.com/2009/03/the-long-war-generals.html If you’re not cheating you’re not trying. --Anonymous U.S. military officer As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language? During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not s...

by Laurence M. Vance March 20, 2009 http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance167.html As of today, March 20, it has now been six years since the United States invaded Iraq. Yes, the United States still has tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, although we don’t hear much about the war any more. What happened to the war? The war should have been an issue in the election. It wasn’t. And thanks to the disaster that is the Republican revolution that wasn’t , it didn’t even have to be. We hardly heard about the war after the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions. Republicans were perfectly willing to exchange one war criminal for another . Many Democrats only opposed the war because it was a Republican war. And now that Obama is president, no one from either party seems to mind that he wants to send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The war is still an immoral, aggressive, unjust, unconstitutional, unnecessary, and senseless war that that violates every "just war" ...

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Juan Cole http://www.juancole.com/2009/03/cheneys-mission-accomplished.html Dick Cheney : "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...." What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq? - An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes , that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes. - It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyon...

still no lessons learned.

by Mary Pitt March 2, 2009 I have been watching the news reports about the appointment of Kathleen Sebelius to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. There was a time when she was considered a possible candidate for the job of Vice-President and there is no reason why those who write the news for television should not have done their homework on her qualifications. However, after the announcement was made of her new appointment, they treated her like a total unknown and spoke briefly about her eight-year career as Kansas Insurance Commissioner before she won the governorship of our "red state" not once, but twice. Kathleen (the name by which Kansans speak of her with varying degrees of reverence, depending on our political leanings), literally imbibed politics with her Pablum since her father, John Gilligan, was Governor of the State of Ohio, and the father of her husband, Gary, was once US Representative from the State of Kansas. She is an accomplished polit...

By Sheila Samples March 2, 2009 Sometimes it's hard to come to grips with the truth -- especially if that truth is about our own country, and is in direct opposition to everything we've been taught since childhood. Patriotism is in our genes, and through the years it has been a national conviction that, if our country needed us, serving in the military to protect our freedom was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do. We still believe that. We still leap to our feet at the first beat of a drum at a military parade, clutch our hearts at the sight of the Stars and Stripes, weep at the refrain of the National Anthem. However, far too many of us succumb to the pomp and pageantry of war -- of mission accomplished -- with little concern for the human beings who made that possible -- what they went through, what they're still going through -- so we can maintain our arrogant national pride. From the beginning, those in the military have served their country with u...

by Mary Pitt February 15, 2009 Just three weeks after Barack Obama was sworn in, we are barraged with complaints because he has not yet wiped out all the vestiges of the Bush administration from the environs of Washington, D.C. We are daily confronted by newspaper items, editorials, and blogs telling us of his shortcomings and failure to correct all the bad Department of Justice decisions, all the illicit Executive Orders, the no-bid contractors, to withdraw all the troops from Iraq, and to restore our country to a state of peace. And yet, the polls show an unprecedented approval by the people! This is, above all, a man who is measured and prudent in his thinking and has established his priorities for action. He has chosen first to put right our economic state, no insignificant or simple task. Believing in our tri-partite system of government, he allowed the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives to write the necessary legislation, to offer it for a vote, and send it to the S...

by Mary Pitt February 8, 2009 As the spouse of a working man, often in remote areas and long before you would find an H&R Block firm within easy driving distance, the job of filing the annual income tax forms fell to me. As the rules changed, it was necessary to study the instructions every year to remain current and legal. While that may seem difficult to many, a bit of initial concentration should get one through it. I did it with a bit less than a high school diploma at that time. As the result of this responsibility, I became aware of the evolution over the years and can see the pattern of the changes that occurred with the many "reforms" instituted during the Republican administrations. It has always been an article of faith within the party that taxes were a nuisance that should be visited only on the private wage earners and every effort at "reform" will demonstrate their efforts to shift the burdens to the working class. This was accomplished on the pret...

by Leonard Cohen It's coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square. It's coming from the feel that this ain't exactly real, or it's real, but it ain't exactly there. From the wars against disorder, from the sirens night and day, from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. It's coming through a crack in the wall; on a visionary flood of alcohol; from the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount which I don't pretend to understand at all. It's coming from the silence on the dock of the bay, from the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. It's coming from the sorrow in the street, the holy places where the races meet; from the homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serv...

by Mary Pitt Sunday, January 18, 2009 Waddya gonna do when you've gone about as far as you can go? You want to open a window and yell, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" But, where you live there is nobody to hear you. Go ahead, yell your fool head off but there are none to hear and, if anybody does, they don't care. The preachers will tell you, "The Lord will provide" but, in all our years, we have never heard of a Great Speckled Bird flying over and dropping money on people. And you learned long ago to pray for nothing but the strength to bear the troubles that befall us in this mortal life. You have simply lasted too long. You have lost dearly loved ones to death for first one reason or another; even nursing a dear lifemate through an illness that took years to claim them. You have worked, budgeted, and micro-managed to keep your family sustained and, due to your own age and illness, are now condemned to a life of poverty. Yo...

by Mary Pitt January 15, 2009 The greatest problem as the new President and the Congress attempt to enact remedies to the very real problems of the poor, the disabled, and the laboring class, (not the much-broader "working class"), is that they do not know or understand exactly what it is that they are trying to "fix". With the exception of the President, none of them have ever wanted for food, clothing, or medical care, (and even he, Thank God, had grandparents of substance who were able to be of assistance.) The trials with which we must deal every day are totally foreign to them. They do not know and never even visit in the homes in the tenements, the poor neighborhoods, or even the common homes in the small rural villages which dot the plains and the industrial areas of our nation. Those who knock on our doors during campaigns are college kids asking for our votes and will promise us anything in return for our pledges. Should our congresspersons come "home...

History's Clear Answer to the Torture Debate Written By Chris Floyd January 13, 2009 http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1680-head-cases-historys-clear-answer-to-the-torture-debate.html There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of "what to do" about the Bush Administration's unabashed and openly confessed use of "interrogation techniques" that are, without question, classified under U.S. law as torture. There seems to be a ripening consensus among our great and good that nothing at all should be done about this perpetration of a capital crime by the top officials of the government -- although one does descry, here and there, a hint that there might be a ritual sacrifice of one or two middling-high figures if the issue gets too hot to brush aside completely. (If I were, say, John Yoo, I'd be looking at sabbaticals in Dubai or Saudi Arabia -- or Israel, maybe, where a man of his expertise in the rationalization of war cri...

by Mary Pitt Saturday, January 10, 2009 With an economy that is sadly in the tank, a stock market that cannot get its feet back under it, with record and growing unemployment, and with working class and poor people suffering with too little income and too many expenses, the economists and politicians are quarreling over what will be required to heal the ills of our nation. One "stimulus" has been tried but it was too little and too limited. Since it went only to the very poor, it immediately disappeared by being used to pay bills that were already in existence rather than on consumer spending. When the massive funds were doled out to the major banks, it did not make a ripple in the marketplace as the companies tucked the money into their reserve funds rather than releasing it into new lending. After eight years of seeing a government that was more intent on its own pet projects than on the welfare of the people; of begging a recalcitrant Congress to do something to stop the o...

Pictures of suffering Pictures of death Some say this is holy Some say this is good Women burned alive Children without heads and heaps of corpses on the ground

by susan abulhawa How can anyone watching Gaza burn escape the bitter realization that history repeats itself? Many have compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid South Africa. But not in their cruelest hour did the Apartheid regime wreak such wanton murder and destruction. Let us stop mincing words. What is happening to Palestinians now whispers of Warsaw and Lodz. Schools, universities, mosques, police stations, homes, water treatment plants, factories, and anything that supports civil society, including the only mental health clinic in Gaza, have been blown to rubble from planes that rain death from clear skies without any resistance, because Palestinians have no opposing air force. Nor do they have an army or navy. No mechanized armor or heavy weaponry. Thanks to Israel, they haven’t even had continuous electricity or fuel for the past two years. Or food and medicine. Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza has prevented the movement of people and goods in and o...

Jan 2, 2009 12:53 pm Thousands of shoes tie up Miami freeway traffic Thousands of shoes were dumped on the Palmetto Expressway causing significant traffic delays in Miami, Friday, Jan. 2, 2009. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz) MIAMI (AP) -- State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lt. Pat Santangelo says the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes Friday morning. Santangelo says he's not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash and no one stopped to claim them. He says he hopes someone will take them because he doesn't want to send them to the dump. Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed.

Let's hope the new year is better.

Shock, Awe and Lies: The Truth Behind the Israeli Attack on Gaza Written by Chris Floyd Monday, 29 December 2008 http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1666-shock-awe-and-lies-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-attack-on-gaza.html Here is a simple, stone cold fact. You cannot read or hear the truth about what is happening in Gaza from any corporate media in the United States. The only thing you will find there are regurgitations of Israeli spin, which are themselves only regurgitations of the kind of spin that American militarists have put on their own depredations -- for centuries now. Up and down the American media and political establishments, you will find nothing but bleatings about Israel being "forced" to launch its vicious blunderbuss attacks against heavily populated Gaza because of the "recent spate of Hamas bombings" since the end of a six-month ceasefire. This is of course a damnable and deliberate lie. Papers in Israel -- in Israel, but not the ...