The United States has set up its first Sahelian drone base, in Niger, in order to carry on the war against “Al-Qaedah in the Islamic Maghreb”. The problem is that there is no such thing as “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”. The US seems to confuse Al-Qaeda with Starbucks. Al-Qaeda does not have branches everywhere, a highly organised supply chain, and transfer pricing.
It is true that long standing ethnic militias in the Maghreb have adopted the styles and terminology of radical Islam, and have tenuous and occasional links with other radical islamic leaderships. But their income and supplies come from unrelated activities – chiefly extortion and smuggling – which have been going on since before al-Qaeda existed. These groups are disparate. There is no connection between the group which took western oil workers hostage in Algeria, and the Tuareg based militias who contolled Timbuktu. Indeed the Mali islamists had a close and cooperative relationship with the Algerian security services, and in their desert wanderings before the disintegration of central authority in Mali, were frequently refuelled and resupplied inside Algeria from government depots.
As usual in Africa, the base of these problems is poverty and competition for scarce resources between competing groups, all complicated by the legacy of colonialism. Hatred of the United States has not been a strong motivator in the Maghreb. But now the United States is about to introduce the concept of weekly drone kills and collateral murders, it will be. The USA is going to create the kind of anti-American unity which does not exist at present, and yet it claims to be fighting. Which will, of course, please the politicians’ paymasters in the arms and security industries just fine.
Israel, the apartheid state.
Alon Liel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general and ex-ambassador to South Africa:
“As long as there is no Palestinian state and Israel rules over the West Bank, Israel is a de facto apartheid state, a former top Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday, using a highly contentious term usually employed only by radical anti-Israel activists.”
“Similarities between the “original apartheid” as it was practiced in South Africa and the situation in Israel and the West Bank today “scream to the heavens,” added Liel, who was Israel’s ambassador in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994. There can be little doubt that the suffering of Palestinians is not less intense than that of blacks during apartheid-era South Africa, he asserted.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/joint-israel-west-bank-reality-is-an-apartheid-state/
Meanwhile, over in the good ole US of A, preening redneck Senator Lindsey Graham unearths Chuck Hagel’s latest crime against the apartheid state:
“South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham has just sent a letter to Barack Obama’s defense secretary nominee, Chuck Hagel. Graham asks if, at a 2010 appearance at Rutgers University, Hagel said Israel “was risking becoming an apartheid state.””
“He (Chuck Hagel) basically said that Israel has violated every UN resolution since 1967, that Israel has violated its agreements with the quartet, that it was risking becoming an apartheid state if it didn’t allow the Palestinians to form a state. He said that the settlements were getting close to the point where a contiguous Palestinian state would be impossible.”
“In his letter, Graham writes: “Senator Hagel, did you say this? Have you said anything similar? Does this contemporaneous email accurately reflect your views?””
Lindsey Graham, a man with no shame.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/graham-hagel-did-you-say-israel-risked-becoming-apartheid-state_703030.html
Thank you, Craig! It’s so refreshing to hear someone talk about what “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” actually means. This title is so blandly inserted into so many news reports that I have long suspected it of being meaningless.
KingOfWelsh Noir says:-
“It is self-evident to most reasonable people that killing children with drones, waterboarding, rendering, invading and bombing, blowing up wedding parties and just about every other tactic of the War on Terror simply adds fuel to the fire and creates more terrorism. They’ve been doing it for ten years now and I’m pretty sure they are not stupid. Therefore I have to assume that fomenting anti-American hatred must be the intended outcome. Or is there another explanation?”
For the kleptoplutocrats and corporations that own the US, permanent war is profitable, extremely profitable, but how do you prevent the war from ending prematurely? Well one adopts battle tactics that create as many new enemies as possible for each current enemy assassinated.
War is costly for the majority of US citizens but good for the 0.01% elite that control the US government. The war will not end until the debt it creates for the other 99.9% of US citizens becomes unsupportable.
Thanks Adrianna and Arbed and all other replies, I’m already penning a letter in reply to the spiel I received from Mr. Bacon.
Hi Nevermind (and others interested in Assange case),
I’m reposting here something I dropped into the Why I’m Convinced AA is a Liar thread a couple of weeks ago because I’m not sure I made its significance quite clear enough. I’ll spell it out more clearly this time.
Yesterday Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt arrived in Australia for talks with Australian FM Bob Carr, who has publicly stated that he won’t be raising Assange’s case with Bildt (hmmm… yeah, right). In a televised panel discussion two nights ago, Bob Carr and the US Ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich did their damnedest to mislead the Australian public that the Wikileaks Grand Jury didn’t exist, Assange’s asylum had nothing to do with America and the US has no involvement in the Swedish extradition case. This link from my previous post blows that last claim out of the water.
Briefly, in late July last year (25 July 2012) the Ecuadorian Ambassador to Sweden showed up unexpectedly at the Swedish FO carrying Ecuador’s formal offer to facilitate Assange’s questioning at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Recent FOI releases in Sweden show that this offer was immediately copied to the America section of the Swedish Foreign Ministry. On the exact same day Assange’s Swedish lawyers wrote to the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny formally making the same offer on behalf of their client. Ny took six days to respond to them and did so in a way which implied she had no knowledge of the Ecuadorians’ formal offer. This might suggest that it’s Carl Bildt’s ministry and its America section who are really running the Swedish investigation/extradition.
If Bob Carr and Jeffrey Bleich’s claims that the US has no involvement in Sweden’s case are true, can they explain why correspondence concerning Assange’s questioning at a safe venue in London is copied to the Swedish FO America section, when it purportedly has nothing to do with them?
Ben Franklin, 11.57pm 25 Feb
Re your query about the Knights of Malta on the previous thread, I wonder if this little gift from Wikileaks contains anything useful for your researches?
WIKILEAKS RELEASE: Malta: 4,685 emails from US intelligence contractor Stratfor:
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/306312677922336768
WIKILEAKS RELEASE: Malta: 15 sensitive emails from US intelligence contractor Stratfor:
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/306313937832521728
Is there some important political event coming up concerning Malta, does anyone know? Wikileaks usually times its releases just ahead of elections and such like. If there’s nothing significant for Malta on the horizon, then the timing of this release is spookily coincidental to your questions, Ben. Perhaps Wikileaks reads this blog and they were sufficiently intrigued to have a quick fish around in their files…? 🙂
The gaju alliance, at it again ! After relegating the runaway blockbuster Avatar to second behind the relatively poor Hurt Locker, only due to Avatars clear allusion to the plight of the Palestinians, we now have this majority alliance in the Oscar panel, voting for “Argo” – when its dershowitzery is plain for all to see. Is it a wonder then, they refer to us as “sum dum goyim”, but the American presstitutes are all laughing their way to the bank.
The Torygraph gives house room to Straw. What does he mean when he says ‘going to war’? He is of course very practiced in the process.
Even if Iran gets the Bomb, it won’t be worth going to war
Containment is a better response than conflict in dealing with a country we have long mishandled
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9892742/Even-if-Iran-gets-the-Bomb-it-wont-be-worth-going-to-war.html
Arbed. No elections in Malta as far as I can see. I wondered if there was some connection to war on Mali and beyond, but officially they say they have no bases for foreign powers. They did have previously.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120613/local/-No-Maltese-interest-in-having-Nato-membership-.424051 A mention of a 2004 Wikileak within.
Not actually in NATO but in this set up which they joined in 1995 and which was renewed.
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_50349.htm The Partnership for Peace programme
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_82584.htm |Countries signed up and date
Remember all that bollocks a few weeks ago about all the hurdles Assange faced because he hadn’t been registered to vote. Lawyers, constitutional experts, the whole shower wheeled out for the cause.
Well, surprise, surprise. It was all bollocks.
“Contrary to the expectations of a number of political commentators, the Australian Electoral Commission has accepted Mr Assange’s enrolment as an eligible overseas elector in the Victorian federal seat of Isaacs, the seat of Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.”
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/assange-takes-step-closer-to-senate-20130225-2f1dw.html
And this is very likely bollocks too!
“Assange’s conspiracy theory is ‘fantasy’: Australian FM”
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/02/26/268381.html
ix/xi was either blowback in response to US aggression in the Middle East, or a false-flag in which the US government executed 3,000 of its own citizens. If the former, it suggests that the US has little fear of blowback. In response to the atrocity US aggression escalated hugely. The barbarity of the attack legitimised any and all subsequent American actions, in the same way that the Death Wish movies show terrible crimes in order to gain sympathy for a homicidal vigilante. The destruction in downtown New York was about as much as (more than?) any terrorist group could hope to achieve against a powerful martial nation with massive security apparatus. So if that didn’t stop the warmongers, what will?
The beginners guide to politics, 101.
Once you start working for The Borg, your brain is theirs!
The human, Bob Carr:
“Writing in his Thoughtlines political blog in February last year, then retired former New South Wales premier Carr was highly critical of the Swedish prosecutorial process levied against Mr Assange.
”The Swedish judge is prosecutor . . . yes, the two roles in the one officer, an outrage by Australian standards,” Mr Carr wrote. ”The charge includes rape but the sex was consensual. The victims have exchanged emails talking revenge and money.””
Bob Carr, after The Borg have liquidised his brain:
“Senator Carr promptly distanced himself from these and other comments once he was appointed Foreign Minister, saying that they were the views of a private individual and did not necessarily reflect the positions he would adopt as a member of the Federal Labor Government.”
Now, you know.
Craig: Could you please explain to the gentlemen in these videos that there is no need to kill people in this way because the organisation they say they belong to doesn’t exist? http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e45_1359741518
How?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6oiR29NcGw
“…the utter failure to defend them [American citizens] by their federal government, by their leaders, and the institutions that were entrusted to do so and because of serious discrepancies between the facts that you’ve set forth and what was told to the American people…” – Senator Mark Dayton – Governor of Minnesota.
“Best let the government of Ecuador know your opinion then, Kempe. They spent two months studying huge quantities of evidence and legal advice and came to the conclusion that Assange was at risk of extreme political persecution.”
Yes, they decided he COULD be at risk of political persecution not that he currently was.
“Have you noticed since its inception just how many spellings abound of aL-Qaeda?”
This is because it’s a translation into the Roman alphabet of a phrase originally written in Arabic which can be expressed in a number of different ways. There are several different ways of spelling Col Gaddafi’s name, doesn’t mean he never existed.
“ix/xi was either blowback in response to US aggression in the Middle East, or a false-flag in which the US government executed 3,000 of its own citizens.”
The reason for 9/11 is well known. During the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait America used fake satellite pictures to make the Saudis think Saddam was going to keep on coming. They agreed to let America build bases on Muslim holy land in Saudi. After Iraq was forced out of Kuwait America decided they were going to keep their bases in Saudi Arabia.
American intelligence must have known that the Muslim factions would not tolerate Infidel soldiers on their Holy Land. They knew they would take action and they knew what action they were going to take well in advance.
Now America doesn’t need bases in Saudi, they are still there but unmanned, they have plenty of bases in Iraq.
Is this picking on Iran because of running out of any sensible arguments?
http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/michelle-obama-added-sleeves-argo-iran-iranian-news-oscars-presentation-102204757.html
Whague’s Cheshire cat grin may disappear today a bit like Wheritty because Mr Kerry is a real politician not an incompetent nincompoop like Hague and Cameron. Kerry will be outlining the plan for Syria, decimation of Assad in the next few weeks, followed the restitution of law and order under the stars and stripes of the Muslim Brotherhood.
William Hague’s relish at the random sniping at citizens by UK special forces and the oppression of the Syrian people by Saudi funded jihadists will come to an end. I have refused to support a jihad which is controlled by UKUSIS for the purpose of installing a Syrian Morsi because I don’t want to be the one who is told that I condoned the possible genocide of Alawis, same as recent history in Libya against black people and supporters of Gaddafi.
Assad and Gaddafi could have been removed by diplomacy. Then the world could have been told that the Alawis are not Muslims and have no place ruling over a Muslim country, and then they could vave been left alone. USUKIS want a genocide so that they can justify taking over Syria’s oil-assets and so they can blame the Muslims for being uncivilised.
However, the Qur’an mentions the genocide of the Jews at the hands of the Romans after they rejected their prophet Jesus pbuh. I believe we will be witnesses to a genocide of Alawis in the months to come. If it happens, it will be Allah’s decision and who can disagree with it?
Kerry will be demanding that UK forces now play an active role in enabling that genocide, while US troops presently stationed in Israel on their return from Iraq secure the pipelines that run through Syria from Iraq under Western control.
Whague will be wishing he wasn’t sitting in the firing line of having to take responsibility for the ensuing massacres, and will feebly wheel out the pathetic excuses of this pathetic, yesterdays conservative party, that no-one in Westminster could have predicted that these massacres could have followed present party policy.
Then the blood and guts will all be washed down by an early disintegration of the Lib-Con alliance and we will have a sparkly, squeaky New Labour Ed Miliband in No 10. Whague will resume his revolting wheeler dealing and believe that he has conned us into thinking he was not to blame.
As I understand it though, those US bases in Iraq are no longer operational.
Good God, Daniel, don’t let facts stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory!
You’re on the way to getting called a troll!
Avoid BBC 2 10.30 tonight at all costs. Bliar is being given airtime for a hour long special with Ms Wark, on Iraq 10 years on. The BBC have the death toll wrong by a factor of 10 btw. They know that and have been corrected time and time again.
Tony Blair: Life in Iraq 10 years on not as I hoped
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21576509
If only the broadcast could coincide with a power cut or similar just as the powers-that-be have taken Press TV out. Note how Bliar gets a mention of Iran and Syria into his spiel.
Vile, vile person.
“As I understand it though, those US bases in Iraq are no longer operational.”
They are still there and can be operational again in 48 hours. America has a huge Embassy in Iraq with the military might to take the city apart if they want to, they have effective control of the Iraqi military and Iraqi air space, there are still plenty of American service men in Iraq as well as all the private security personnel under the control of the American military. They have drone bases and they have training bases for the Syrian rebels.
If America decides Israeli planes can cross Iraq to get to Iran there isn’t a blind thing the Iraqi government can do about it.
Would you not think Milord Patten, Chair BBC Trust, had more important matters to attend to at the BBC than to go to the Lords yesterday to ask this question with its anti-Islamist content?
Lord Patten (Conservative)
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the risks posed to Christians in the north-eastern province of Kenya from the Somali-based Islamist group al-Shabaab.
Hansard source (Citation: HL Deb, 25 February 2013, c244W)
Baroness Warsi (Conservative)
We have had reports of two attacks against Christian places of worship in Kenya’s North East Province in recent months. This is part of a wider increase in terrorist attacks by domestic and Somali extremist groups against a range of Kenyan targets. We assess these attacks are linked to Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia and that the risk is unlikely to diminish in the immediate future.
Fred, thanks for the clarification.
Fred’s ‘clarification’, is complete claptrap.
Whilst it may not fit too well with his fanciful narrative, the Iraqi government are however in control of their own airspace.
Deary me Mary, not that I favour either brand of mumbo-jumbo, but on what Planet does asking a question about the safety of Christians in Kenya become ‘anti-Islamist’? I think that’s the sound of the barrel being scraped.
“Fred’s ‘clarification’, is complete claptrap.
Whilst it may not fit too well with his fanciful narrative, the Iraqi government are however in control of their own airspace.”
How do they do that then? They haven’t got any jet fighters.
“The USA is going to create the kind of anti-American unity which does not exist at present, and yet it claims to be fighting. ”
Job done. If there are no enemies we will create them proving we were right all along.
I am reminded if benefit scrounger (£500k+) Maggie Thatcher…
“Where there is peace we will create division. Where there is harmony we will create discord…”*
*I am going not by the words of this Old Age Terrorist but her actions.
As usual in Africa,[and elsewhere] the base of these problems is poverty and competition for scarce resources between competing groups, all complicated by the legacy of colonialism. Hatred of the United States has not been a strong motivator in the Maghreb. But now the United States is about to introduce the concept of weekly drone kills and collateral murders, it will be. The USA is going to create the kind of anti-American unity which does not exist at present, and yet it claims to be fighting. Which will, of course, please the politicians’ paymasters in the arms and security industries just fine.
Never has a truer word been spoken (as they say).
StarBucks doesn’t pay its Taxes. I’m sure Al-Qaida would be very upset by being compared to them.
But they can’t be, because Al-Qaida does not exist.
There is just a bunch of groups and inidividuals all over the world with a bunch of different aims and objectives. People against them just use the word Al-qaida to justify the unjustifiable.
Everything is Al Qaida and everyone is Al Qaida.
Muslim school girls in france that are not allowed to go to school because they wear a scarf are all Alqaida and stoping them going to school is Frances efforts to fight Al-Qaida.
Palestinian farmers whose families have been in that same farm for more than a thousand years are AlQaida for not giving that farm to Russians who claim to be Jewish. Killing the farmers, destroying their homes, trees and fields and handing it over to people from America or Russia is Israels fight against Al-Qaida.
Belgium police arresting, beating and striping naked a Muslim lady and than parading her naked in a police is Belgiums fight against Al Qaida. And that lady wearing a Naqab makes her Al Qaida.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQqn7w6oyEc&feature=player_embedded