Tag: perpetual war

Liz Cheney Says Not Increasing Military Spending by 3-5% Is a ‘Red Line’

President Biden requested a $753 billion military budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which would be the highest of all time. But this number is not enough for Republican hawks in Congress. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WI) said not increasing the budget by three to five percent would be a “red line” for Republicans. Biden’s budget request would be about a 1.6 percent increase from 2021.

“In my view, that is a red line, and if the administration is not going to be proposing a budget that meets that requirement, then I think they will need to explain to the American people why they’re unwilling to fund defense at the levels the nation needs,” Cheney said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference, which was held virtually on Wednesday and Thursday.

“I would clearly oppose budgets that were below that number, and I think we’re going to have a very healthy debate and discussion about the administration’s proposal because it is coming in significantly below that number,” she said.

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The Israel Narrative Is Crumbling Because Of Phone Cameras And The Internet

The mass media are working furiously to spin this in a way that rivals my satire piece from the other day. The New York Times has been cartoonishly re-writing its own reporting in a desperate attempt to make Israel look like an innocent victim of unprovoked attacks instead of the obvious aggressor against people protesting a brutal apartheid regime backed by an entire empire. The New York Post falsely reported that the deaths on Monday were caused by “Airstrikes from Hamas militants” (when did Hamas get an air force?) when sharing an article which falsely implied that those fatalities were inflicted by both sides. DW News framed its headline in a way that suggested the nine children killed had been involved in “fighting” against Israeli forces, and the word “clashes” is being thrown about willy nilly to describe a very one-sided assault.

But it isn’t working.

Social media is teeming with viral video footage of police assaulting peaceful worshippers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, of Israelis cheering and chanting “Yimach shemam (may their names be erased)” at the sight of a fire near the mosque, of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian protesters using the signature knee-on-neck maneuver made famous by the murder of George Floyd, many of which have millions of views. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are putting out statements explicitly condemning Israel as the aggressor in these attacks, and the White House is facing some actual adversarial journalism for once regarding its refusal to denounce the killing of Palestinian children and its absurd position that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves.

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Questioning America’s Warlords

I know, I know: President Joe Biden has announced that our combat troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 9/11 of this year, marking the 20th anniversary of the colossal failure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to defend America.

Of course, that other 9/11 in 2001 shocked us all. I was teaching history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and I still recall hushed discussions of whether the day’s body count would exceed that of the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. (Fortunately, bad as it was, it didn’t.)

Hijacked commercial airliners, turned into guided missiles, would have a profound impact on our collective psyche. Someone had to pay and among the first victims were Afghans in the opening salvo of the misbegotten Global War on Terror, which we in the military quickly began referring to as the GWOT.

Little did I know then that such a war would still be going on 15 years after I retired from the Air Force in 2005 and 80 articles after I wrote my first for TomDispatch in 2007 arguing for an end to militarism and forever wars like the one still underway in Afghanistan.

Over those years, I’ve come to learn that, in my country, war always seems to find a way, even when it goes badly — very badly, in fact, as it did in Vietnam and, in these years, in Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed across much of the Greater Middle East and significant parts of Africa.

Not coincidentally, those disastrous conflicts haven’t actually been waged in our name. No longer does Congress even bother with formal declarations of war. The last one came in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Americans united to fight for something like national security and a just cause. Today, however, perpetual American-style war simply is. Congress postures, but does nothing decisive to stop it. In computer-speak, endless war is a feature of our national programming, not a bug.

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Afghanistan: Nearly 1,600 Child Casualties in Airstrikes Over Past Five Years

Almost 1,600 children were killed or wounded in airstrikes in Afghanistan over the past five years, according to a report from Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).

The report analyses data released earlier this year by the UN and found that between 2016 and 2020, there were 3,977 civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan, 1,598 of which were children. Out of that number, 785 were killed, and 813 were wounded.

About 50 percent of the civilian casualties were caused by the US and its NATO coalition partners. The rest were at the hands of the Afghan Air Force, which is entirely propped up by the US.

From 2018 to 2019, the US dropped bombs on Afghanistan at a higher rate than it did during the height of the surge in 2011. In 2019, the US Air Force was responsible for more than two-thirds of child casualties from all airstrikes.

The Trump administration loosened the rules of engagement in Afghanistan, which led to the uptick in airstrikes. Last year, a report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project found that civilian casualties in airstrikes rose 330 percent from 2016 to 2019 due to the relaxed rules of engagement.

Since the US-Taliban peace deal was signed in February 2020, the US has reduced its airstrikes in the country, although the US has occasionally bombed the Taliban since. In March 2020, US Central Command stopped publishing reports on Afghanistan airstrikes, so there’s no way to know for sure at what rate the US bombed the country that year.

While US bombings decreased in 2020, the Afghan Air Force significantly escalated its airstrikes. The UN found that civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force during the first six months of 2020 had tripled, compared to the same time period in 2019.

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China was preparing for a Third World War with biological weapons – including coronavirus – SIX years ago, according to dossier produced by the People’s Liberation Army in 2015 and uncovered by the US State Department

Chinese scientists have been preparing for a Third World War fought with biological and genetic weapons including coronavirus for the last six years, according to a document obtained by US investigators.

The bombshell paper, accessed by the US State Department, insists they will be ‘the core weapon for victory’ in such a conflict, even outlining the perfect conditions to release a bioweapon, and documenting the impact it would have on ‘the enemy’s medical system’.

This latest evidence that Beijing considered the military potential of SARS coronaviruses from as early as 2015 has also raised fresh fears over the cause of Covid-19, with some officials still believing the virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab.

The dossier by People’s Liberation Army scientists and health officials, details of which were reported in The Australian, examined the manipulation of diseases to make weapons ‘in a way never seen before’.

Senior government figures say it ‘raises major concerns’ over the intentions of those close to Chinese President Xi Jinping amid growing fears about the country’s lack of regulation over its activity in laboratories. 

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US Establishment Recycling “WMD” Iraq War Propaganda For Iran

As the United States seems to be nearing re-entry into the Iran Nuclear Deal, the corporate media are whipping out every piece of war propaganda in order to drive a wedge between the Biden Administration and the Iranian government.

This Monday, in a piece so outrageous that it verges on the comical, Fox News published a piece which directly claim’s Iran has been seeking technology to develop “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as of last year.

The article, written by Benjamin Weinthal, using widely over-inflating reports which carry no evidence to back them up, added the finishing touch to the current mainstream media vernacular about Iran, bringing us from 2021 back to 2003. “WMDs” they are now crying, in a blatant attempt to side with Washington’s neoconservative tank and place pressure on the Biden administration to scrap the idea of peace with Iran and to maintain its brutal sanctions regime.

But it does not end there, Iran is also now meddling in the Scottish elections, or at least the “experts”, quoted by The Telegraph, are “almost certain” of it. The source for this claim, a neoconservative think tank named the ‘Henry Jackson Society’ again presents no tangible evidence to support their claims, but any chance to mix Iran into something that British conservatives oppose – a possible Scottish Independence referendum – they’ll take. If history is any indication, when a think tank, talking about a topic they are clearly biased on, says that they are “pretty sure” or “almost certain” about something, that typically means that they are either flat out lying and/or have zero evidence to corroborate their theory.

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World’s Most Tyrannical Regime Can’t Stop Babbling About “Human Rights”

“America won’t back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms,” reads a Wednesday tweet from the presidential Twitter account. “No responsible American president can remain silent when basic human rights are violated.”

The tweet, an excerpt from the US president’s prepared congressional address, was retweeted on Saturday by Secretary of State Tony Blinken with the caption, “We will always defend human rights at home and abroad.”

Like all US secretaries of state, Blinken’s public statements overwhelmingly focus on the claim that other nations abuse human rights, and that it is America’s duty to defend those rights. Which is very silly, considering the fact that the US government is the single worst human rights abuser on planet Earth.

And it’s not even close.

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