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polly7
polly7's Journal
polly7's Journal
November 23, 2015
Full article: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/troops-clearing-space-at-cfb-kingston-for-syrian-refugees-1.2670111
Troops clearing space at CFB Kingston for Syrian refugees
Graham Slaughter, CTVNews.ca Staff
Published Sunday, November 22, 2015 10:25PM EST
VIDEO
Soldiers and military personnel at a Kingston, Ont. base are being asked to clear their barracks to make room for an early wave of Syrian refugees arriving in just over a week, CTV News has learned.
Multiple residences at CFB Kingston are being cleared for Nov. 30 to house the refugees, according to an internal memo obtained by CTV News.
Multiple residences at CFB Kingston are being cleared for Nov. 30 to house the refugees, according to an internal memo obtained by CTV News.
“We are determined to bring refugees here quickly, but we are also determined to do it right in terms of security and in terms of health,” he said.
Earlier this month, CTV News reported details from a document entitled “Operation Syrian Refugees” that suggested up to 900 Syrian refugees a day could arrive in Toronto and Montreal from Lebanon, Jordan and possibly Turkey.
Full article: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/troops-clearing-space-at-cfb-kingston-for-syrian-refugees-1.2670111
November 22, 2015
Aww ........ isn't he though. You forgot the bear?!?
How about these, aren't they dreamy? This is the result of what you're having so much fun! laughing off:
November 22, 2015
NOVEMBER 20, 2015
The Left and Right Must Stop the Establishment’s Perpetual War Machine
by SAM HUSSEINI
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/20/the-left-and-right-must-stop-the-establishments-perpetual-war-machine-2/
Just thought I'd leave this here ...
But someone is going to have to break with the backing of autocratic regimes and perpetual war, because I’ve got news for you: Perpetual war is going to cost you a lot. The Vietnam War helped undermine the war on poverty — Martin Luther King called it a “demonic suction tube.” Perpetual war is going to make you lose your soul. Perpetual war will make you an accomplice to murder many times over. Perpetual war will mean generations more of Muslim youth driven to madness against the U.S. Perpetual war is going to potentially lead to nuclear war. Perpetual war will mean an even more militarized police force. Perpetual war will likely mean more of a repressive state. Perpetual war will mean you can’t march against climate change — or anything else. Perpetual war will mean that refugees and other folks get treated like trash. Perpetual war means your kid can’t get a job in much of anything other than the military. Perpetual war means soldiers with PTSD coming home and beating the crap out of their wives and traumatizing their children. Perpetual war will mean at every public venue you’ve got to go through security so that you can scratch yourself without court approval.
NOVEMBER 20, 2015
The Left and Right Must Stop the Establishment’s Perpetual War Machine
by SAM HUSSEINI
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/20/the-left-and-right-must-stop-the-establishments-perpetual-war-machine-2/
November 22, 2015
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/we-are-in-pitiless-times/
We are in pitiless times
By Vijay Prashad
Source: open democracy
November 22, 2015
Macho language about “pitiless war” defines the contours of leadership these days. Little else is on offer. It is red meat to our emotions.
Where did these ISIS attackers come from? The temptation is to blame religion or race, to take the eye off more substantial areas of investigation. Amnesia is the order of the day. Each terror attack on the west resets the clock. No-one must pay attention to the western and Saudi-backed World Muslim League, whose job was to destroy the forces of secular nationalism and communism in the Arab world in the 1960s and 1970s. All those who were on the good side of history fell to the sword, destroyed as anti-Islamic in order to protect the Gulf Arab emirates and the Saudi kingdom as well as western interests in oil and power.
We must not mention the western and Saudi assault on Afghanistan in the 1970s, before the Soviet intervention, to cut down that nation’s communist republic. No one should talk about the creation of the “mujahideen”, whose core contained a brutal kernel that exploded into al-Qaeda. Why make so much of the wars on Iraq and then on Libya and Syria, which wrecked states and turned them – like Afghanistan – into playgrounds for the “jihadis”, children of the Cold War?
Disbelief will greet those who remind us of western violence, from the aerial bombardment of Libya in 1911 to the bombing of Libya in 2011 – untold numbers dead; “it was not war,” wrote a journalist in 1911, “it was butchery.” Few will go to their shelves and pull out Leila Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge, a searing novel about the French government’s murder of hundreds of pro-Algerian protesters in Paris in October 1961.
You will not ask who influenced these young men, sanctified by their governments to go fight in a war elsewhere and then inspired by Saudi-funded clerics who told them not only to fight in Syria but to go home and create mayhem? You will think all this is made up, that I want to justify the massacres.
There is no justification here. There is only the recitation of a pitiless history that is buried under official clichés.
Where did these ISIS attackers come from? The temptation is to blame religion or race, to take the eye off more substantial areas of investigation. Amnesia is the order of the day. Each terror attack on the west resets the clock. No-one must pay attention to the western and Saudi-backed World Muslim League, whose job was to destroy the forces of secular nationalism and communism in the Arab world in the 1960s and 1970s. All those who were on the good side of history fell to the sword, destroyed as anti-Islamic in order to protect the Gulf Arab emirates and the Saudi kingdom as well as western interests in oil and power.
We must not mention the western and Saudi assault on Afghanistan in the 1970s, before the Soviet intervention, to cut down that nation’s communist republic. No one should talk about the creation of the “mujahideen”, whose core contained a brutal kernel that exploded into al-Qaeda. Why make so much of the wars on Iraq and then on Libya and Syria, which wrecked states and turned them – like Afghanistan – into playgrounds for the “jihadis”, children of the Cold War?
Disbelief will greet those who remind us of western violence, from the aerial bombardment of Libya in 1911 to the bombing of Libya in 2011 – untold numbers dead; “it was not war,” wrote a journalist in 1911, “it was butchery.” Few will go to their shelves and pull out Leila Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge, a searing novel about the French government’s murder of hundreds of pro-Algerian protesters in Paris in October 1961.
You will not ask who influenced these young men, sanctified by their governments to go fight in a war elsewhere and then inspired by Saudi-funded clerics who told them not only to fight in Syria but to go home and create mayhem? You will think all this is made up, that I want to justify the massacres.
There is no justification here. There is only the recitation of a pitiless history that is buried under official clichés.
Western policy-makers are like little boys playing with their little toys. They don’t see the human suffering and the terrible outcomes of their terrible polices.
We are in pitiless times. There is terrible violence. There is awful sadness.
We are in pitiless times. There is terrible violence. There is awful sadness.
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/we-are-in-pitiless-times/
November 21, 2015
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-world-is-rising-to-stop-transnational-corporate-treaties/
The World Is Rising To Stop Transnational Corporate Treaties
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
Source: Popular Resistance
November 21, 2015
The TPP is being pushed in large part by the United States government at the behest of transnational corporations and financial institutions to expand its global hegemony and encircle countries that are building alternatives that are independent of US control such as the countries involved in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) bank. The TPP and other giant treaties such as the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trade-in-Services Agreement (TISA) will drive a global race to the bottom in wages and laws to protect workers, communities and the planet.
Decades of experience with “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have taught us that transnational capital has no loyalty to nations, only to profit. Transnational capital will go where the wages are lowest and the regulations are the most relaxed. This has reduced wages globally, including in the US where 51% of workers made less than $30,000 a year in 2014.
Decades of experience with “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) have taught us that transnational capital has no loyalty to nations, only to profit. Transnational capital will go where the wages are lowest and the regulations are the most relaxed. This has reduced wages globally, including in the US where 51% of workers made less than $30,000 a year in 2014.
The president of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino III, is trying to change the Filipino constitution to allow foreign ownership of land, a prerequisite for joining the TPP. The peasants movement, Kilasung Magbubukid ng Pilipinas or KMP, strongly opposes this change because already 80% of farmers do not own the land they tend even though they have farmed it for generations. Foreign investors have been allowed to lease the land and this has exploited and displaced Filipino farmers.
Then Maira Sutton, Global Policy Analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects digital rights, who was in Peru for protests at a round of TPP negotiations, read an OpEd by former Peruvian Minister of the Environment Jose de Echave that discussed the attacks on environmental activists:
“Increasingly, those seeking to defend our forests are coming under violent attack. Assassinations of environmental activists in Peru have surged. The nongovernmental organization Global Witness found that at least 57 environmental activists in Peru have been killed since 2002, with the majority assassinated since 2010. Peru has become the fourth most dangerous country in the world to be an environmental or land defender.”
“Increasingly, those seeking to defend our forests are coming under violent attack. Assassinations of environmental activists in Peru have surged. The nongovernmental organization Global Witness found that at least 57 environmental activists in Peru have been killed since 2002, with the majority assassinated since 2010. Peru has become the fourth most dangerous country in the world to be an environmental or land defender.”
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-world-is-rising-to-stop-transnational-corporate-treaties/
November 21, 2015
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_air_force_whistleblowers_risk_prosecution
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/numbing_horrible_former_drone_operator_brandon
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_2_air_force_vets_speak
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/from_console_to_trigger_how_pentagon
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/20/watch-drone-pilot-whistleblowers-describe-devastating-impacts-targeted-kill-program
Former Drone Operators Say They Were “Horrified” By Cruelty of Assassination Program
By Murtaza Hussain
Source: The Intercept
November 21, 2015
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/former-drone-operators-say-they-were-horrified-by-cruelty-of-assassination-program/
Watch: Drone Pilot Whistleblowers Describe Devastating Impacts of Targeted Kill Program
Published on
Friday, November 20, 2015
byCommon Dreams
Democracy Now! interviews four whistleblowers risking prosecution to speak out against ongoing drone program
byNadia Prupis, staff writer
Four former drone operators who are speaking out against the U.S. military's ongoing targeted killing program—and risking federal prosecution for doing so—appeared on Democracy Now! Friday morning, alongside renowned human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack, for their first extended interview on air.
"We have seen the abuse firsthand, and we are horrified," former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant said at a press conference Thursday.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, the Air Force pilots-turned-whistleblowers issued an open letter to President Barack Obama warning that the drone program "is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world."
"We witnessed gross waste, mismanagement, abuses of power, and our country’s leaders lying publicly about the effectiveness of the drone program," the operators wrote in their letter. "We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home."
Watch their interviews below:
"We have seen the abuse firsthand, and we are horrified," former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant said at a press conference Thursday.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, the Air Force pilots-turned-whistleblowers issued an open letter to President Barack Obama warning that the drone program "is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world."
"We witnessed gross waste, mismanagement, abuses of power, and our country’s leaders lying publicly about the effectiveness of the drone program," the operators wrote in their letter. "We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home."
Watch their interviews below:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_air_force_whistleblowers_risk_prosecution
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/numbing_horrible_former_drone_operator_brandon
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_2_air_force_vets_speak
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/from_console_to_trigger_how_pentagon
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/20/watch-drone-pilot-whistleblowers-describe-devastating-impacts-targeted-kill-program
Former Drone Operators Say They Were “Horrified” By Cruelty of Assassination Program
By Murtaza Hussain
Source: The Intercept
November 21, 2015
U.S. drone operators are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing today in New York.
The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse, further stating that some operators had flown missions while impaired.
In addition to Haas, the operators are former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant along with former senior airmen Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis. The men have conducted kill missions in many of the major theaters of the post-9/11 war on terror, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We have seen the abuse firsthand,” said Bryant, “and we are horrified.”
The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse, further stating that some operators had flown missions while impaired.
In addition to Haas, the operators are former Air Force Staff Sgt. Brandon Bryant along with former senior airmen Cian Westmoreland and Stephen Lewis. The men have conducted kill missions in many of the major theaters of the post-9/11 war on terror, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We have seen the abuse firsthand,” said Bryant, “and we are horrified.”
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/former-drone-operators-say-they-were-horrified-by-cruelty-of-assassination-program/
November 21, 2015
Tangled Threads of US False Narratives
Published on
Friday, November 20, 2015
by Consortium News
Official Washington’s many false narratives about Russia and Syria have gotten so tangled that they have become a danger to the struggle against Sunni terrorism and conceivably a threat to the future of the planet
by Robert Parry
Full article: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/20/tangled-threads-us-false-narratives
Too much spin noted to even begin to pick a paragraph to quote.
And again ........ I know the U.S. is not alone in this. Ally nations including my own have provided plenty of help.
November 21, 2015
Full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/20/at-night-i-hear-victims-shouting/
At Night I Hear Victims Shouting
NOVEMBER 20, 2015
by ANDRE VLTCHEK
Winter was approaching. Some refugees were freezing, and the girl was suffering from malnutrition. Her natural behavior, her innocence and her obvious oblivion of the war touched me tremendously.
A few weeks later, I drove back with sweets and toys. But the girl had already left. I was told that her family took her north to Aarsal, near the Syrian border where Hezbollah is locked in an epic battle with the ISIS. Yes, the same ISIS that were originally trained and armed by NATO in Turkey and Jordan.
I printed her photo and glued it to my refrigerator. I think about her often, almost every day. I don’t know why.
In a way, her image, that of a simple girl, of a child standing in the middle of some horrid refugee camp near a war zone, is a symbol of insanity of the world in which we are forced to live.
A few weeks later, I drove back with sweets and toys. But the girl had already left. I was told that her family took her north to Aarsal, near the Syrian border where Hezbollah is locked in an epic battle with the ISIS. Yes, the same ISIS that were originally trained and armed by NATO in Turkey and Jordan.
I printed her photo and glued it to my refrigerator. I think about her often, almost every day. I don’t know why.
In a way, her image, that of a simple girl, of a child standing in the middle of some horrid refugee camp near a war zone, is a symbol of insanity of the world in which we are forced to live.
In Eritrea, the victims of the Empire were passing only through in my mind, in my memory. They were passing one by one. Peruvian victims, Colombian victims; victims from Indonesia, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Philippines, the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Ivory Coast, Ukraine, Serbia, Nicaragua, Honduras… victims from dozens of other countries, mainly women; because women always suffer the most. Unnecessary deaths – people who just perished for no particular reason; only because the Empire could not stop looting, murdering, aiming at absolute control over the world.
One day we will be building enormous monuments to those who vanished, to those who suffered immensely, to “un-people” whose tears most of us do not even see, whose screams of horror and pain are muzzled by horrendous lies, deranged pop music and movie soundtracks, by whoring mass media, and by formal education which is distributed to everyone like a poison, like sedatives, like a tool that makes most of the people on this scarred Earth disappear from our consciousness.
Full article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/20/at-night-i-hear-victims-shouting/
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