by Chris Flyod
Empire Burlesque
1.5.09

The Israeli military is reportedly using napalm-like white phosphorus shells in its all-out attack on Gaza, according to the conservative Times of London. The phosphorus in the smoke-emitting shells causes agonizing, unquenchable burns, sometimes searing flesh right down to the bone.

These savage tools of terror are “legal” when used as smokescreens to mask military operations, although their use as an offensive weapon is war crime. This is a rather ludicrous distinction when the shells are fired into heavily populated civilian areas, exploding and spraying phosphorus in all directions. Anyone who orders their use on cities and refugee camps knows with iron certainty that civilians will be burned, maimed and killed by this chemical weapon. That is to say, they know they will be murdering and mutilating innocent people in the most gruesome manner — and they give the order anyway.

America’s leaders also ordered the murder and mutilation of innocent civilians with chemical weapons in the brutal razing of Fallujah in late 2004 (among many other places). There, in addition to the wide use of “Willy Pete” in the city — where tens of thousands of people had been sealed off after more than 300,000 had been driven from their homes — American forces also poured in massive amounts of depleted uranium munitions, thermobaric explosives and jellied gasoline. The Pentagon also declared the entire city a free-fire zone, giving soldiers carte blanche to shoot and kill anyone they saw.

[…]

via Fallujah by the Sea: Aping America, Israel Unleashes Chemical Weapons in Gaza.

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see

More children among Gaza dead + Israels ground offensive in full swing

Israel rains fire on Gaza with phosphorus shells

US Blocks UN Security Council Vote Calling for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza

Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims + Israel is Guilty of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity

Israel-Palestine-Gaza-Occupation

December 20, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Katrina’s Hidden Race War + A Correction and an Apology by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

Democracy Now!
Dec 19, 2008

Katrina’s Hidden Race War: In Aftermath of Storm, White Vigilante Groups Shot 11 African Americans in New Orleans

In a shocking new report, The Nation magazine exposes how white vigilante groups patrolled the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, shooting at least eleven African American men. Local police have never conducted investigations into the shootings. We speak to reporter A.C. Thompson and New Orleans resident Donnell Herrington, who nearly died after being shot by a white vigilante. [includes rush transcript]

Real Video Stream

Real Audio Stream

MP3 Download

via Democracy Now! | Katrina’s Hidden Race War: In Aftermath of Storm, White Vigilante Groups Shot 11 African Americans in New Orleans.

***

Katrina’s Hidden Race War

IWantDemocracyNow

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Katrina’s Hidden Race War“, posted with vodpod

***

A Correction, an Apology, and the Second Battle of New Orleans

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque (Chris Floyd)
Dec 19, 2008

In a brief post yesterday, I wrote that African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to apologize for making such a controversial — and flagrantly incorrect — statement. Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild. For as a new article in The Nation forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class citizens in the United States; they are treated as wild animals to be hunted down and shot in cold blood.

The article is a very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups that formed, with police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in New Orleans in the days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had designated the area — which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood — as a vital evacuation point for those trapped in the city, a group of white residents seized the opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black skin. Many African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one knows the exact number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate any of the incidents, and coroner’s records of the gun-blasted bodies that showed up in the area have unaccountably gone missing.

[…]

via A Correction and an Apology.

December 17, 2008 by dandelionsalad

A Million McVeighs Now: The American-Made Insurgency in Afghanistan by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
December 16, 2008

The “Good War” in Afghanistan – the Bush-launched war that Barack Obama tells us we must fight and win – continues to deteriorate before our eyes. Just like every other operation in the so-called “War on Terror” (another Bush-launched campaign that Obama has fully embraced as his own), the Afghan war, now in its seventh year, has proven entirely counter-productive to its stated aims. Instead of stabilizing a volatile region and denying it as a base for violent extremism, it has of course done the opposite. The shock waves of the heavy-handed American-led invasion of Afghanistan – a country that no foreign power has ever conquered and held – have spread across Central Asia, most dangerously into Pakistan.

Afghanistan itself is in a desperate condition, laden with a weak, foreign-installed government dominated by warlords and riddled with corruption. The illegal opium trade, quashed by the Taliban, has now surged to historic levels, and is flooding the streets of Europe and the West with cut-rate heroin – not to mention fuelling an astonishing rise in drug addiction among Afghans, Pakistanis and Iranians. At every turn, the iron hand of American militarism is producing more suffering, more chaos, more corruption, more extremism, more slaughter, both directly and as blowback from people maddened into wanton violence by the relentless stream of atrocities.

And no, to comprehend an origin of violence is not to condone it; but reality compels acknowledgement of the fact that state-terror atrocity breeds “asymmetrical” atrocity in turn. It also teaches by example. The state militarists of empire say: Violence works. Violence is honorable. Violence is the most effective way to accomplish your goals. And you must not blench at killing innocent people in your violent operations. Is it any wonder that others adopt these methods, which are championed and celebrated by our most respected and legitimatized elites? Recall the words of one of America’s own home-grown “asymmetricals,” Timothy McVeigh, who at his sentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing quoted Justice Louis Brandeis: “Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

McVeigh of course was schooled in death and violence as a soldier in the first Iraq War, where he had been appalled to find himself killing people who wished America no harm, and to see the wholesale slaughter of innocent people in a conflict that need never have been fought. A peaceful settlement of the complex financial and territorial dispute between Iraq and Kuwait had been brokered by the Arab League; but although Iraq accepted the deal, at the last minute, the Kuwaiti royals – long-time business partners of then-President George H.W. Bush – reneged and declared, “We will call in the Americans.” Then the regional squabble between Iran and Kuwait was deceitfully turned into a “global threat” by the false claim that Iraq’s invading forces were massing on the borders of Saudi Arabia. Pentagon chief Dick Cheney claimed secret satellite imagery showed vast Iraqi armies preparing to swoop down on the Saudi oilfields, the lifeline of the American economy. Bush Family capo James Baker, then Secretary of State, went before Congress and declared that the imminent war was all about saving American jobs. But commercial imagery obtained by a US newspaper at the time showed there were no Iraqi forces on the Saudi border. It was all a knowing lie – as were the claims paraded before Congress that Iraqi soldiers were flinging infants from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. This bearing of false witness had been arranged by a prominent Bush-connected PR firm. The first Iraq War was just as falsely based and pointless as the second.

[…]

A Million McVeighs Now: The American-Made Insurgency in Afghanistan

see

Kinzer: Surge Afghanistan Diplomacy, Not Troops

Ray McGovern: Will Afghanistan be Obama’s Vietnam?

Afghan Massacre – The Convoy of Death

U.S. keeps silent as Afghan ally removes war crime evidence

Obama-Barack

December 13, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Atrocity Unlimited: US Seeks to Turn Somalia into Global Free-Fire Zone

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Dec 11, 2008

Not content with destroying the only vestige of stability that Somalia had known for almost two decades by arming, backing and participating in a brutal “regime change” invasion by Ethiopia, the Bush Administration now wants to turn the ravaged land into an international “free fire zone,” a giant Fallujah where any powerful nation on earth can launch armed incursions on Somali soil, wreaking the usual “collateral damage” in the search for pirates — or for those arbitrarily designated as pirates.

The Bush Regime is drafting a UN Security Council resolution that will give “the international community” carte blanche to “hunt down” alleged pirates on land in Somalia, the Guardian reports:

A draft resolution that would permit states fighting piracy to “take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia, including in its airspace” has been circulated to members of the UN Security Council. Prior consent for raids would be required from Somalia’s weak and fractured government…

As we noted here recently, the “Somali government” is a rapidly collapsing coalition of CIA-paid warlords and Ethiopian collaborators which “controls” only a few city blocks of territory in the entire country. It is unfathomable that this near-fictitious entity would or could oppose a “request” by a world power to send armed forces into Somalia in a noble quest to clamp down on pirates. And what happens when these invading forces inevitably clash with the various other armed groups now waging a multi-sided, hydra-headed war in the country? Why, the invaders will have to take stern “force protection” measures, of course.

via Atrocity Unlimited: US Seeks to Turn Somalia into Global Free-Fire Zone or via Global Research

November 5, 2008 by dandelionsalad

WIBDI: What If Bush Did It? A Prism for the New Paradigm by Chris Floyd

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Nov. 5, 2008

As the United States enters a new and unprecedented political era — or, as killjoy cynics would have it, as the American empire gets a new set of temporary managers — the fate of the “dissident” movement that arose under the Bush Regime seems greatly occluded. So many of those who set out their stalls as bold outsiders “speaking truth to power” now find themselves on the inside, enthralled by power, speaking for power, as it is personified by President-elect Barack Obama — who, ironically, has consistently repudiated many of the tenets and principles that provoked the dissidents’ outrage in the first place.

Continue reading →

September 12, 2008 by dandelionsalad

The Falling Land by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Thursday, 11 September 2008

There is, apparently, to be no end to our falling. No bottom to the pit of moral nullity through which we keep plunging, no act of evil which we will not accept, and countenance, and even cheer.

At one time, it required great lies — elaborate, monstrous deceits, wrapped in myths of goodness and light — to disguise the brutal machinations of raw power. Otherwise, it was thought, the people might rise up in anger at the crimes being committed in their name, thus threatening the primacy and privilege of the elite.

But this proved to be unnecessary in the end. The foulest deeds could be done in broad daylight, in full view of the world, before the eyes of our children, without the slightest consequence for the perpetrators. The crowd would applaud, or, at worst, simply shrug and move on.

Chris Floyd Online – The Falling Land.

August 28, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Biden, Obama & The Blood-Dimmed Tide + Tongue of Flame by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Thursday, 28 August 2008

I’ve been away for seven days, without access to email or the internet, in a country where I couldn’t speak the language, in a place with no newspapers in English anywhere to be found. It was a blissful detoxification from the media echo chamber — and from the even more deadly poisons of politics and power that the chamber so confusingly and cacophonously presents.

Only once, briefly, did I find myself in a room where CNN was blaring on a tiny television set. As it happened, it was the exact moment when Joe Biden was being anointed as Barack Obama’s running mate. It was a live feed: Biden was at the podium, giving a strangely stilted speech in a fake Southern accent. (Perhaps he was trying to channel Bill Clinton — or maybe Sam Nunn.) Although wearing a tie, he was coatless, with shirtsleeves rolled up, in that classic pose of political hackery: a man ready to “go to work for the American people.” (Obama, looking on rather distractedly from the side, was dressed in the same way).

Chris Floyd Online – Biden, Obama and The Blood-Dimmed Tide.

***

Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Thursday, 28 August 2008

As we noted here yesterday, Arthur Silber has written a powerful and profound series of articles on the Joe Biden VP nomination, and its deeper implications. He has now followed these up with a piece on Biden’s disturbing — not to say blood-curdling — acceptance speech on Wednesday night. You should read Silber’s latest piece in full, but I wanted to add a few comments of my own.

Joe Biden’s acceptance speech was indeed a remarkable performance — bellicose and delusional and deceitful by turns. If you closed your eyes, there were moments when you would have thought that you were back in the Cow Palace in 1964, listening to Barry Goldwater belching fire and threatening doom for all those who challenge America’s uniquely exceptional special unquestionable morally superior dominance of the world.

Chris Floyd Online – Tongue of Flame: A Speech Presaging Endless War.

see

The “Good Germans” And The Democratic Convention By Timothy V. Gatto

RNN: Biden and the anti-war constituency + Polls, the media

The Great Circus By John Steppling

The Future That Never Comes; The Past That Never Was; The Present Inscrutable

Joe Biden: On the Issues by Lo

Georgia

Biden-Joe

July 28, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Black Milk Blues: Elite Power and the Efficacy of Force by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Sunday, 27 July 2008

I.
A reader offers an intriguing comment below:

[Referring to a previous post on Israel and the United States, “Shep” writes]: Interesting perspective, Chris… One thing I don’t understand, though, is how the destruction of the American financial system (which is well on its way to occurring, aided by the humongous war-related expenses) serves the interests of the “Old American Establishment”. I can see that the Zionist Jews might not be as emotionally invested in the weakening of the US, simply because America isn’t their country.

Is the key the fact that the Establishment simply sees that the entire “Western Industrial Society” Ponzi scheme is about to collapse of its own weight, and are sucking up as much of the country’s money and property as possible? Or perhaps is the real reason the prevalence of the apocalyptic “End-timers” who are pushing for a final, violent conflagration in the Middle East to fulfill their misguided notions of biblical prophesy, to herald the rapture? Or maybe the eugenicists, who want to see many, many less people on the planet, see this as an opportunity to drastically cut back on the flow of oil around the globe and thus engender mass genocide?

Again, I don’t doubt that the reasoning in your post is solid but what is the overarching reasons for the current apocalyptic world trend? In short, who is driving the bus off of the cliff, and why?

Pertinent questions indeed. Here is my attempt at a reply:

First, I don’t believe that the American financial system is about to collapse — certainly not to the extent that it will actually harm the power and privilege of those on the very top, whether these be the “Old American Establishment” or new-style war-profiteers, etc. Of course we have already seen vast ruin and great suffering caused by the economic turmoil generated to a large degree by the endless Terror War. But who is suffering from it? Not the managers and operators of the great financial houses, who get bailed out by the government or escape the collapse of their institutions in golden parachutes. They live on in comfort and safety to gouge and exploit another day.

And not the bribed and greased politicians whose policies create such a fertile environment for economic predators. Every now and then some bottom-feeding goober like Curt Weldon gets caught up in the net for being too obviously greedy — but what of the bipartisan legislative leadership that over the past several decades have cultivated this toxic, predatory environment, with perfectly legal, finely-crafted laws written for them by corporate lobbyists? They go on to fat-cat careers as lobbyists and consultants, or they run for president, or they sit on corporate boards, or they go home and play golf. When they are in office, they (and their successors) protect the system they have nurtured and tendered; they won’t let it “collapse.”

Again, this is not to deny that millions — perhaps even tens of millions – of people will end up in very dire straits, losing houses, losing jobs, losing insurance, going hungry. This is not to deny that businesses will fold, whole industries could be rolled up like a carpet, and communities will languish and fade or die. But we have seen all this before, and the wealth and privilege of our monied elites didn’t disappear; neither did their means of acquiring more wealth and power.

…continued

June 27, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Big Dog, Little Tail: The American Elite Resolves on War With Iran

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Friday, 27 June 2008

I.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Israel will not attack Iran without the full knowledge and approval of the United States government. The trigger of the “warning shot” of Israel’s long-range air-strike exercise last week was actually pulled in Washington. The Israelis will not force or deceive the U.S. government into an attack on Iran; that attack – which grows more certain by the hour – will take place because America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment and military-industrial complex (to the extent that there is any real difference between the two) want it to happen, or are willing to let it happen.

It is of course an article of faith for some people that the Israeli tails wags the big American dog. This rather ludicrous assertion is nothing more than the pernicious doctrine of “American exceptionalism” tricked out in “dissident” drag. For its underlying assumption is that good ole true-blue American elites would never commit war crimes or seek empire and geopolitical dominion unless they had somehow been tricked into it by those wily Jews. This is exactly backwards. If Israel was of no use to the American elite’s domination agenda, then it would be discarded, or at least downgraded in terms of military, economic and diplomatic support.

…continued

h/t: Weldon

June 3, 2008 by dandelionsalad

An Agony Foretold: Bitter Roots, Bitter Fruits in the Middle East by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Sunday, 01 June 2008

Long before the Nabka, long before the Holocaust, the present-day agony in Israel and Palestine had already taken root. The ineradicable core of the conflict is brutally simple: the attempt by one people to take another people’s land. In this respect, the turmoil in the Middle East is just another chapter in one of the world’s oldest stories, for human beings have always been about the bloody business of conquest, dispossession and domination. The United States, for example, was built on this ancient principle. Its settling was cast largely in the same terms as those used later by the Zionists in Palestine: the claiming and cultivation of a land that was essentially empty — save for a few savages who could only benefit from the imposition of a superior civilization. (And if they couldn’t, so much the worse for them.)

…continued

May 31, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Uranium Enrichment: The Bushes, The Saudis and The Bomb by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Thursday, 29 May 2008

Did you hear the alarming story about a country led by draconian Muslim religious extremists acquiring enriched uranium for their nuclear plants — plants which could be weaponized anytime in the future, putting weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Sharia law fanatics who repress women, chop off heads and throttle all dissent? What’s more, they were given this weapons-grade material by a rogue nation led by a goonish tyrant who gained power only because he was the wastrel son of the former leader. Break out the regime change machinery right away; this evil must be stopped!

What’s that? No, we’re not talking about Iran getting souped-up nukestuff from North Korea. We’re talking about George W. Bush’s bestowal of enriched uranium on his pals and business partners, the Saudi royals, the most draconian religious tyrants in the world. Harvey Wasserman has the goods at Democracy Now:

You know, I’d like to know the insane asylum in which this policy was concocted. The idea of giving enriched uranium to the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the future is just almost staggering to think about. It’s something, I guess, we’ve come to expect with the Bush administration.

…

…continued

see

Bush Promises to Give Enriched Uranium to Saudi Arabia

May 27, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Hay Ride: Jimmy Carter Crosses the Line by Chris Floyd + video

Dandelion Salad
by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
26 May 2008 Continue reading →

May 25, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies by Chris Floyd + Secret prisons (vids)

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd

Empire Burlesque

24 May 2008

I.

The United States government is holding some 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to “harsh interrogation techniques” (to use the prim locution for “torture” used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

Many of these captives are stuffed into holding pens in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, which is still in operations despite the momentary torture-photo scandal of 2004 — and despite Bush’s earnest promise to Iraqis to tear down that hated symbol of Saddam’s torture. Other captives are crammed into the holds of prison ships floating around the world. Still others languish in the torture chambers of the Bush Administration’s Terror War allies — despotisms, tyrannies, brutal kingdoms — having been “renditioned” there by American agents, sometimes after being kidnapped, or sold into captivity by bounty hunters, or snatched up in mass sweeps or random grabs or simply for having the wrong name, the wrong face, the wrong color, the wrong religion.

In any civilized country, such facts would provoke banner headlines, marathon television debates, investigations, prosecutions and widespread public revulsion. It might have done so even in the United States not all that long ago. But the most recent encapsulation of these horrors — from Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, speaking earlier this week on Democracy Now — has caused scarcely a ripple. Even that is putting it too strongly; in the mainstream media, the news has been greeted with the usual iron curtain of silence.

…continued

***

US holding 27 thousand in secret prisons

IWantDemocracyNow

see

The rest of the Democracy Now! program: Democracy Now! Spies for Hire + Secret Overseas Prisons + Malcolm X

FBI agents created “war crimes file” documenting US torture

For His Treatment of Children in the ‘War on Terror,’ Bush Is a War Criminal

May 12, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America’s New Moral Universe by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Friday, 09 May 2008

Tell me that this doesn’t sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:

The rules [of engagement] explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances…Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights….Of course, it’s not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.

Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that “if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender.” He explained, “They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time.” In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: “Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons.”

In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight — which any human being would instinctively do — then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.

The excerpt above comes from a story in Salon.com, “Killing by the Numbers,” about an “elite” U.S. sniper squad that murdered a captured, unarmed civilian in cold blood. A more detailed excerpt follows below, but I’d like to deal briefly with one ancillary aspect first.

…continued

April 22, 2008 by dandelionsalad

I know no one cares about Somalia by Chris Floyd

Dandelion Salad

by Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque
Monday, 21 April 2008 Continue reading →

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