Columnist – John Sammon
We committed what amounts to a genocide in Iraq. I’m ashamed of this country for its role in Iraq.

A foreign head of state participating with the president in laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?

Let me get this straight. We invade Iraq based on false weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, destroy much of the country and kill a million Iraqis. And Obama has the puppet Iraqi leader we set up in power in Baghdad lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington. [ READ: THE WAR CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE UNITED STATES IN IRAQ ] [ MORE CRIMES ]

How would you like to be the puppet? A country that invaded your country and killed a million of your citizens. You’re forced (or invited?) to come to that country and honor the soldiers of a foreign army that attacked your country and killed a million of your own citizens (bad citizens and innocent citizens for alleged reasons good and bad) based on false, concocted premises.

The leader of Iraq is a good puppet ruler.

America can hold its head high because it’s walking away from this fiasco with no remorse. We can do anything and it doesn’t matter because even if it’s wrong we’re still right. If there’s only one person left in this country who says morality is not determined by who wins or who’s powerful then I have to stand up and demand that the American people hear it.

Even if they never hear.

Asking a foreign ruler we set up in power by force after concocting false reasons for going to war to come to Washington D.C. and pay homage to the foreign power that invaded his country is wrong, immoral, and obscene.

Here are some suggested ways we can have the puppet ruler we set up in Iraq pay homage to the United States in a way that will remove even the slightest pretense of the sovereignty of Iraq.

1.   Have the puppet of Iraq serve as Obama’s chauffer complete with uniform.

2.   Have the puppet sweep out the Washington Monument.

3.   Have the puppet engage in campaigning for Obama during the 2012 election.

4.   Declare Iraq a new American state and down-grade the puppet to a governor with a foreign accent.

5.   We got their oil, we killed a million of their citizens based on falsehoods. It’s a win-win.

6.   Instead of “War,” we can re-label this a “Humanitarian Project.”

7.   Of course, other Arab countries overthrew their dictators without the help of U.S. troops.

8.   I think the Founding Fathers envisioned America only going to war when its national security was directly threatened and without the bogus weapons of mass destruction it wasn’t threatened, but the Founding Fathers were out of touch. They had no understanding of the new Roman Empire-style America and its “ends-justify-means” mentality.

9.   If Obama wants to promote good relations with Vietnam he could go to Hanoi and lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Vietcong.

I DO NOT ASK, I DEMAND, A COUNTRY THAT IS WILLING TO FACE THE TRUTH. A COUNTRY THAT IS HONEST. Once again, Obama disappoints me.

Obama before he became president called Iraq a “dumb war.”

It was also dishonest, wrong and immoral.

We’re not right just because we’re America. I won’t let this country hide behind the shield of its power. Somebody has to have the courage to say it.

The war in Iraq was engineered based on lies by George Bush and Dick Cheney. We had equipped, supplied and encouraged the dictator of Iraq (look at the picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking the no-good bastard’s hand). We thought he was our puppet. When he acted too big for his britches, we attacked his country in a false effort to tie it to 9-11. Bush and Cheney needed to sell the war to the American people so they created the false weapons of mass destruction scam.

Americans want to feel good and the president has to justify what happened. He can’t admit wrong or risk being called a traitor. The system has built-in protections to safeguard it from the truth. Obama, as good a man as he is, is a pawn of the system.

No one will ever discuss what we did or learn from the mistakes. [ SPECIAL READ: BUSH'S MIDEAST DISHONOR ]

Iraq War Crimes

George W. Bush — A War Criminal

May 05, 2011: Media conservatives are insisting that George W. Bush deserves as much credit as President Obama for the death of Osama Bin Laden, if not more. However, making this argument means ignoring what the Bush administration itself reportedly called its “gravest error” — not capturing bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001 — and Bush’s 2002 statement that he was “not concerned” about bin Laden. [ READ MORE ]

This is also in stark contrast to their usual attacks that Obama is responsible for things that are happening during his presidency, including those tied to Bush-era policies like the Gulf oil spill, the weak economy, and the nation’s deficit problems. [ READ MORE ]

Dishonest Crook Sean Hannity Says Bush Not Obama Deserves Credit For Bin Laden Killing!

Hannity: We Got Osama Bin Laden “Thanks To George Bush“

Brent Bozell: Bush Gets All The Credit, None Of The Blame

Donald ‘Birther’ Trump: Obama is Getting Too Much Credit on Osama Bin Laden

Obama To GOP ‘Appeasement‘ Critics: ‘Ask Osama Bin Laden’

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Osama Bin Laden: Obama Reminds GOP He Won’t Be Underestimated

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Other Lies, Distortions, Mis-information and Outright Racism From Fox and Other Right-Wing Political Whore Houses [ WorldNetDaily: Obama "Wants To Import Homosexuals" ]
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Fox Sees “Black Reparations” In UN Climate Deal in Durban, South Africa

“Fuzzy Math“: Fox’s Latest Attempt To Obscure The Current Unemployment Figures — Ever since the Department of Labor released the November unemployment numbers, which showed that the unemployment rate had dropped to 8.6 percent from 9 percent, Fox News has had trouble accurately presenting the data. [ READ MORE ] [ DISHONEST FOX NEWS CHARTS ]

Debating Government Involvement In Health Care, O’Reilly Tries To Claim The Military Is Not Government-Controlled

Limbaugh Plays “First Family Early Kwanzaa Celebration” Parody That Features Jeremiah Wright

Limbaugh Congratulates Himself For Hoping Obama Fails

Limbaugh: Obama “Sabotaged” And “Tried To Undermine” The Iraq War

Limbaugh: Democrats “Can’t Win Unless There Is Vote Fraud” And “Signature Fraud“

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The Big Picture: December 9, 2011

   Columnist – John Sammon
I pose this question to readers of Politicalarticles.net.

If you had to pick which America is America, looking at the America of today, and if you had a choice between the America of Richard Nixon, secretive, dishonest, undermining the Constitution, as opposed to the anti-Vietnam War counter-culture, including hippies, pot-smoking, often irresponsible and selfish, hedonistic, socialistic, but at least with a concerned sense of ethics.

Which would you choose between the two? Which America won? Which America today is America?

Nixon or the counter-culture?

Remember, George Bush is walking around a free man and even praised after launching an unnecessary war in Iraq under false pretenses that killed a million Iraqis. The current president, Obama, has broken almost every campaign promise he made to get elected including continuing two economy-draining wars, keeping Guantanamo Prison open as an American Bastille, promoting nuclear power despite the catastrophe in Japan, and on and on.

Remember too, the moron Tea Party movement is alive and well.

Given this, clearly, Nixon won. Nixon’s America is America. Nixon was just 40 years ahead of his time. If he had committed the Watergate break-in today, not only would the timid press of the kind that never questioned George Bush let it slide. Nixon never would have been caught. But even if he had, he would never have been impeached.

HE WOULD HAVE BEEN PRAISED. AS A TRUE PATRIOT.

He’d probably get his ski nose face carved on Mount Rushmore.

Honesty doesn’t mean anything to Americans, most of them. Look at Barry Bonds and his steroid home run record. The majority of Americans, Nixon in his day celebrated and praised as the “Silent Majority.” What Nixon meant by this label is that the majority of Americans had the same values that he himself supposedly had, hard work, perseverance from humble beginnings, law-biding, church-going, war-supporting, uncomplaining, noble.

Instead of ruthless disregard for decency which is what he really was.

The silent majority. In other words, the kind of people who will turn a blind eye and go along with what is wrong simply because the president said it’s right. This is what Bush and Cheney did. The ovens at Auschwitz were supported by another “silent majority.”

Nixon has been vindicated, not from wrongdoing; what he did is enormously wrong. He’s been cleared because he had the right idea. Honesty is for suckers. A sucker game. Nixon would himself tell you so in secret with a laugh and a sneer and an accompanying dirty joke. From the corporate board room with its scheming executives who would steal $50 off their mother if they could get away with it, to corporations shipping jobs overseas to take advantage of slave labor, to Donald Trump with his pompous bellowing trying to cover the fact that he’s only a little man, to suave Obama with his broken promises.

Dishonesty is as American as apple pie. So is greed and avarice. All three are Nixonian. I wonder what Nixon thinks about all this right now. I don’t believe he’s in hell. He can tell God that he loved his mother and that he did what he did for the American people.

God would probably buy that. I think God probably placed Nixon somewhere between heaven and hell, possibly Detroit.

Nixon is saying, see I told you so. Nobody protested the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and they’ve dragged on longer than Vietnam. I was just ahead of my time. Look at what Bush got away with, lying to the American people. Nobody says peep. Look how the press badgered me and today they don’t do anything.

Why did I have to suffer when Bush doesn’t?

Why did they pick on me?

The mythology of America, that it’s a country run by honest people, has to be preserved. And that it’s a democracy, or republic, or whatever you want to call it, in which people have a say. They don’t have a say, in Afghanistan, or a hundred other issues, nor the secret rocket that was launched the other day carrying into space what nobody except the Pentagon knows.

Nixon won. Since that’s the case, maybe it’s for the best that Americans don’t have a say. Perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference if they did.
I’m sure Nixon is happy. I know I’m not.

Copyright 2011 Sammonsays.

Anyone Convinced that Depleted Uranium Is Safe Should Read This

What follows summarizes one article, already produced, and synopsizes another narrative, forthcoming in a few days. The rationale for giving folks a summary and a preview is twofold.

In the first place, these are extremely complicated issues, a full understanding of which inevitably involves digging pretty deeply into background, technical data, and divergent perspectives about the evidence and how to analyze it. Under such circumstance, many people prefer to know ‘the skinny’ or ‘executive summary’ and leave the heavy-lifting for nerds and policy wonks.

In the second place, even if someone shoulders the responsibility to plow through the intricacies of such problems, she might not have time right now. He might markedly prefer to receive a briefing, with appropriate coordinates to find the more complete account, so as to be able to have a sense of context going in, choosing the moment to try to take in the bigger picture, as it were.

In any case, here readers see a short queue. The first place tells of a piece posted a couple of weeks ago. The second stop proffers the essence of an upcoming installment.

A RECAP

In the initial article of this partnered pair, the narrative introduced the fiery clash that has occurred over the impacts of Depleted Uranium munitions. Given such deep-seated differences of opinion, a widespread, grassroots dialog and policy consideration might serve purposes both scientific and political. An increase in knowledge almost always attends such processes; popular decision-making is impossible without the necessary understanding and nexus of participation.

A contextualization of DU followed, in which the general historical omnipresence of class oppression and imperial-industrial growth arguably went hand-in-hand. What Jeremiah Wright called a ‘theology of liberation’ has acted as a counterpoise to this central tendency of domination by propertied elites.

Taking DU as a plausible expression of both ruling-class self-interest and imperial hegemony, last week’s text focused on a particular effort of the Manhattan Project’s S-I Uranium Committee. A subcommittee of that body, so vital to the success of the race for atomic weapons, examined with some care the question of creating lethal instruments from fission, creating ‘dirty bombs’ out of waste and by-products of the inherent work of trying to construct an atomic explosive.

The likely formulation of such deadly machines would have been as poison gas bombs of some sort. From this demonstrable fact, various opponents of contemporary DU weaponry have concluded that this ‘Groves-Memorandum’ acted as the inception of the United States’ pathway toward the present deployment of DU as a devastating component of bullets and cannon shells and bombs of various sizes.

Stentorian and frequent and derisive critique of these arguments has emanated from the ranks of Health Physics experts and from former members of the military who dismiss any contention of significant dangers flowing from DU weapons. Such disputants hammer on the otherwise accurate summation that nowhere in either the summary memo or the original report’s easily available text do the authors–Conant, Compton, and Urey–make any mention of Uranium.

Instead of engaging in a dialog about this interpretation, however, these voluble naysayers condemned the anti-DU proponents of this position as frauds and charlatans. In fact, quite the opposite is, reasonably, a much more legitimate conclusion.

The horrific toxicity of Uranium is well-established. The USG inclination to develop weapons of indiscriminate effect, putting poison by-products to ‘productive’ use, is incontrovertible. Mass murder repeatedly happened at the behest of the U.S. Government, through the technology of fission weapons and their aftermath. Moreover, the USG approached these matters as opportunities for human experiment.

As well, Leuren Moret, whose analysis led the way in linking DU with the Manhattan Project, offers testimony from Manhattan-Engineering District participants that scientists and bureaucrats involved with the S-1 subcommittee did in fact intend to include Uranium in the lethal stew that this small group was contemplating. In no obvious way do the supposed scholars so busily casting aspersions refute Moret’s directly pertinent rebuttal.

Thus, any wholesale rejection of the notion that 1940′s experts imagined the possibility of weaponizing Uranium is at best one plausible assertion. In fact, such a view goes against both analytical and evidentiary elements of this case.

However, rather than merely proposing that the DU decriers have clearly won this battle of wits, this humble correspondent proceeded to call for a Peoples Congress on this particular issue, and on the wider questions associated with the employment of DU ordnance and the insistence that a ‘renaissance’ of the Nuclear Fool Cycle is in the best interest, here or elsewhere, of citizens and soldiers and civilians. Without going into devilish details, THC does insist that such a community-led conversation may be the only way to achieve anything akin to justice or consensus on DU.

The present pages provide further background useful to the creation of such a forum. The nature of this explication is the articulation, development, and defense of a thesis that might account for the attendant facts of DU and the dogfights which it has engendered.

A BRIEF PREFACE

In the first portion of this duo, readers may easily have gained adequate background to begin to speak, ask questions about, and generally learn more regarding the origins of ‘atomic energy,’ which, of course, started out exclusively as a modality for creating ‘gadgets’ that killed tens of thousands in one fell swoop. The data and background that these articles and the many other resources about DU provide permit at least a general discussion of the nuclear genie to move forward.

The present narrative installment seeks to accomplish one basic task, which is to proffer a hypothesis as to why such a toxic metal, in the context of ongoing doubts and fears about its safety, would end up the default choice of the USG and its military branches. This premise is fairly easy to state. Something like the following would fit the bill necessary to develop the argument here.

‘The development of nuclear weaponry, and all the attendant events and processes related to them–such as the so-called Nuclear Fuel Cycle of the both weapons and power based on fission or fusion; such as the problem of atomic wastes and such opportunistic ‘solutions’ to that problem as the manufacture and use of DU ordnance; such as the policy choices to pursue a ‘Nuclear Renaissance;’ and so forth–not only emanate from and serve both the dominance of capitalism, but they also represent the primary, and some would say the only, focus or methodology that financial Plutocrats, who have come to predominate the entire system, will accept to resolve capitalism’s inherent and ever-recurring crises.‘

Readers should note that this leaves aside all judgments about the viability of these glowing, radioactive choices. It completely ignores the opinions, more or less informed, that the Fuel-Cycle is in fact a ‘Fool-Cycle’ that guarantees human mayhem, dissolution, and decline as the best possible outcome. Of course, such beliefs are typical of this humble correspondent and many wiser than he.

However, the point of the forthcoming investigation and analysis, which these paragraphs merely summarized, is to explore the rationality of the thesis. Does capital necessitate a nuclear highway? That would be the preliminary conclusion of THC, and the pages-to-come are the initial presentation of a proof about that.

This first pass, though, will not attempt a complete telling of the tale of the hypothesis-in-action, but instead will circumscribe the assessment by tending to revolve an examination of DU in the process. In part, this is the result of the alleged, and quite plausible, social damage that has accompanied the political and economic underpinnings of DU’s deployment. In part, the emphasis on DU follows from the way that this unfolding catastrophe–or, if one prefers, highly charged controversy–sheds so much light on how capital created this situation and how its manifestation illustrates the chief proposition itself.

The choice here, to make a radical excision in order to present an overview of multifaceted difficulties, may or may not end up making the other materials more digestible. But the idea seemed a worthy experiment, in the same sense that long reports and other texts often begin with such brief statements of the case.

Besides, my wife be me that this would be a good idea. I couldn’t resist the wager.

“Everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed, and there are reasons for that,” Steele said. “There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”

That’s correct, but as usual, Uncle-Steele had to shit in his pants after peeing in it: “the Afghan war is a war of ‘Obama’s Choosing,‘ added Steele.

Wrong! Obama inherited the war from genocidal criminal George Bush.

Afghanistan has been called the “graveyard of empires” — a land that has never been conquered by a foreign force. Russia’s red army spent a decade there and returned to the Soviet Union broken and defeated — after killing half a million Afghanis!

As the US sends more troops to Afghanistan, it could learn from the former Soviet Union’s experience there.

Al Jazeera’s Neave Barker reports from Moscow on the lessons to be learned:

Brigadier Amir Sultan Tarar, widely regarded as the “Godfather of Taliban,” told Russia Today in March that NATO will never succeed in Afghanistan, and they should, instead, enter negotiations with insurgent leaders. [ SEE VIDEO BELOW ]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

…..and of course the right-wing LYNCHING pack of dogs pounced on Uncle-Steele, FANGS dripping hot blood!

They want the killing (LYNCHING) to continue, and the complicit American “mainstream media” will look the other was as America slaughters Afghanis by the hundreds of thousands — occasionally reporting low estimates of the dead and injured, just as the did in Iraq — falsely quoting a figure of only 35,000 dead, a blatant underestimation of over a million Iraqis killed by American bombs.

Additionally, the effects of the “unreported” use of chemical weapons and depleted uranium, is already being felt in Fallujah, Iraq. Babies are being born with severe birth defects.

Yes, the “benevolent” United States, the almighty “spreader of democracy,” — for eight years, under the dictatorship of war criminals — George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, used chemical weapons on Iraqis.

This is the bloodshed that the Republican LYNCH-MOBS wish to continue indefinitely in Afghanistan. You see, the apple doesn’t fall too far away from the tree. Like their fore-fathers who nearly exterminated Indians, the current litter of Republicans want to lynch the whole world — Blacks, Mexicans, Immigrants……Lynch! Lynch! Lynch! ….that’s the Republican way! — [ SEE HERE ] [ SEE HERE TOO ]

Kristol stands by his call for GOP chair Steele to resign

Krauthammer: “I think [Steele] has to go. This is a capital offense”

Rove: Steele Afghanistan comment “bone-headed,” “ludicrous“

Hayes: Steele’s Afghanistan comment “should cause him to resign“

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