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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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| Thursday, December 06 | | · | The Reality of the 'Lesser Evil' |
| Wednesday, December 05 | | · | A new call against standing idly by? |
| Monday, October 01 | | · | What is the Difference Between Benjamin Netanyahu & Colin Powell? |
| Friday, April 13 | | · | |
| Saturday, February 18 | | · | 'Human Rights' Warriors for Empire |
| Monday, January 30 | | · | Rationalizing Idiocy: Attacking Iran For All the Right Reasons? |
| Tuesday, November 29 | | · | Propagandized America |
| Thursday, June 16 | | · | Remote Control Killing Like Sport |
| Tuesday, June 14 | | · | CIA Requires Secrecy To Conceal Its Own Crimes |
| Monday, May 09 | | · | Americans Are Living In 1984 |
Older Articles
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War and Terror: The Religious Element of Terrorism
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By William Blum
December 08, 2015
Is it terrorism or is it religion? Does the question matter?
From the early days of America’s “War on Terror,” and even before then, I advocated seeing terrorists as more than just mindless, evil madmen from another planet. I did not believe they were motivated by hatred or envy of American freedom or democracy, or of American wealth, secular government or culture, although George W. Bush dearly wanted us to believe that.
The terrorists were, I maintained, driven by decades of terrible things done to their homelands by U.S. foreign policy. There should be no doubt of this I wrote, for there are numerous examples of Middle East terrorists explicitly citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their actions. And it worked the same all over the world.
In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of outrageous Washington interventions, there were countless acts of terrorism against U.S. diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of U.S. corporations. 9/11 was a globalized version of the Columbine High School disaster. When you bully people long enough they are going to strike back.
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War and Terror: Israelis – Not Muslims – Cheered in Jersey City on 9/11
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By Glen Ford
November 29, 2015 - blackagendareport.com
“By making only a partial correction of Donald Trump’s prevarication, the corporate media were telling their own lie about what happened on 9/11.”
The corporate media don’t like Donald Trump. They used to like him a lot; in fact, Big Business Media are responsible for making this minor multi-millionaire into a household name. But Trump is on their hit list, nowadays, because the Republican presidential candidate insists on telling his own lies, rather than sticking to the list of official lies parroted by corporate media every minute of every day.
Donald Trump told a really “HUGE” – as he would put it – lie when he claimed to have watched thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the World Trade Center came down on 9/11. Every corporate news outlet in the country rushed to debunk Trump’s fictitious account. The Washington Post offered psychological theories for why Trump gets away with telling fantastic lies. The New York Times said there was no evidence that Jersey City Muslims cheered the destruction on 9/11. CNN said it never happened. And, they were right.
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War and Terror: The Paris Attacks and the White Lives Matter Movement
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By Ajamu Baraka
November 20, 2015 - ajamubaraka.com
I received a message from one of my friends in Lebanon who asked with feigned curiosity why the U.S. media only gave a passing reference to the bombing in Beirut before turning to non-stop coverage of the attacks in Paris. Of course, like many of us she already knew the answer – that in the consciousness of the White West there is a premium on the value of White life.
Acknowledging this fact is neither new nor should it be particularly controversial. Its obviousness is apparent to anyone who is honest. We saw it in the response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks where the world (meaning the White West) engaged in a gratuitous expression of moral outrage against terrorism. But that outrage against terrorism didn’t extent to the two thousand Nigerians who were murdered by Boko Haram the same weekend that a massive rally in Paris took place to condemn the Charlie Hebdo attack. At that rally not one word of solidarity or condemnation of terrorism in Nigeria was expressed by the speakers or the thousands gathered that day.
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War and Terror: Freedom Rider: Obama’s Africa Hypocrisy
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By Margaret Kimberley
August 10, 2015 - blackagendareport.com
“...hypocritical Americans have made gay rights the new measurement of societal well being all over the world ...”
On January 20, 2017 Barack Obama will leave the presidency and those black people capable of critical thought will have many reasons to breathe sighs of relief. They will no longer have to submit to condescending lectures directed exclusively at them. From the moment he ran for president Obama has harangued black people on a wide variety of issues. It doesn’t matter if his audience is made up of church congregants, graduating students, or Kenyan dignitaries. Every black person unlucky enough to be in his vicinity risks being treated like a dead beat dad, career criminal or cousin Pookie, Obama’s own imaginary Willie Horton.
During his trip to east Africa the president chastened Kenyans about gay rights, domestic violence, genital cutting, forced marriage and equal rights for women. He went on and on with no mention of how well his country lives us to any accepted standards of human rights.
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War and Terror: 10 Myths About Obama’s Latest War in Iraq and Syria
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By Reese Erlich
October 03, 2014 - reeseerlich.com
Veteran foreign correspondent Reese Erlich was in northern Iraq at the start of the U.S. bombing campaign against Islamic State. He interviewed Kurdish leaders, peshmerga fighters and U.S. officials. He says the reality on the ground is far different from the propaganda coming out of Washington.
1. Islamic State presents an immediate threat to the people of the U.S.
In justifying air attacks on Syria on Sept. 23, President Barack Obama said, “We will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people.”
I saw firsthand the tens of thousands of Yazidis forced to flee Islamic State fighters. IS is a vicious, un-Islamic, ultra-right-wing group that poses a real threat to the people of Syria and Iraq. But those people will defeat IS, not the U.S., whose motives are widely questioned in the region. IS poses no more of a terrorist threat to the American people than al-Qaida and its offshoots.
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War and Terror: How the US Helped Create Al Qaeda and ISIS
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By Garikai Chengu
September 20, 2014 - counterpunch.org
Much like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is Made in the USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region. The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.
The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.
The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the US has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation”.
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War and Terror: America’s deadliest export and the endless war on terror
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By William Blum
September 16, 2014
Praise for America’s Deadliest Export: “Blum concentrates on matters of great current significance, and does not pull his punches” — Noam Chomsky.
This is an extract from America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy — The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else by William Blum (Zed Books, 2014). Zed Books have just reissued Blum’s three classic books, America’s Deadliest Export, Rogue State and Killing Hope in new updated editions.
A safer world for Americans… if they don’t leave home
Supporters of US foreign policy have been repeating the point ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001: US counterterrorism policy has worked. How do they know? Because there haven’t been any successful terrorist attacks in the United States in all the years since that infamous day.
True, but there weren’t any terrorist attacks in the United States in the six years before September 11, 2001 either, the last one being the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. The absence of terrorist attacks in the US appears to be the norm, with or without a War on Terror.
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War and Terror: Black Political Class Paralyzed and Silent on Gaza Massacres
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Why Our Black Political Class is Paralyzed and Silent on Gaza Massacres and Israeli Apartheid
By Bruce A. Dixon
July 28, 2014 - blackagendareport.com
Sometimes a silence can be the loudest sound in the room. The silence of our numerous and powerful US black political class, not just on the current massacres of civilians in Gaza but on the incontrovertible fact that Israel has become a full fledged racist ethnocracy is deafening.
As Israeli troops massed around Gaza this weekend, the NAACP wrapped up its 2014 annual convention in Las Vegas this weekend without a mumbling word of solidarity with bleeding Palestinians. Moral Monday's Rev. Barber was a guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher Sunday night as well, but could not spare a single breath to discuss the morality of occupation, house demolitions, or Israeli apartheid to his notoriously Islamaphobic host. Al Sharpton is on MSNBC nightly, and can't find time to cover the murderous assault on Gaza in any meaningful way. You don't hear so much as a peep from the Congressional Black Caucus or the National Urban League, the National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH, big time black pastors and business people or the rest of that crowd.
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War and Terror: Airliner Shot Down 'By Mistake' say US Officials
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US intelligence officials back theory that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was likely shot down by ill-equipped rebels, but evidence shows no direct involvement by Russia
By Jon Queally
July 23, 2014 - commondreams.org
New comments from high-level U.S. officials and portions of declassified intelligence information released on Tuesday indicates—contrary to earlier comments by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry—that Russia had no direct involvement in last week's Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 disaster in which 298 passengers were killed after being shot down over eastern Ukraine.
Overall, the U.S. assessment as of Tuesday appears to be that the shooting down of the airliner was "a mistake" by Ukrainian rebels in the east of the country who remain in a protracted battle with the Ukraine Army controlled by the newly-established government in Kiev. Though the presented evidence—much of which could not be independently verified by media outlets—attempted to make connections between Russian weapons and training facilities—no "smoking gun" was presented that showed Russian forces or personnel were involved.
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War and Terror: Reverting to the Ummah: Who is the ‘Angry Muslim’ and Why
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By Ramzy Baroud
June 25, 2014
“Brother, brother,” a young man called on me as I hurriedly left a lecture hall in some community center in Durban, South Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when all efforts at stopping the ferocious US-western military drives against these two countries terribly failed.
The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani Pashtun attire, and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely extraneous to my lecture on the use of people history to understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as a model.
“Brother, do you believe that there is hope for the Muslim Ummah?” He inquired about the future of a nation in which he believed we both indisputably belonged to, and anxiously awaited as if my answer carried any weight at all, and would put his evident worries at ease.
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War and Terror: Freedom Rider: Death and Somalia
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By Margaret Kimberley
October 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“Our government bears responsibility for the loss of life at the Kenyan mall.”
“Does al Shabab Pose a Threat on American Soil?” So read a headline in the New York Times’ blog, Room for Debate. Despite its name, Room for Debate rarely shows any true differences of opinion on whatever issue of the day is considered significant to the Times’ editors. None of the supposed debaters on this topic actually addressed the central issue of al-Shabaab’s existence and what it says about the United States behavior around the world. A better question would be why the United States turned Somalia into a ruin and why does it keep killing people there.
Sometimes we get the opportunity to see violence up close as in the recent al-Shabaab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. But in the absence of good reporting, scenes of carnage tell us nothing. Thanks to liar presidents and their partners in the corporate media, Americans know nothing about Kenya or its role as American partner in keeping Somalia in a constant state of war.
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War and Terror: Innocent Kenyan Blood Drips from Imperial Hands
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By Mark P. Fancher
October 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“There has been speculation that the U.S. drive to dominate Somalia’s oil supply has prompted an interest in perpetual instability and division within the country.”
A 2011 report prepared for members of Congress lacks significant references to Kenya, but it details eye-opening events in Somalia that set the stage for the recent attack on a Kenyan shopping mall. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, titled “Somalia: Current Conditions and Prospects for a Lasting Peace” also contains facts that allow readers to conclude that much of the innocent blood shed by shoppers killed by al-Shabaab militants drips from western imperialist hands.
The recent shopping mall attack was reportedly in retaliation for Kenya’s participation in military operations against al-Shabaab in Somalia in 2011. Al-Shabaab became a force in Somalia after a 2006 military operation that dislodged a government run by “The Islamic Courts Union,” a network of tribunals that administered Islamic law. In 2006, the U.S. State Department’s point person for African affairs was Jendayi Frazer, and she was quoted as saying: “The top layer of the [Islamic Courts Union] courts are extremist to the core. They are terrorists and they are in control.”
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War and Terror: The World Needs Peace – But Not a Pax Americana
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By Cynthia McKinney
September 27, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
Former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who last week completed a peace mission to Syria along with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark and others, made the following remarks to the IBON IBON Conference on Democracy, Self-Determination and Liberation of Peoples. The conference was held at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.
Thank you for the invitation to be with you today.
This conference is about Democracy, Self-Determination, and popular liberation.
As a representative of the United States people’s movement for justice and peace, I want to start by acknowledging some facts about the practice, as I know it, of one form of “democracy.”
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War and Terror: Obama: As Warlike as Bush, and Just as Lonely
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
September 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“U.S. imperialism has no option but to bang its military fist on the table to reset the global game board.”
With obscene imperial arrogance, President Obama proclaimed that the “world” – not he – has drawn a bloody “red line” in Syria. “I didn’t set a red line,” said Obama, at a stop in Sweden on his way to a Group of 20 nations meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. “The world set a red line.”
That’s news to the rest of the planet, including most of the Group of 20 and the meeting’s host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who described Obama’s claims that Syria used sarin gas against civilians in rebel-held areas as “completely ridiculous.” “It does not fit any logic,” said Putin, since Syrian President Assad’s forces “have the so-called rebels surrounded and are finishing them off.”
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War and Terror: American Foreign Policy - Have Our War Lovers Learned Anything?
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By William Blum
March 05, 2012 - www.killinghope.org
Over the past four decades, of all the reasons
people over a certain age have given for their becoming
radicalized against US foreign policy, the Vietnam War has
easily been the one most often cited. And I myself am the
best example of this that you could find. I sometimes think
that if the war lovers who run the United States had known
of this in advance they might have had serious second
thoughts about starting that great historical folly and war
crime.
At
other times, however, I have the thought that our dear war
lovers have had 40 years to take this lesson to heart, and
during this time what did they do? They did Salvador and
Nicaragua, and Angola and Grenada. They did Panama and
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and Iraq. And in 2012 American
President Barack Obama saw fit to declare that the Vietnam
War was "one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery
and integrity in the annals of military history".1
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