The USA reaps what it has sown - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[knowledgeispower]

This is a letter written to newsweek. I copied it directly from Indymedia.org.

PLEASE ADD COMMENTS

I don`t hate Americans and I`m sorry if this gives the impression that I do. I was quite angry when I wrote this. Most of my anger is directed towards the American government but you guys are supposed to hold them to account. Please add comments.
Also, please copy this and put it all over the internet. (article 1)
America, you suck. You were asking for it big time.

You think you stand for democracy and freedom?

Yeah like monkeys might fly out of my butt!

Just how many ruthless oppressive dictatorships have you poured billions of dollars into propping up... and even putting them in power in the first place.

WHO put Saddam "he`s a son of a bitch but he`s our son of a bitch" Hussein in power? Who armed him to the back teeth? Who supported him for years? Who turned a blind eye to his abhorrent human rights abuses such as the poison gas massacre of his own Kurdish people at Halabja? Who cosied up to Saddam Hussein until he invaded Kuwait? Who subsequently decided cynically and hypocritically to denounce his human rights record only when this was deemed appropriate to western interests? Who DECIMATED Vietnam (AND Cambodia)? Who contaminated Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo with depleted uranium and littered them with unexploded clusterbombs which behave just like landmines? Who killed THOUSANDS of civilians in the Gulf War whilst claiming that hardly anyone was getting hurt? Who wants to use the WTO to deny European supermarkets the right to label products so as to inform the customer of whether or not controversial GM ingredients are present? Who wants to force third world countries to drop all their tarifs on western goods whilst keeping in place your own tarifs on thrid world goods? Who wants third world countries to be forced to remove all subsidies on agriculture whilst flooding their markets with your own HEAVILY subsidised grain which puts third world farmers out of business, who then have to go and live in a slum in the city and work for fifty cents a day for a multinational company that doesn`t give them any employment rights and uses armed security to stop them from forming unions? Who wants to militarise space so that you can dominate the world even more than you already do? Who has reduced the nation of Iraq from being a prosperous nation to the fifth poorest country in the world, resulting in the ruin and in many cases DEATH of hundreds of thousands of civilians? Who wants the rest of the world to do exactly as you want but refuses to abide by any rules that the majority of other countries desire for the international community? Who won`t sign ANY international agreement on protecting the environment or nonproliferation of weapons? Who won`t ban landmines - which kill overwhelmingly among civilians and whose effect will last for hundreds of years (not as bad as depleted uranium). Who supports the "targeted" assasinations of Palestinians - including many children and even some babies? Who pours billions of dollars into arming the oppressive regime of Israel? Who supports the theft of land from Palestinians and the bulldozing of their houses? Who is deeply implicated and complicit in the horrendous massacres that were deemed necessary by the undemocratically unelected friend of America, General Pinochet, when he decided to "open up Indonesia to the free market"? Who supplied Pinochet with weapons, knowing only too well what he was going to do with them in East Timor?
Who has ACTIVELY FOUGHT AGAINST DEMOCRACY throughout Latin America? Who is "sympathetic" to the Turkish military and its "Kurdish problem". Who supports the burning of Kurdish villages just because they refuse to assimilate and become Turks?

Who trained Nicaraguan *****TERRORISTS***** at the School Of The Americas?


Who sucks third world countries dry by extracting crippling debt payments - debts that were irresponsibly loaned to undemocratically unelected governments who didn`t know how to spend the money efficiently and who pocketed large amounts of it in personal off-shore bank accounts?

Who indeed?

The answer to all these questions is of course America, the most arrogant self-righteous self-interested ROGUE STATE that has ever existed.

George Bush has some nerve to be banging on about "democracy". This man - who has bought all his votes with the vast sums of money he has been donated by big oil companies and suchlike - did not even win the election. It`s official that overall, out of every vote cast by Americans, Bush actually secured a lower share than his rival. And this is what America calls democracy? This is what America stands for?

As for "freedom", out of all the countries in the world that are nominally "democratic" - ie that have elections, the USA has the largest proportion who live BEHIND BARS. 70% of them are black and around 70% of those who are white are dyslexic. Conclude from that what you will but it doesn`t seem very fair to me. If black people are more likely to end up in prison then that says two things to me. One, your justice system (including the police) is institutionally racist and two, black people don`t have a very good start in life if they are more likely to end up resorting to crime. Think what life must be like in the ghetto. It doesn`t bear thinking about.


GEORGE "Dubya" BUSH is apparantly PARANOID about so called "rogue states". I`ll tell you what a rogue state is. A rogue state is a dictatorship that doesn`t do what America tells is. A dictatorship that doesn`t conform to Western interests. Are Indonesia and Saudi Arabia and China and Turkey and the USSR
and Burma "rogue states"? No they are not, because despite the fact that they ALL have APPALLING human rights records (ie they torture their own people and stuff like that) they don`t do anything that upsets the interests of the American government or the interests of corporate freemarket globalised capitalism. Nevermind that Indonesia has broken international law by illegally invading East Timor (ok so it`s given it back now but it didn`t exactly leave it in the same condition in which it found it - on the contrary the place has been decimated). Indeed the US government considered this to be a good thing.

Now let me tell you this. You do NOT support democracy and you do not support freedom and you do not support human rights. You support these things when they suit you and you coldly and callously and cruelly ignore them... when it suits you.

I`m now going to quote you an extract from a speech by a man named George Kennan, a strategic planner during the middle part of the last century.

"We have 50 per cent of the world`s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation" - George Kennan, 1948.

Well, through your various alliances and unequal trading relationships and through the IMF and World Bank and WTO, and through the military might of NATO, you have sure as hell got that "pattern of relationships" you were looking for.

With the looming militarisation of space and the ever increasing powers of the WTO, you can only consolidate all this influence and thus increase the extent to which you already dominate undemocratically, the entire planet, whose environmental destruction you - above all other countries - preside over.

I appreciate that it`s not just America. The west is generally guilty. In fact we are all guilty. It says in the bible that we are all sinners. But because America is the most powerful country in the world, it has the most opportunities to sin. The thing is that you don`t even recognise that. You`re so self-righteous and arrogant that you think you have the right to call yourself "enlightened", like somehow all the other countries are primative and barbaric enough to be capable of evil but you`re not. Anyone who`s truly enlightened must understand that we are all capable of evil and that we must ask God to "lead us not into temptation". You Americans are (ironically and hypocritically) a very religious people. Most of you ask God to "lead [you] not into temptation" at least once a day. You also ask him to forgive you of your sins as you forgive those you sin against you. You say these things to God so often that you forget what they even mean and you don`t even recognise when you are blatantly breaking all these rules. As for the ten commandments, is the level of adultery not rather high in your country? And how many of you can honestly say that you "don`t covet thy neighbour`s oxen". That means, by the way, in more modern English, that you shouldn`t be jealous of people`s material belongings. And yet you are without a shadow of a doubt the most **MATERIALISTIC** people on the planet.

If you read your bible then you`ll no doubt be aware that "the love of money is the root of all evil".

Ooops, there goes capitalism;-)

By the way, I`m actually an aetheist; I just decided to phrase these ideas in religious language because I thought that might get through to you nominally Christian people.

Anyway, I actually think that it`s a real tragedy what happened yesterday. It`s always a tragedy when people get killed. So pardon me for being a little tactless. All I`m saying is that America has for a long time been a perpetrator of crimes against humanity and that this has made it a lot of enemies and that for this reason, you guys really should have seen it coming.

God Bless America

[knowledgeispower]

by Michael Moran, NBC

At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators.

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998

Bin Laden comes home to roost

His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story


Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.

BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia’s Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.
But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.

BIN LADEN’S BEGINNINGS

As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.

As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.

By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan’s mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan’s freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.
Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

WHAT’S ‘INTELLIGENT’ ABOUT THIS?

Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA’s reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.

In fact, while he returned to his family’s construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.
Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt’s Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION

It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden’s connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein’s monster like this.
It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA’s Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party’s grip on power in Moscow.
Even Hatch can’t be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its “mission,” had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director William Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual “Soviet Military Power” report right up to 1990.
Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.
That decision is coming home to roost.