The forgotten victims of September 11th

Since the atrocities in 2001, the 11th of September has become a national day of mawkish commemoration in the United States, despite the fact that the same kind of extreme Islamist terrorists are still wreaking havoc across Europe and the Middle East, largely thanks to the US invasion of Iraq that followed 9/11 and ended up creating the biggest lawless terrorism breeding ground on earth.

It would take an extremely blinkered view of history to not know that in the 1980s the US actually funded, supplied and trained Al Qaida in Afghanistan, when they were considered "brave freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation by the western media. 

It would take more historical ignorance/revisionism to fail to realise that the US intervened to fight alongside Islamist militias in Kosovo in the late 1990s, support for Islamist fanatics that was provided several years after the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in 1993!

And it would take a severe level of self-deception to deny that the September 11th terrorist attacks are "blowback" from the United States' foreign policy tactics from the mid 20th Century onward.

Over the space of just a few years we've seen Al Qaida morph from US funded and supported allies in places like Afghanistan and Kosovo into supposedly the greatest ever threat to American freedom in history. A threat that has been used to impose all kinds of unconstitutional and totalitarian attacks on the liberties of American citizens (and citizens of the rest of the world) such as the "Patriot" Act and the incredible expansion of NSA spying activities. 

This rapid conversion of Al Qaida from US allies to dangerous terrorists was bad enough, but the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies in 2013 were marred by the fact that the US government were straining at the leash to actually help Islamist terrorists in Syria by bombing the Syrian government and creating yet another Iraq style power vacuum for them to thrive in.

Just 12 years since after the 9/11 attacks and the US administration were assuming the American public to be so gullible and compliant that they would accept the US openly siding with the same kind of Islamist terrorists as those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and inordinately more innocent civilians in Iraq,Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and in terrorist atrocities across Europe too during the last 17 years.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility that would be necessary for the American public to accept the idea that the US political establishment openly siding with Al Qaida and other extreme Wahabi Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, simply because their terrorist activities there coincide with American imperialist interests is also on display in the fact that so many Americans still believe the absurd narrative that "America fights for freedom and democracy across the World".

40 years ago the US backed a violent coup d'etat in Chile and the
imposition of a brutal neoliberal regime led by Augusto Pinochet.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the American determination to actually undermine and destroy freedom and democracy came in Chile after a US-backed military coup that took place on September 11th 1973.

This coup marked the birth of the toxic neoliberal ideology pushed by the Chicago school pseudo-economists. 

In 1973 neoliberalism was a fringe anti-communist economic ideology supported by virtually nobody, today this bankrupt pseudo-economic gibberish is the global economic orthodoxy adhered to by almost all political parties in the West, and enforced across the globe by the machinery of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

To say that neoliberalism had a painful birth in Chile would be an understatement. The man that the neoliberals backed in Chile was a brutal dictator called General Pinochet. 

During his dictatorship over 3,000 people were "disappeared" (captured and tortured to death) whilst another 28,000 were detained without trial, most of them suffering torture and in many cases sexual abuse too. 

Aside from those tortured and killed and the families that survived them, other victims of this brutal US backed dictatorship included protesters that were burned alive in the streets by the police and musicians who had their fingers broken before being machine gunned to death.
 

The Americans weren't the only ones to back
Pinochet's murderous right-wing dictatorship,
The Thatcher government in Britain
supported him too.

  This brutal and oppressive Chilean regime was supported by the US administration because to successive American governments and their corporate backers, right-wing military dictatorship, imprisonment without trial, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings were an insignificant price to pay when it came to securing access to the Chilean economy so that it could be used as a playground for the neoliberal pseudo-economists from the Chicago School, and opened up for exploitation by US corporations.

The Chilean regime was part of the US financed Operation Condor, which was a plan to control the population of the southern cone of South America through the instillation of  brutal right-wing military dictatorships. 

The members of this anti-democratic group were the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, the Banzer military dictatorship in Bolivia, the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the 12 year military dictatorship in Uruguay. 

Undoubtedly the most brutal members of Operation Condor were the US backed Argentine Junta that joined in 1976, after the military coup against Isabel Perón.

Photos of the disappeared in Buenos Aires, 2004.

The US backed military dictatorship in Argentina was yet another playground for the Chicago school neoliberal pseudo-economists. 

Whilst the US backed military dictatorship were busy murdering an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians and torturing countless thousands more, "the Chicago Boys" were imposing their favoured economic ideology (deregulation, mass privatisation, lax tax enforcement, massive tax cuts for the rich, regressive tax hikes for the poor and ordinary, destruction of welfare provision, revocation of rights and liberties, wage repression ... ), resulting in poverty and chaos for millions of Argentines. 

The state terrorism of this savage regime meant that few people dared to speak out against this US-backed economic vandalism.

Some of the favoured tactics of the Argentine junta included torture, extrajudicial killings, throwing people out of aeroplanes without parachutes (death flights) and the kidnapping of pregnant women in order to steal their babies to give to supporters of the regime, after which the mothers were executed without trial.

In the late 1970s the US and the Argentine junta collaborated in "Operation Charly" to export their model of brutal right-wing dictatorship to Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) and in 1980 the Argentine junta, the US administration and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie collaborated to assist the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia which installed Luis García Meza. 

Meza was another brutal dictator and upon his instillation in power he immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, banned trade unions, silenced the press and oversaw the murder of over 1,000 people in just 13 months in power.

The 45th anniversary of the US backed military coup in Chile will pass virtually unnoticed in the United States, and great swathes of the public will continue to believe the comforting lies that the US has a history of promoting democracy and freedom, rather than a demonstrable history of deliberately and callously undermining them.

The millions of victims of the vile US backed Latin American dictatorships are not the only people that should be remembered on September the 11th. 

The countless global victims of the vile "greed is a virtue" neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology devised by the Chicago Boys, supported by the US government and born in Chile on this day in 1973 also just as worthy of remembrance as the victims of the September 2001 atrocities.
                        

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OR

How David Cameron is still talking absolute rubbish about Syria

Last night I had the misfortune of watching the BBC News. I'm not naive. I know that the government of the day hold the BBC purse strings so there has always been a strong pro-government bias in their reporting (whichever party happens to be in power). I also know that New Labour made things even worse when they decided to castrate the BBC for daring to tell the truth about how Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell "sexed up" the evidence used to justify the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Even though I'm well used to the BBC failing to hold the government of the day to account, the ridiculous Tory propaganda they tried to pass off as news last night was utterly appalling.

The segment in question was a report about David Cameron's absurd blethering about the Russian airstrikes in Syria against anti-Assad terrorist groups. Cameron had worked himself up into a state of carefully stage managed rage about how Russia were hitting the wrong targets, and how it was an outrage that some of the targets they'd hit had been the "good" US/UK backed terrorist groups in Syria, rather than the "bad" Saudi/Qatar/UAE backed terrorists he's had to pretend to oppose because their sheer barbarity makes it impossible to explicitly support them.

Cameron's humiliation over Syria

It's worth noting how the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media seem to have completely forgotten David Cameron's humiliation when his insane rush to war was defeated by a rebellion of his own MPs just two years ago, making him the first Prime Minister in over 200 years to lose a war vote in parliament. 

His own MPs saw through through the sheer insanity of attacking Assad when Islamist fanatics were flooding into the Syrian conflict back in 2013, yet he's still not willing to accept that ISIS are a greater danger to the UK than Bashar al Assad's government.

Perhaps Cameron will eventually change his mind if ISIS affiliated groups begin launching terrorist attacks in Britain? But maybe not? Maybe he's a man so filled with impotent rage that he didn't get his way back in 2013 that he'll continue arguing that the UK should assist the Islamist takeover of Syria by destroying Assad's government whatever evidence presents itself that Islamist fanatics like ISIS are a much more dangerous enemy to the UK than an admittedly brutal regional dictator like Assad ever could be?

What does Cameron actually want to happen in Syria?

Cameron's rhetoric is so confused it's absolutely pitiful. He tries to pretend to be opposing ISIS, but then he openly supports the much weaker terrorist groups who are trying to oust Bashar al Assad from power, leaving the door wide open for ISIS to take control of Damascus. 

I don't know who Cameron thinks will prevent Syria falling to ISIS should he get his wish that Assad meets the same fate as Saddam Hussain or Muammar Gadaffi? Is he completely unaware that the rise of groups like Al Qaida in Iraq and ISIS came about in the first place as a result of the power vacuum left by the catastrophically ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq (that the Tory party supported at the time)?

David Cameron hobnobbing with the not at all brutal and repressive Saudis.

Maybe David Cameron thinks the ragtag bunch of rebels who have failed to topple Assad despite all of their backing from the US and UK will be able to hold ISIS back should Assad fall? Can he really be unaware that several of these groups have allowed ISIS to usurp their own fighters and their supplies of US weapons? 

Maybe Cameron envisages a massive ground invasion by US and UK troops to engage in direct conflict with ISIS? I wouldn't want to be a British soldier fighting extremists so brutal that even Al Qaidi criticise them for their barbarity.

Whatever future scenario Cameron is imagining (if any), he can't be so stupid to think that ISIS wouldn't take advantage of a power vacuum in Syria can he? Perhaps that's precisely what he wants in order to justify a US/UK invasion and occupation of the region?

The BBC News report predictably didn't ask any questions like these, instead allowing his confused and ridiculous rhetoric against the only established power structure (as repressive as it is) standing between ISIS and control of Syria to go completely unchallenged. 

Aside from the strategic incoherence of continuing to attack Assad while ISIS make headway across the region, David Cameron's rhetoric was bizarrely hypocritical too. It's utterly ridiculous to hear the UK Prime Minister refer to a dictator like Assad as "the butcher Assad" when he's oh-so-happy to suck up to vile human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia when he's over there trying to hawk weapons contracts for British arms companies. 

David Cameron's friends

If David Cameron had any integrity whatever he'd use exactly the same kind of rhetoric to condemn Saudi Arabia as "butchers" for the planned crucifixion and beheading of Ali Muhammed al-Nimr for the "crime" of protesting in favour of democracy. And he'd describe the Chinese government as "serial human rights abusers" instead of sucking up to them by describing the UK as the most open country in the western world to Chinese investment and bribing them with £billions to build our energy infrastructure for us (because the Tories have such a strong ideological opposition to the UK building it's own energy infrastructure that they'd prefer to bribe a repressive bunch like the Chinese government to do it instead of building it for ourselves).

Cameron doesn't speak out against butchers and human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia and China because they wouldn't buy our weapons or build our nuclear power stations for us if he did. He reserves such rhetoric for Assad, presumably because his great (and not at all brutal or repressive) friends in Saudi Arabia see Assad as an obstacle to the spread of their extremist form of Wahhabi Islam throughout the Arab world, and Cameron wants to keep them sweet so they continue to buy more weapons from British arms companies.

The wrong targets?

Another factor that makes Cameron's whinging about the Russian airstrikes seem so absurd and out of touch is that the very night before his manufactured outrage about Russia hitting the wrong targets, the US spent a couple of hours bombarding a hospital in Afghanistan. As many concerns as I have about the Russian's direct involvement in Syria, at least they seem to be attempting to attack combatants in a war zone, not deliberately obliterating a hospital. It doesn't matter if militants are hiding in a hospital, or in a UN compound, it's a war crime to attack such locations. It's phenomenally brazen for Cameron to criticise another country for attacking "the wrong military targets" the day after his closest military ally launched a sustained attack on a hospital killing some 20 staff and patients.

And a partisan political swipe at Labour from the BBC

Perhaps one of the most telling things about the report was the way the BBC News anchor concluded the item by reading out a highly partisan swipe at Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party without allowing anyone from Labour any kind of reply to the Tory party accusation that their middle east foreign policy represents a threat to UK national security. 

If the BBC had allowed anyone from the Labour Party to respond perhaps they'd have pointed out that ISIS, not Assad represent the biggest threat to UK national security, and that Cameron's continued backing of anti-Assad terrorists in Syria is actually helping ISIS by further destabilising the region?

It's absolutely clear that if the state broadcaster in Russia or Syria had aired such a biased, pro-government, anti-opposition report, people would rightly be howling their condemnation, but because it's the BBC, hardly anyone even considers it noteworthy enough for comment that they brazenly favour the government of the day, and allow David Cameron's ill-conceived gibberish about the conflict to go completely unquestioned.

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David Cameron and the lucrative Syrian blood pie

After visiting the middle east the UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced his intention to overturn an EU ban on sending arms to Syria. He has stated that he wants British companies to arm the Islamic rebels in order to help them to overthrow the Syrian regime. According to the Guardian newspaper, Tory party officials stated that the Prime Minister now wants to put every possible measure to remove Assad "back on the table".

Cameron was in the region on a mission to hawk military hardware to middle eastern despots when he visited the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.  Cameron cited the "appalling stories" of suffering as his reason for trying to escalate the bloody civil war by selling British made weapons to one side of the conflict.

There are so many problems with this "we must arm the rebels to end the suffering" justification narrative it is literally mind boggling.

The unarmed prisoners of war in this picture were machine gunned to death.
 The UK Prime Minister David Cameron now wants to allow British arms companies
  to provide weapons to the Islamic fanatics that committed this war crime.

The first criticism is that funnelling arms into a conflict zone in order to put an end to human suffering is akin to pouring petrol onto a campfire because you don't want the wood to burn. You would really have to be an idiot to be taken in by the argument that arming one side of a conflict would reduce the level of human suffering more than efforts to enforce an arms embargo on both sides and to seek diplomatic solutions. It is repeatedly claimed that Iran and Russia are arming the Syrian side, however little mention is made in the western mainstream media of where the rebel forces are obtaining their weapons (or their soldiers for that matter). The fact is, that the rebels are being funded and armed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (all recipients of British arms). Any attempt to bypass weapons embargoes to provide British arms directly to the rebel forces would certainly give a strong and clear signal to Assad's allies that openly supporting one side of the conflict with weapons is now a completely legitimate strategy.

The next criticism is that the argument that the UK should be providing arms to the rebels shows a distinct lack of understanding of (or concern about) who the rebels actually are. The rebel forces do have many Syrian fighters, but there are plenty of foreign Islamic militants too, including Iraqi Al Qaida, and Islamic militias from Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It is truly remarkable to see the UK lurch from "The War on Terrorism" to arguing in favour of providing weapons to exactly the same international terrorist brigade, this time engaged in a bloody civil war that the Assad regime rightly describe as a terrorist insurrection led by foreign Islamic militants.

It shows a disgraceful level of British hypocrisy that our leaders would engage in a decade long occupation of Afghanistan in order to "stamp out terrorism", then fund and support terrorist groups in Libya and argue the case to do exactly the same for the Islamic terrorist groups in Syria. This is not to say that I support the fallen Qaddafi regime in Libya or the dictatorial Assad regime in Syria. It is a simple observation that when Islamic militants fight against British and American interests, they are "terrorists" that must be eradicated, but when they fight against Libyan or Syrian interests they are "heroes" that must be armed and supported. If Cameron can't understand how ugly this hypocrisy looks to the Islamic world, he must be suffering from some severe form of DoubleThink.

So Cameron's "argument" is that because he has heard first hand accounts of the suffering of anti-Assad refugees in Jordan, the right course of action is to arm the anti-Assad militants and, in theory, bring an end to the conflict. I've already explained why this strategy would probably just end up escalating and intensifying the conflict by giving the green light to pro-Assad outsiders to openly arm the Syrian regime too, however there is another important factor, and one that Cameron and the mainstream British media tend to overlook. There is plenty of suffering on the other side too. Take the postal workers that were thrown off the roof of a high rise building in Aleppo or the bleeding and clearly tortured prisoners that were machine gunned to death in front of a baying mob of Islamic fanatics there in July (WARNING direct link to graphic video). There was another brutal execution of clearly surrendered prisoners in Saraqeb, which happened just a few days before Cameron started demanding that British arms companies be allowed to provide weapons to the very groups responsible for these grotesque massacres. The UN have described these extra-judicial killings as war crimes, yet David Cameron is desperate to allow British arms companies to sell weapons to the people responsible. Are we sure that arming war criminals that have engaged in countless massacres of surrendered prisoners and civilians is actually going to "reduce the suffering"?

We should fund the Islamic militias in Syria
because funding the Islamic militias in Afghanistan
during the 1980s worked so bloody well didn't it?

Another factor to consider is the disastrous consequences of previous attempts by western forces to provide arms and support to Islamic fanatics. In the 1980s the CIA funded the Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan in order to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union. One of these Mujahideen fighters was a certain Osama Bin Laden, who was still being lavishly praised by the Western media in 1993 as a freedom fighter and a hero. This case alone is enough to make a strong argument that the direct provision of arms and support to Islamic fanatics can have extremely serious unintended long-term consequences. To see the UK and the USA engaged in supporting another proxy-war (via the western client states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey) because the interests of the Islamic militias once again align with the interests of the West should be utterly shocking to anyone that still believes the absurd "War on Terrorism" narrative. What level of cognitive bias does it take for someone to support the campaign against Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan and to also want to provide material support to an Islamic terrorist uprising in Syria?

Another argument against Cameron's "we must arm the rebels to end the suffering" narrative is that the story of Cameron becoming overwhelmed with sympathy for the plight of the Syrian people is just not believable. Given that his government is steadfastly refusing to stop the Atos DLA disability witch-hunt, at least until an inquiry has been held into the fact that 73 disabled people a week are dying after being declared "fit for work" shows that he is not even capable of empathy towards the most vulnerable of his own countrymen and their families. What would make anyone believe that he is capable of greater empathy towards a bunch of foreigners?

Cameron's lame justification narrative for his desire to arm the rebels is so full of gaping flaws (including the fact that it doesn't even make sense at the most fundamental level) it is astonishing. The narrative that "we must arm the rebels to end the suffering" is clearly just a hastily cobbled together smokescreen to obscure Cameron's real reasons for wanting to bypass the EU arms embargo.

When we consider what Cameron's real motivations are, it is important to remember exactly what he was in the region to do. He went to the middle east to help British arms companies broker contracts with pro-western despotic regimes such as the UAE, Oman, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That last name is very significant, as mentioned earlier, Saudi Arabia is one of the major sources of arms and funds to the Syrian uprising.

This brings us to Cameron's real reason for wanting to fund the rebels. He's seen what an enormous amount of money is flowing into Syria from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the blessing of the United States, and he wants to ensure that British arms dealers get a lucrative slice of this disgusting Syrian blood pie.

See also 
  
What is... a justification narrative?
 

  Tory policy: All narrative, no substance
   
The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and Lord Sempill
  
What is... confirmation bias?