April 8th, 2008 at 11:08
Björn Hallberg
NATO employees are frequenting prostitutes in Kabul, effectively building new enterprises of brothels and trafficking. The Sun is covering the patriotic angle of course, claiming that these visitors are by and large civilians. But that seems unlikely. It’s just the tip of the iceberg and men in uniform are as likely as civilians to frequent prostitutes. Also, the article makes it sound as if all the sex workers are Chinese and present out of their own free will. Both assertions also seem highly unlikely. But to admit that local women are being sold into prostitution would comparably be a much bigger PR fiasco.
Nato chiefs say one in five civilian staff use brothels and warn it must stop for fear of outraging Muslim Afghans and derailing the security mission.
One must also question whether you can be a civilian morally speaking while working for an organization like NATO. Especially in a day and age where more and more traditional soldiering is being outsourced.
April 7th, 2008 at 09:25
Björn Hallberg
Here we go again. Charley Reese articulates perfectly why Tibet is such a non-issue that is being exaggerated to frightening and suspicious proportions.
Coffee sippers who think it might be a good idea to free Tibet from China are about 58 years too late. China is not going to free Tibet, and Western encouragement of Tibetan resistance will only get people killed needlessly.
Tibet was part of China for centuries. In 1913, when China seemed to be falling apart, the British Empire encouraged Tibet to declare its independence. It did, and that lasted until 1950, when, at the end of the Chinese civil war, China invaded and reclaimed the area. By then, the impotent British Empire was in no position to help anyone even if it had been so inclined. America chose to do nothing.
Americans in particular should keep in mind that we are currently engaged in mismanaging two occupations of two countries that we illegally invaded.
And one could add that it would be nice if those two occupations garnered the same sort of outspoken disapproval worldwide. As would Israel’s occupation, or indeed very existence. One must also consider possible ulterior motives for the nations that now protest but were also once part of the foreign oppression of China. Old habits die hard. While admittedly a heavy-handed response by Chinese authorities, we know very little of the surrounding circumstances. China has been accused of using agents provocateurs, but the opposite is just as likely. There are major powers, including neighboring India, holding a serious grudge.
I was also amused by the condemnation and massive media coverage of Hu Jia, suddenly recalling that we have our own prisoners of conscience right here in liberal Europe. They are derisively called “Holocaust deniers” and coincidentally, even the lawyer of such a “Holocaust denier” can be sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Seems just as bogus to me.
March 3rd, 2008 at 18:45
Björn Hallberg
This video made a big splash on certain social bookmarking sites. While essays could be written on the implications of such general and random callousness, the really interesting fact of the matter is the unequaled, unified and bipartisan moral outrage that people have expressed. I wonder where I HAVEN’T seen that before.
Let me translate for your convenience: Dogs (or in this case one puppy, no more or less) are now worth more than a million Iraqis.
I rest my case.
February 20th, 2008 at 09:56
Björn Hallberg
Welcome the day of reflection. Raping starts again next week, business as usual.
The US military slapped a sweeping curfew Wednesday on troops and their relatives on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa after a series of incidents including an alleged rape that sparked tension.
A US Marine was arrested last week on allegations that he raped a 14-year-old girl in Okinawa, home to half of the US troops in Japan, leading Japanese leaders to demand tighter discipline for troops.
[…] within days, Okinawa police arrested two more Marines, with one allegedly driving while drunk and the other accused of stumbling into a stranger’s house and passing out intoxicated.
Japanese media also reported Tuesday that US authorities detained a Marine for allegedly distributing counterfeit 20-dollar bills in Okinawa.
February 12th, 2007 at 11:42
Björn Hallberg
And so people are buying into the same sort of deception that got the US into Iraq. Or in fact every major conflict since the Spanish-American war. Will they ever learn? Larry Chin is the latest to argue, correctly in my mind, that the planning for war has already started and that this year will see an increase in make-believe evidence presented against Iran. The fabrication of the case against Iran has begun. And it will not stop there. The chaos that will follow from engaging another made-up enemy in yet another theater, while leaving past objectives woefully unfulfilled even according to their own definition, may well be intentional and the onset of a much broader and vicious campaign. The question is how much of this is sheer stupidity and stubbornness and how much is an actual desire to fire the first volley in the next world war. Put another way, is it even possible that anyone could be so delusional about the state of the world and could have bought into the definition of a clash of civilizations or is it just a calculated “risk” that a more “robust” war will do what wars always have the potential to do, namely silence dissent at home, stave off economic collapse in the short run, open new markets for corporations and add to the power play of geopolitics? Or to put it yet another way, whether or not this chain of events is being advanced by idiots or rational, but immoral, intellects.
Some skeptics have maintained for years that the Bush administration will not attack Iran, based on the rational concept that not even the Bush administration and its neocons would be insane enough risk a full-blown superpower nuclear war.
But in a testimony before Congress, Robert Gates declared that the Pentagon, indeed, has plans for full-scale war against Iran, Russia and China. This statement, a virtual promise of world war, suggests that the Anglo-American establishment is prepared to wage the endless war. So much for sanity.
As Chin also points out, the testimony by Zbigniew Brzezinski last week really puts the US position in perspective. Clearly, Brzezinski is not so much concerned about the “calamity” for its own sake. Rather because it undermines US hegemony, which at the end of the day is much more than carrier groups or cruise missiles. You know that things have gone terribly wrong when brazen imperialists like Brzezinski are sending up the red flag.
If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.
This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran — though gaining in regional influence — is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Quite the conspiracy theorist it would seem. One must not forget that this is one of the foremost US technocrats of empire after all and one that has been privy to some of the darkest secrets of the land. And if anyone knows radical Islam it would be Brzezinski, since he helped set them up in the first place.
Meanwhile, Putin, or as we like to call him — captain obvious — notes that America’s influence has to stop expanding and that the US has overstepped its bounds in nearly every field. I guess you could say the same for Russia though fortunately they don’t project force or export ideology across the globe. I don’t see them subverting elections in Mexico or Canada for instance which would be the equivalent of what the US is doing in Ukraine and elsewhere. And while mentioning Brzezinski, it worth remembering who got the Soviet Union involved in Afghanistan and how by and large Brzezinski’s successors copied the same approach when urging former satellite states to turn on Russia and fuelling the conflict in Chechnya. All in all, the hypocrisy across the board is quite staggering.
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:03
Björn Hallberg
An interview with Daniele Ganser on the topic of his book “Nato’s secret Armies: Operation Gladio Terrorism in Western Europe” which deals with the secret anti-Communist stay-behind armies. It’s a good primer for anyone who is still oblivious to the very real history of false flag operations during the cold war. Operations that were directed by the United States against those that aspired to freedom and genuine democracy.
Silvia Cattori: Your book about NATO’s Secret Armies explains that the strategy of tension and the False Flag terrorism imply great dangers. It teaches us how NATO - together with the intelligence services or the West European countries and the Pentagon - utilised secret armies during the Cold War, hired spies among the extreme right wing, and organized terrorist acts for which they blamed the left. Becoming aware of this, we can wonder about what is likely to happen today behind our back.
Daniele Ganser: It is extremely important to understand what the strategy of tension truly represents the way it works nowadays. This can help us clarify the present and to see more clearly to what extent it is still in action. Only a few people know what the expression “strategy of tension” means. It is very important to talk about it, to explain it. It is a tactic that involves carrying out criminal acts and attributing them to someone else. By the term “tension”, we mean emotional tension, all that which creates a feeling of tension.
By “strategy” we make reference to that which increases people’s fear in regard to a determined group. These secret structures of NATO had been equipped, financed and trained by the CIA, in coordination with the M16 (the British secret service), to fight against the Army of the Soviet Union in a case of war, but also according to the information to which he have access today, to commit terrorist acts in several countries. That is how, since the 70s, the Italian secret services have been using these armies to foment terrorist attacks, with the purpose of causing fear among the population, and later, to accuse the communists of being the authors. The strategy of tension was designed to serve the purpose or discrediting, weakening and stopping communism from reaching executive power.
Ganser notes in his book (Ganser 2005:245-246) that these stay-behind irregulars were on the one hand a prudent measure, had the Soviet Union ever invaded, but they also engaged in “extracurricular” activities while biding their time, stymying democracy wherever they saw it.
The secret stay-behind armies of NATO, however, were also a source of terror, as the evidence available now shows. It has been this second feature of the secret war that has attracted a lot of attention and criticism in the last decade, and which in the future will need more investigation and research. As of now the evidence indicates that the governments of the United States and Great Britain after the end of the Second World War feared not only a Soviet invasion, but also the Communist Parties, and to a lesser degree the Socialist Parties. The White House and Downing Street feared that in several countries of Western Europe, and above all in Italy, France, Belgium, Finland and Greece, the Communists might reach positions of influence in the executive and destroy the military alliance NATO from within by betraying military secrets to the Soviet Union. It was in this sense that the Pentagon in Washington together with the CIA, MI6 and NATO in a secret war set up and operated the stay-behind armies as an instrument to manipulate and control the democracies of Western Europe from within, unknown to both European populations and parliaments. This strategy lead to terror and fear, as well as to “humiliation and maltreatment of democratic institutions’, as the European press correctly criticized.
Experts of the Cold War will note that Operation Gladio and NATO’s stay-behind armies cast a new light on the question of sovereignty in Western Europe. It is now clear that as the Cold War divided Europe, brutality and terror was employed to control populations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As far as Eastern Europe is concerned, this fact has long been recognised, long before it had been openly declared. After the Red Army had in 1968 mercilessly crushed the social reforms in Prag, Soviet leader Leonid Breschnew in Moscow with his infamous ‘Breschnew doctrine’ had openly declared that the countries of Eastern Europe were only allowed to enjoy ‘limited sovereignty’. As far as Western Europe is concerned the conviction of being sovereign and independent was shattered more recently. The data from Operation Gladio and NATO’s stay-behind armies indicates a more subtle and hidden strategy to manipulate and limit the sovereignty, with great differences from country to country. Yet a limitation of sovereignty it was. And in each case where the stay-behind network in the absence of a Soviet invasion functioned as a straightjacket for the democracies of Western Europe, Operation Gladio was the Breschnew doctrine of Washington.
Definitely worth a read as a primer to the deceitful history of NATO and the far-reaching meddling the the US undertook with regard to its supposed allies in Europe. As relevant as ever since the very same stratagem is likely still in use, even though the original secret armies are dead and buried. It is very likely indeed that within the ranks of European military structures as well as in civil society lurk radical American sympathizers, ready to dissuade or remove detractors and stir up trouble by means of false flag operations. It is likely that these modern equivalents however are far less militarized than their predecessors and while no doubt active in the terrorism attacks that have hit Europe in the last couple of years, they will most likely be found in think tanks, media groups and the higher echelons of civil society. After all, the last legitimate rationale (namely to plan for a Soviet invasion) is no longer present.
February 2nd, 2007 at 18:48
Björn Hallberg
Chalmers Johnson’s latest creation, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”, is hot off the presses and should arrive in bookstores around the world any day now. Needless to say, this much anticipated and final piece of the trilogy deals primarily with the cost and consequences of imperial overstretch. Few people in the US have the honesty, strength of character and desire for serious change that Johnson possesses.
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis on the Imperial Premises
American Empire Project
History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country — like the United States today — that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say a few words about my new book, Nemesis, and explain why I gave it the subtitle, “The Last Days of the American Republic.” Nemesis is the third book to have grown out of my research over the past eight years. I never set out to write a trilogy on our increasingly endangered democracy, but as I kept stumbling on ever more evidence of the legacy of the imperialist pressures we put on many other countries as well as the nature and size of our military empire, one book led to another.
January 26th, 2007 at 08:15
Björn Hallberg
- “WIPED OFF THE MAP” - The Rumor of the Century - Or how the world was duped into believing that Iran’s President had threatened to destroy Israel. I’ve mentioned this many times over, but this preposterous and malicious claim seems to refuse to go away. The question is if people are gullible and / or lazy or are spreading this lie on purpose, hoping to precipitate an armed conflict with Iran.
- US Expands Military Base Network in Europe - Italy will house 1800 more troops at Ederle. And the Czech Republic will house part of the interceptor network. Much to Russia’s dismay. But goading Russia, infiltrating states and the fact that the interceptor program doesn’t work as advertised is obviously no problem for military planners.
- Open Season on Every Religion But One - Christian conservatives on the ADL and Judaism. I guess you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want, as they say.
- White House Originally Wanted 2002 Iraq War Resolution to Cover Entire Middle East - Original Iraq resolution was hastily rewritten by Congress to avoid giving the president carte blanche in the region. Sloppy wording by the White House or an attempt at subversion?
- Pentagon shows off new ray gun - Billed as non-lethal but that isn’t much to be bragging about. Hacking someone’s arm off is non-lethal as well. And more to the point, blindness from having your eyeballs cooked is also non-lethal.
- Uranium killing Italian troops - “Italian soldiers are still dying following exposure to depleted uranium in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, their relatives say. US says it fired around 40,000 depleted uranium rounds during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts.”
- Secure beneath the watchful eyes - British Government poster outside a London Metro. Police state? At least they weren’t eyes in triangles. Remember the Terrornoia Posters on US commuter trains?
- They met in Teheran - Shamir: “[Y]ou may deny the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ, you may besmirch Muhammad, but if you have any doubt that six million of Jews were executed by Germans in gas chambers within the framework of a total annihilation project you may find yourself in a jail in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and other ‘free’ countries. The Teheran Conference is the first one ever to deal critically with the sad events of the World War Two.”
- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on habeas corpus - “Alberto Gonzales testified that habeas corpus — the right to go to federal court and challenge one’s imprisonment — is not protected by the Constitution.” Senators eager to know why the constitution regulates the suspension of a right that according to Gonzales doesn’t exist. Illustrates much larger problem of serious gaps in the US constitution. Some gaps, like the expressed right to vote, have been temporarily mended from time to time with legal patches but the situation is more dire than constitution-hugging Americans would like to admit. Nor can we afford any new legislation in times like these, given the grave danger that the US will be stuck another 200 years with such abominations like the Patriot Act and so forth.
January 14th, 2007 at 09:20
Björn Hallberg
Unsurprising perhaps, the US airstrikes on Somalia last week missed their intended targets. Especially unsurprising considering the target was an organization that in reality doesn’t exist and is the brainchild of CIA pencil pushers.
The herdsmen had gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes. But lit up by the flames, they became latest victims of America’s war on terror.
It was their tragedy to be misidentified in a secret operation by special forces attempting to kill three top al-Qa’ida leaders in south-ern Somalia.
Of course, in US military lingo, the entire area is a theater of war and since there are no civilians at the target sites, according to the Pentagon’s map, it is simply impossible for the US to kill civilians.
It is also noteworthy that violence in Somalia is surging and that the country which had enjoyed relative calm for a short while is now being thrown back into chaos. The warlords that were meticulously and painstakingly driven out by the Islamic Courts are back to reclaim their respective turfs and kill whoever stands in their way and torment the Somali people once more. It’s their pound of flesh for sticking with their US patrons. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian army (back by US diplomacy, satellite intel, weapons and training) has to continue fighting indefinitely, despite initial reports of resounding success. It does sound very familiar, doesn’t it?
See also:
January 7th, 2007 at 19:25
Björn Hallberg
As’ ad over at Angry Arab brings our attention to the willingness of the US media to transmogrify the Israel-Palestine issue and one of the greatest euphemisms in recent history - the “arrest raid.”
Elsewhere, just in case you missed it, Israel is now officially crowned worst brand name in the world. Though as you can imagine, according to the pro-Israel sort, this is through no fault of their own. I guess we can all expect a new round of Holohoax “education” now to cover the murderous tracks of the settler state.
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