Welcome to Call to Decision
2010: Welcome to Orwell’s World
by John
Pilger, December 31, 2009
In Nineteen
Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate
called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that
"passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the
past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future; who
controls the present controls the past.’"
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."
In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.
Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."
Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media, and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.
The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace," and American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.
Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable" Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favored western relief agencies, engineers, and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.
That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s "strategic hamlet program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."
Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment, and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.
The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
"It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2009/12/30/2010-welcome-to-orwells-world/
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."
In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.
Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 percent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power." The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."
Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media, and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.
The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace," and American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.
Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable" Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favored western relief agencies, engineers, and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.
That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s "strategic hamlet program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban."
Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment, and constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.
The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
"It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2009/12/30/2010-welcome-to-orwells-world/
I See London, I See France, I See Bombs in Underpants
by Jeff
Huber, December 31, 2009
So this Lonesome Luke rich Nigerian kid, Umar
Farouk Abdul Mutallab, hops on a plane bound for
Detroit on Christmas Day with a bomb sewn into his underpants.
As the plane begins to land, the kid tries to set off the bomb
and it does little more than give him third-degree burns on
his tallywhacker, and the entire civilized world goes snake
guano.
Many observers have compared the rich Nigerian kid with the
skivvy bomb with shoe bomber Richard
Reid who tried to blow up an airplane over the
Atlantic in 2001. The explosive in Reid’s shoes was the
same type the Nigerian kid had in his drawers, PETN.
Had Reid been able to detonate his shoes, he presumably would
have blown his toes off.
The rich Nigerian kid had twice as much of the explosive in his boxers as Reid had in his shoes. Federal authorities say if the kid’s panties had gone boom like they were supposed to, they would have blown a hole in the side of the aircraft. That would have caused something called "explosive decompression," which isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Unlike what you may have seen in thriller entertainments, decompressions don’t suck everybody out of the airplane — unless, of course, the hole is big enough to break the airplane in half, in which case being sucked out of it becomes a minor concern.
The media have been frothing over the prospect that the rich Nigerian kid is connected to al-Qaeda. The kid himself told authorities that he has ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That could mean just about anything. It could mean some huckster recognized him as a screwed up rich kid with radical Islamic leanings, sidled up to him, and said, Psst. Young Man. I am with al-Qaeda. We’ve had our eye on you for some time now, and we like what we see. You want the martyrdom, the virgins, the seat beside Allah? Well, I have a lovely little bomb you can sneak onboard an airplane in your Fruit of the Looms, and for you I’ll part with it for a mere $100,000 US, and believe me, I’m losing money on the deal.
Who are these AQAP hooligans, anyway? They’re described as an al-Qaeda "offshoot." Does that mean they’re a subsidiary of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, kind of like KBR is an offshoot of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton? AQAP formed in January 2009 when al-Qaeda in Yemen merged with Saudi Arabia’s al-Qaeda. Whatever you do, don’t mistake AQAP or Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which more than anything else resembles a Pittsburg garage band that calls itself "The Rolling Stones of Pennsylvania."
AQAP has taken credit for the rich Nigerian kid’s bombing attempt, which tells us the outfit is a gang of losers. Taking credit for the Detroit plane bombing is like Winston Churchill bragging about his role in Gallipoli: yeah, I’m the schmuck who arranged that unmitigated disaster.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who never met an issue he couldn’t be partisan about, criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for appearing "bored" on the Christmas weekend political gab-athons. "There was no intensity, there was no show of emotion," King said. King obviously would have preferred the female Democrat to appear hysterical and disoriented.
As it was, Napolitano did more than sufficient damage to herself by claiming that "the system worked." Yeah. A rich Nigerian kid who’s on a watch list and whose respected banker father has warned authorities may be a terrorist risk manages to board an airplane headed for America with a pant load of bomb and no passport and the freaking system worked? Napolitano later retracted her statement, but the damage had been done. Like President Obama finally said, there was a "systematic failure" of America’s security apparatus.
Speaking of saying stupid things: I have two graduate degrees in bull crap, I know exactly what it sounds like, and I hear it every time lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman opens his mouth. Like Dick Cheney, Lieberman managed to get himself deferred out of the Vietnam conflict, first for attending Yale and Yale Law School and then for managing to get his wife pregnant. Joe’s only real warmongering credentials are his conspicuous displays of smoking John McCain’s stogie, but that appears to be enough for him to get by. Joe never met a war he didn’t like: except, of course, for the one he managed to dodge when he was of draft age.
Joe told FOX News "Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war." Joe’s always been one for acting preemptively. He was a leading proponent of going off half-cocked into Iraq. He still thinks preemptive deterrence is an enlightened method of foreign policy. Joe might want to stitch his pie hole shut on the subject of military actions and look into what’s wrong with the Homeland Security structure, seeing as how he’s the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and all.
Joe doesn’t seem to understand, however, that we’re already doing preemptive things in Yemen. The US was involved in a pre-Christmas air strike on Yemen’s Sa’ada Province. CIA agents and Special Operations forces began covert ops in Yemen a year ago. This has all been done, of course, without a declaration of war or an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) from Congress, much as the Bush administration blew villages in Somalia to smithereens without authorization from the legislature. We don’t have presidents any more. We have emperors.
Non-G.I. Joe says Yemen is now one of the "centers" of the fight against terrorism, and Joe’s not the only war dog who thinks Yemen is the next military-industrial mother lode.
"Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen," says Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They’re regional problems and they affect Western interests."
Lest you think the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is actually interested in peace, be advised that another of its associates is Robert Kagan of the neocon Kagans who include father Donald Kagan and brother Fred Kagan who played a major role in designing both the Iraq and Afghanistan surges. Robert Kagan is also the long-time publishing and ideological partner of Weekly Standard editor and Project for the New American Century founder Bill Kristol.
Keep in mind, then, that Christopher Boucek’s real job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is to start a full-blown war in Yemen, and the job of everyone else at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is sustain international warfare for as long as humanly possible.
And now we’re all hot to trot off to war in Yemen because of some spoiled, screwed up Muslim kid who, by the way, comes from Nigeria, not Yemen, just as the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, not Afghanistan.
The rich Nigerian kid had twice as much of the explosive in his boxers as Reid had in his shoes. Federal authorities say if the kid’s panties had gone boom like they were supposed to, they would have blown a hole in the side of the aircraft. That would have caused something called "explosive decompression," which isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Unlike what you may have seen in thriller entertainments, decompressions don’t suck everybody out of the airplane — unless, of course, the hole is big enough to break the airplane in half, in which case being sucked out of it becomes a minor concern.
The media have been frothing over the prospect that the rich Nigerian kid is connected to al-Qaeda. The kid himself told authorities that he has ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That could mean just about anything. It could mean some huckster recognized him as a screwed up rich kid with radical Islamic leanings, sidled up to him, and said, Psst. Young Man. I am with al-Qaeda. We’ve had our eye on you for some time now, and we like what we see. You want the martyrdom, the virgins, the seat beside Allah? Well, I have a lovely little bomb you can sneak onboard an airplane in your Fruit of the Looms, and for you I’ll part with it for a mere $100,000 US, and believe me, I’m losing money on the deal.
Who are these AQAP hooligans, anyway? They’re described as an al-Qaeda "offshoot." Does that mean they’re a subsidiary of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, kind of like KBR is an offshoot of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton? AQAP formed in January 2009 when al-Qaeda in Yemen merged with Saudi Arabia’s al-Qaeda. Whatever you do, don’t mistake AQAP or Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which more than anything else resembles a Pittsburg garage band that calls itself "The Rolling Stones of Pennsylvania."
AQAP has taken credit for the rich Nigerian kid’s bombing attempt, which tells us the outfit is a gang of losers. Taking credit for the Detroit plane bombing is like Winston Churchill bragging about his role in Gallipoli: yeah, I’m the schmuck who arranged that unmitigated disaster.
Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who never met an issue he couldn’t be partisan about, criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for appearing "bored" on the Christmas weekend political gab-athons. "There was no intensity, there was no show of emotion," King said. King obviously would have preferred the female Democrat to appear hysterical and disoriented.
As it was, Napolitano did more than sufficient damage to herself by claiming that "the system worked." Yeah. A rich Nigerian kid who’s on a watch list and whose respected banker father has warned authorities may be a terrorist risk manages to board an airplane headed for America with a pant load of bomb and no passport and the freaking system worked? Napolitano later retracted her statement, but the damage had been done. Like President Obama finally said, there was a "systematic failure" of America’s security apparatus.
Speaking of saying stupid things: I have two graduate degrees in bull crap, I know exactly what it sounds like, and I hear it every time lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman opens his mouth. Like Dick Cheney, Lieberman managed to get himself deferred out of the Vietnam conflict, first for attending Yale and Yale Law School and then for managing to get his wife pregnant. Joe’s only real warmongering credentials are his conspicuous displays of smoking John McCain’s stogie, but that appears to be enough for him to get by. Joe never met a war he didn’t like: except, of course, for the one he managed to dodge when he was of draft age.
Joe told FOX News "Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war." Joe’s always been one for acting preemptively. He was a leading proponent of going off half-cocked into Iraq. He still thinks preemptive deterrence is an enlightened method of foreign policy. Joe might want to stitch his pie hole shut on the subject of military actions and look into what’s wrong with the Homeland Security structure, seeing as how he’s the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and all.
Joe doesn’t seem to understand, however, that we’re already doing preemptive things in Yemen. The US was involved in a pre-Christmas air strike on Yemen’s Sa’ada Province. CIA agents and Special Operations forces began covert ops in Yemen a year ago. This has all been done, of course, without a declaration of war or an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) from Congress, much as the Bush administration blew villages in Somalia to smithereens without authorization from the legislature. We don’t have presidents any more. We have emperors.
Non-G.I. Joe says Yemen is now one of the "centers" of the fight against terrorism, and Joe’s not the only war dog who thinks Yemen is the next military-industrial mother lode.
"Yemen’s security problems won’t just stay in Yemen," says Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "They’re regional problems and they affect Western interests."
Lest you think the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is actually interested in peace, be advised that another of its associates is Robert Kagan of the neocon Kagans who include father Donald Kagan and brother Fred Kagan who played a major role in designing both the Iraq and Afghanistan surges. Robert Kagan is also the long-time publishing and ideological partner of Weekly Standard editor and Project for the New American Century founder Bill Kristol.
Keep in mind, then, that Christopher Boucek’s real job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is to start a full-blown war in Yemen, and the job of everyone else at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is sustain international warfare for as long as humanly possible.
And now we’re all hot to trot off to war in Yemen because of some spoiled, screwed up Muslim kid who, by the way, comes from Nigeria, not Yemen, just as the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, not Afghanistan.