Tag: perpetual war

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed. 

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. 

“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”

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US Spends Billions On Overseas Wars, But Who Really Benefits?

Fears over incentivizing global conflicts are rising as the Biden administration requests more than $105 billion in supplemental security spending.

The administration says the money, primarily for Israel and Ukraine, will be good for the economy.

President Joe Biden has described the mammoth spending package as “a smart investment” that will “pay dividends” to U.S. security interests.

Likewise, Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien described the supplemental as “a very good bargain.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the money will “flow through our defense industrial base, creating American jobs in more than 30 states.”

Many are skeptical of the administration’s claims, however, and believe that the massive investment in the defense industry will squander the nation’s ability to adequately address social and infrastructure needs.

Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr. is among them.

“Creating jobs is a poor excuse for a foreign policy that wreaks mayhem around the world,” Mr. Kennedy told The Epoch Times in an email.

“If we want to increase employment in good manufacturing and construction jobs, instead of making weapons we should repair our infrastructure and manufacture products that actually serve human well-being.”

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Israeli tank gunner reveals orders to fire indiscriminately into kibbutz 

Firsthand testimony by admittedly inexperienced Israeli tank operators reveals orders to open fire upon Israeli communities when Palestinian militants breached the fences encircling Gaza on October 7.

A glowing profile of an all-female tank company by Israel’s N12 News network contains admissions by the 20-year-old captain — identified only as ‘Karni’ — that she was ordered by a “panicked” soldier to open fire on homes in the Holit kibbutz whether they contained civilians or not. 

Ten Israelis were killed in Holit on October 7; no children were among the dead.

“The soldier points and tells me, “shoot there — the terrorists are there,”” the captain recounts in the newly-released footage, noting that when she asked “are there civilians there?,” her compatriot simply replied, “I don’t know,” and ordered her to “just shoot” a tank round into the buildings anyway.

Ultimately, she recalled, “I decided not to shoot” as “this is an Israeli community.” Instead, she said, “I fired with my machine gun at a house.”

While the Israeli government and its army of international propagandists have blamed Hamas alone for a range of grisly killings on October 7, along with unsubstantiated claims of rape, torture and beheading babies, the comments in N12’s report add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that shelling by Israeli tanks was responsible for many of the casualties incurred in Israeli kibbutzim. According to the soldiers interviewed, others killed by the tank company in question include supposed Palestinian militants whom they say they crushed to death with their vehicle.

“My driver spots two terrorists on the road and reports it,” the captain tells her N12 interviewer. When “I tell her to run them over, she simply runs over the terrorists and moves on,” she explains blithely.

The female tank company appears to have been trained on the least advanced vehicles in Israel’s arsenal, and given only border defense duties. In the chaos of the Hamas assault on October 7, they were forced into more advanced vehicles equipped with a remote controlled weapons system (RCWS).

In the N12 report, Brigadier General Raviv Mahmia admitted that taking on a band of militants in Kibbutz Holit was a “very complex” task for which the young tankers were “in many ways…not trained to fight.”

“They fired in Israeli communities, driving on plain roads,” he noted.

Reporting by The Grayzone has revealed that many of the bodies found burned beyond recognition inside southern Israel’s so-called Gaza envelope were likely victims of the Israeli military – which recent admissions seem to confirm. 

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BBC Editor Speaks Out After False Gaza Hospital Reporting, Says He ‘Doesn’t Regret One Thing’

BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen was pressed on his initial reporting of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Saturday and said he didn’t regret his mistakes during an interview on the network on Saturday.

Several media outlets initially reported that Israel was responsibile for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Bowen claimed during his initial reports that the Al-Ahli hospital was flattened.

“The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. You can hear the impact. The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli Hospital. It was already damaged from a smaller attack at the weekend. The building was flattened,” Bowen said.

Bowen, during an appearance on BBC News channel’s “Behind The Stories,” said he didn’t regret his reporting and that he “didn’t race to judgment.”

“So it broke in, I suppose, mid-evening. And to answer your question, no, I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout. I didn’t race to judgment,” he said.

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Israeli ‘Iron Beam’ Lasers Are ‘Future Of Warfare’

Last year we reported on Israel’s development of a ground-based laser defense system dubbed ‘Iron Beam,’ which then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called “a game-changer” that could “bankrupt” the enemy.

Now, it’s being reported that the system – which has been in development by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for 15 years, and was originally set for a 2025 rollout, will be deployed more quickly than that due to the Israel-Hamas war, and it may be placed in service as early as 2024.

More than a hundred Rafael engineers have reportedly been working on this project, considered one of the most significant technological challenges ever faced by the Israeli defense industries, in order to create a fast and effective interception system, with inexhaustible and near cost-free ammunition.

Recent tests of Iron Beam in the Negev have shown promising results, with the system successfully intercepting various airborne threats. The heart of the system is an electric laser pointer, capable of targeting and sending out a powerful laser beam, invisible to the naked eye.

Since the war erupted on October 7, more than 10,000 projectiles have been fired at Israel, including 3,000 in the first hours of the conflict. Rafael and the Israeli Defense Ministry have considered the current operations as an opportunity to test the Iron Beam under real combat conditions. –i24news

Speaking with Calcalist, one of Rafael’s iron beam program managers expressed high hopes for the system, saying “Our aim is to reach a state where the enemy feels totally powerless. He has to understand that our laser pointers, deployed where needed, intercept and destroy all his attacks, almost instantly after they are launched, long before they reach Israeli territory or threaten anyone else. In such a scenario, the activation of warning sirens might even become unnecessary.”

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Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal

In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. 

“This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared on its official Twitter/X account. “All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments. May her memory be a blessing.”

Aviva Klompas, a former speechwriter for Israel’s United Nations mission and one of the country’s top English language social media propagandists, claimed on Twitter/X, “The terrorists massacred all of [the Hetzroni’s], then torched the building.”

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, chimed in to proclaim that “Liel Hetzroni of Kibbutz Beeri was murdered in her home by Hamas monsters… We’re fighting the most just war: to ensure this can never happen again.”

Liel Hetzroni was among the noncombatants killed in Kibbutz Be’eri when the small southern Israeli community was momentarily taken over by Hamas militants seeking captives to spur a prisoner exchange. During the standoff that ensued, she was killed instantly alongside twin brother, great-aunt and several other residents of Be’eri.

However, the 12-year-old Hetzroni was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.

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Ukrainian Official Confirms Russia Was Ready to End War in March 2022 If Kyiv Agreed to Neutrality

David Arakhamia, a high-ranking member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People political party, said that Kyiv could have ended the war with Russia after a month if it agreed not to join NATO. The official said that Moscow was not concerned about other issues, such as “denazification,” but only wanted Kyiv to agree to neutrality.

In an interview with TV channel 1+1, a Ukrainian network, Arakhamia confirmed previous reporting that Moscow and Kyiv had nearly agreed to end the war in March 2022. Still, Ukraine’s Western backers pushed it to try to win the war against Russia. “They really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality,” Arakhamia  said.” It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”

Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiation team, said that other issues, such as the protection of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and the “denazification” of the government in Kyiv, were less important to Moscow. “In fact, [neutrality] was the key point.” He continued, “Everything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning’ about denazification, the Russian-speaking population and blah-blah-blah.”

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U.S. FLIES ‘ROUTINE’ SPY FLIGHTS FROM UK’S CYPRUS BASE NEAR GAZA FOR ‘THIRD PARTY GOVERNMENTS’

The cable, published by WikiLeaks and classified as ‘secret’, was written in April 2008 by the US embassy in London and sent to Washington. 

A letter included in the cable is from Will Jessett, then the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) director of counter-terrorism, who asks for “new procedures for requesting intel flight clearances” regarding US spy missions from British bases.

Jessett refers to “the regular intelligence flights that the US undertakes from RAF Akrotiri” – the huge British air base on Cyprus. He added that “these flights have become routine”. 

He goes on to write that the American aircraft are flown by the State Department and US military “or possibly other agencies”, assumed to mean the CIA. 

The only US equipment the British government has ever admitted to being located on the UK’s so-called Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) on Cyprus is the U-2 spy aircraft. These have been permanently stationed at RAF Akrotiri for nearly half a century, and were originally operated by the CIA.

The 2008 letter adds that recent American U-2 spy flights from RAF Akrotiri had collected intelligence over Turkey, Iraq and Lebanon.

The cable is significant in light of current US activities on Cyprus. The US is moving arms to Israel from around Europe using RAF Akrotiri, but the Ministry of Defence has refused to tell Declassified what American aircraft are flying or what weapons are on board. US surveillance drones are also known to be flying over Gaza. 

For 50 years, the US and Britain have attempted to keep secret the size and activities of the American presence at the UK bases and “retained sites” on Cyprus. This territory, which comprises 3% of Cyprus’s landmass, was kept by the British after independence in 1960. 

Declassified also recently revealed that 129 US airmen are permanently deployed to RAF Akrotiri, which is a staging post for bombing campaigns across the Middle East. The US spy force, the 1st Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, is permanently deployed at Akrotiri.

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Human Bones Were Ground into Flour to Make Bread in 16th Century France

In human history, there are some tales so bizarre they surpass the wildest fiction. One such story, rooted in the grim realities of 16th century France, reveals a desperate and macabre solution to famine: the grinding of human bones into ‘flour’ for bread-making.

The background to this strange episode is set during the tumultuous Wars of Religion in France. In 1590, the city of Paris, controlled by the Catholic League, found itself under siege by the French Royal Army led by Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV of France. The siege aimed to starve the city into submission, a tactic that led to desperate measures.

In these dire times, Pierre de L’Estoile, a clerk-in-chief of the French Parliament, recorded a chilling decision made by Parisians. As food supplies dwindled, an assembly proposed a horrifying solution: to grind the bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents’ charnel house into flour and bake bread from it. Driven by extreme hunger, the plan was executed, but with tragic outcomes. L’Estoile notes that those who ate this ‘bone bread’ met their death, not from starvation, but from the very solution they hoped would save them.

Why did those who ate the ‘bone bread’ die? This question has puzzled historians and scientists alike. Some speculate that toxic substances like arsenic, or psychological trauma from consuming human remains, contributed to the deaths. However, a more likely explanation lies in the nutritional inadequacy and inorganic nature of human bones.

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When the First Casualty of War Is Truth, Journalists Are the Second

Truth – and journalists – are the first casualties of the war on Gaza. As Israel’s 7-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed over 14,000 Palestinians, 5,000 of whom were children, courageous Palestinian journalists, working in Gaza under unbelievably difficult and dangerous circumstances, are being killed, one by one. This week, a grim milestone was reached, as the number of journalists killed in the conflict surpassed 50. While a negotiated pause gives civilians in Gaza a brief respite, and 50 Israeli hostages held in Gaza will be released, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised the violence will continue immediately afterwards.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 53 journalists and media workers have been killed in what the organization calls “the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.” To date, 46 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese reporters have been killed. Eleven have been injured, three remain missing, and 18 Palestinian journalists have been arrested by Israel.

“We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s unprecedented,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “For journalists in Gaza specifically, the exponential risk is possibly the most dangerous we have seen.”

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