TBR News February 12, 2017

Feb 11 2017

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. February 12, 2017: “What the fuzzy-brained liberals, provoked and funded by rich foreigners, do not wish to address is the fact that an enormous flood of ignorant refugees pouring into the United States, and then promptly signing up for welfare, free food and cheap housing, would have a devastating impact on an already depressed national economy.

But liberals, being liberals, do not see this and wail and moan about how the cruel and evil President Trump is tormenting wonderful, different, people.

Our spiritual brothers! Sing ‘Kumbaya’ children!

Pictures in the captive press of weeping women clutching photogenic babies are supposed to move a nation to opening its hearts to such wonderful new non-citizens.

Who will be expected, of course, to vote for liberal candidates in future elections.

What the fuzzies do not realize is that the bulk of Americans are tired of public gay marriages, uni-sex lavatories, free-loading immigrants, both legal and illegal, vapid praise, and virtual worship, of all minorities no matter of how ignorant, criminal or useless, a very bad national educational system which loads its unsuspecting hopefuls with overwhelming debt and many more negativities.

But reality is always far distant from the bleaters but, most important, is to the rest of domestic society.

Donald Trump was legally elected to the Presidency but the business oligarchy and their thoroughly corrupt American bureaucrats are determined, by energizing the dim of wit,  to ruin him, block him at every turn from attempting to govern and replace him with something like Hillary Clinton, who though thoroughly obnoxious and far from honest, is at least easy to control.

And the Puppet Master will go too far in his hysterical attempts to unseat Trump and then can be packed, alive, in an air-tight rubber bag and returned to the country of his birth. By a slow boat.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Rep. Maxine Waters: Trump Must Be Impeached Because Putin Invaded Korea!
  • US authorities detain hundreds in immigration raids
  • Thousands of refugees could be barred from US despite ruling on travel ban
  • NYT: Unlike Russian Wars, US Wars ‘Promote Freedom and Democracy’
  • Bravo, Donald! The Imperial City Can’t Stand The Truth About Its ‘Bloody Hands’
  • Bringing Freedom and Liberty to All!
  • German firm refuses key component for US grenade launcher over 1868 international law
  • Saudi Lobbyists Recruiting Veterans to Kill 9/11 Lawsuit
  • Why Democrats can’t just obstruct their way back into power
  • The Forward Base Falcon Disaster and the MV Iran Deyanat cover-up

 

Rep. Maxine Waters: Trump Must Be Impeached Because Putin Invaded Korea!

February 6, 2017

by Daniel McAdams

AntiWar

It is often not fully understood just how ignorant most US Representatives are when it comes to the finer details of foreign policy. Members get their news from an even narrower pool of information than many Americans, who are by and large abandoning the mainstream media. They read the Washington Post or they rely on their staffers, who read the Washington Post. Most Members enjoy being considered experts in the issues upon which they are voting, but the fact is they are very poorly informed.

However, there are gradations of moderately badly informed to “whaaat??!?? Did she really say that???” badly informed.

Those are the murky waters we often navigate when we sample the wit and wisdom of Rep. Maxine Waters, a 13-term Democrat from Los Angeles.

In a press conference last Friday, Rep. Waters did not disappoint. Asked by the media why she called for the impeachment of President Trump when he has not yet been a month in office, Rep. Waters replied, “I am not calling for the impeachment yet. He’s doing it himself.”

She continued:

“Let me just say the statement I made was a statement in response to questions and pleas that I am getting from many citizens across this country. What are we going to do? How can a president, who is acting in the manner that he’s acting, whether he’s talking about the travel ban, the way that he’s talking to Muslims, or whether he’s talking about his relationship to Putin, and the Kremlin – and knowing that they have hacked our D-triple-C – DNC, and knowing that he is responsible for supplying the bombs that killed innocent children and families in, um – in, um– yeah, in Aleppo.

And the fact that he is wrapping his arms around Putin while Putin is continuing to advance into Korea – I think that he is leading himself into that kind of position where folks will begin to ask, what are we going to do? And the answer is going to be, eventually, we’ve got to do something about him. We cannot continue to have a president who’s acting in this manner. It’s dangerous to the United States of America.”

Watching the video, the word “Aleppo” was thrown at her from the press corps when she couldn’t remember where she was (falsely) accusing Putin of killing innocent women and children.

But what was a real attention-getter was her accusation that President Trump must be impeached because President Putin invaded Korea. The conspiracy theorists angry about Hillary’s loss have invented all manner of bizarre explanations accusing Putin of masterminding the Trump victory, but thus far no one has accused Putin of invading Korea.

She meant “Crimea” you might say. Don’t be so sure. Members should be given a blank map whenever they talk with presumed authority about anywhere abroad. They should be forced to find the place they are about to start talking about before the microphone is switched on. If they can’t, they shouldn’t.

US authorities detain hundreds in immigration raids

US authorities have arrested hundreds of migrants across five states. Officials have called the operations “routine” but immigration advocates say it signals a more aggressive policy under President Donald Trump.

February 11, 2017

DW

Hundreds of undocumented migrants were arrested in the US this week as President Donald Trump’s hardline stand on immigration appears to be being put into action.

The US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency conducted a series of immigration sweeps across Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. While the agency did not release the total number of detainees, a spokesman for the Atlanta office said it had arrested 200 people, while the director of enforcement and removal for the Los Angeles field office, David Marin, said his office counted 161 arrests.

This week’s raids sparked concerns among immigration advocates and families. The sweep comes on the heels of Trump’s executive order barring refugees and migrants from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. The order is currently on hold after a District Court judge in Seattle ordered a temporary halt to the ban.

“The fear coursing through immigrant homes and the native-born Americans who love immigrants as friends and family is palpable,” the executive director of the National Immigration Forum, Ali Noorani, said in a statement. “Reports of raids in immigrant communities are a grave concern.”

Business as usual?

Authorities have refuted claims that this week’s raids mark a step-up in enforcement under Trump, saying they are simply enforcing laws and conducting “routine” sweeps against immigrants who are in the country illegally or have criminal records. The raids, they say, are no different to what was enforced under former President Barack Obama.

Marin described this week’s operations as an “enforcement surge” and said that “rash of recent reports about purported ICE checkpoints and random sweeps are false, dangerous, and irresponsible.”

This week’s operation was in the planning stages “before the administration came out with their current executive orders,” Marin said, adding that only five of the 161 people arrested in southern California would not have been deportation priorities under Obama.

Immigration in the Trump era

The Obama administration also took a hardline on illegal immigrants. While the government prioritized illegal immigrants posing a risk to national security or public safety, the US still deported more than 2 million people during Obama’s eight years in office. In 2012 alone, the US deported a record 409,000 people.

Trump’s order, however, has broadened the categories of people targeted for deportation.

Signed five days after Trump took office, the new executive order makes any illegal immigrant living in the US a priority for deportation, above all those with outstanding deportation orders. Trump also said the enforcement priorities would include legal immigrants who had been convicted of a criminal offence.

Michael Kagan, a professor of immigration law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, warned that this week’s sweeping arrests could signal the start of a more aggressive enforcement.

“It sounds as if the majority are people who would have been priorities under Obama as well,” Kagan said. “But the others may indicate the first edge of a new wave of arrests and deportations.”

Thousands of refugees could be barred from US despite ruling on travel ban

Ninth circuit court’s decision does not apply to Trump’s effort to cut in half the number of refugees resettled in US each year

February 11, 2017

by Oliver Laughland

The Guardian

New York-Thursday’s ninth circuit appellate court ruling to uphold a nationwide restraining order on Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban was heralded as a major blow to the administration and a victory for migrant rights advocates and refugee resettlement agencies across the country.

In many respects the ruling has left the administration in a state of disarray. Though he had vowed to fight the ruling in court, on Friday, the president said he was considering signing a “brand new” executive order on immigration instead.

Migrants and refugees with valid documentation from the seven targeted Muslim-majority countries have been allowed to enter the United States as the Department of Homeland Security announced last week it would obey the federal court order.

But the restraining order itself only applies to certain sections of Trump’s sprawling executive action, and does not apply to the president’s directive to vastly curtail the number of refugees resettled in the US each year by more than half.

Trump’s executive order, announced two weeks ago, was in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s pledge last September to significantly increase the United States’ annual resettlement targets to 110,000 for the 2017 fiscal year, which began in October 2016. The state department responded to Obama’s order by accelerating the rate of heavily vetted refugee arrivals to meet this target. By the first quarter of 2017, the US had admitted 25,671 refugees, compared with 13,791 the year before.

This increased volume of resettlements is set to collide with elements of Trump’s controversial order that have remained intact, namely the decision to limit the annual intake of refugees to 50,000 a year. If the US continues to accept refugees at the rate it has done for the first quarter, it will reach the 50,000 cap by March – meaning the resettlement program will effectively be suspended anyway until October 2017.

David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies working in America, said on Thursday that the appellate court ruling would allow his organisation to “get back to work resettling refugees”. But seen in the context of Trump’s drastic cap the picture may be more complicated. The latest statistics show that by the end of January 2017 the US had already resettled more than 32,000 people.

Questions also remain over the tens of thousands of refugees currently referred by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, for resettlement to the US. Last year the agency referred a record number of refugees to the federal government, indicative of the magnitude of the world’s refugee crisis, which has left more than 65 million people displaced across the world. The average vetting time for these referrals is 18 months to two years to complete – meaning the vast majority are still in the so-called resettlement pipeline. The UN has referred more than 60,000 Syrian refugees to the US for vetting alone. Last year the agency referred more than 7,000 Somalis and 7,000 Iraqis for vetting.

Even if Trump’s order is eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, it will still have the ability to turn down thousands of the world’s neediest people from the areas he targeted in the order last month.

NYT: Unlike Russian Wars, US Wars ‘Promote Freedom and Democracy’

February 9, 2017

by Adam Johnson

fair.org

The New York Times, in its recent rebuff of comments President Donald Trump made about Russia, seems not to have evolved its understanding of US geopolitics past an 8th grade level. Trump had been asked by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly (2/5/17) why he wouldn’t condemn Vladimir Putin, whom O’Reilly called a “killer.”

“You got a lot of killers,” Trump told O’Reilly. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

Naturally, this prompted a torrent of pearl-clutching from liberal patriots aghast that the president could equate the moral worth of the United States with that of the dastardly Russians. Most prominent among these was the New York Times, whose editorial board published a flag-waving scolding called “Blaming America First” (2/7/17):

Asserting the moral and political superiority of the United States over Russia has not traditionally been a difficult maneuver for American presidents. But rather than endorsing American exceptionalism, Mr. Trump seemed to appreciate Mr. Putin’s brutality—which includes bombing civilians in Syria and, his accusers allege, responsibility for a trail of dead political opponents and journalists at home—and suggested America acts the same way.

Oh my, the horror.

A rough look at the actions in question since Putin has been in office reveals this outrage to be, at best, misplaced. One tally by Airwars, a Western nonprofit, puts the total number of Syrian civilians killed by Russia since it entered the war in September 2015 at just over 4,000, or 0.8–0.4 percent of the 500,000 to 1 million civilians who died due to George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003. Add to this the thousands of other civilians killed in other theaters of the “War on Terror” under the Bush and Obama administrations, including Afghanistan, Libya and Syria itself, and the idea of pointing to respect for civilian lives as something that elevates the United States above Russia seems a little absurd.

But the addition of stifling dissent and allegedly killing journalists takes Russia over the line into Bad Guy territory, the Times suggests—ignoring the US’s own harsh punishment for whistleblowers, infiltration of dissident groups and bombing of foreign journalists. Not to mention the US’s sprawling, unprecedented incarceration system, or its unmatched institutional racism–all human right abuses leveled at home.

The Times goes on to insist that “no American president has done what Mr. Putin has done,” including “invading Ukraine” and “interfering in the American election.” Of course, American presidents have invaded other countries and intervened in other elections, but for reasons unclear, the Times suggests that those two cases are the ones that indicate the US’s moral superiority over Russia.

The New York Times briefly mentions the Iraq War and torture, but whistles past these episodes by insisting they were “terrible mistakes.” The Times seems to be under the impression that Russia kills innocents for laughs, while the United States does so only with the best of intentions:

At least in recent decades, American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results, as when Germany and Japan evolved after World War II from vanquished enemies into trusted, prosperous allies.

That US invasions “have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy” is not argued, let alone proved; it’s presented as an article of faith. As the Times’ “recent decades” go back to World War II, the United States presumably killed an estimated 3.8 million in Vietnam “to promote freedom and democracy”—despite President Dwight Eisenhower admitting that given the chance, 80 percent of the Vietnamese people would have voted for Ho Chi Minh, the leader whose government the US opposed. Implicitly, the US’s use of covert terror to try to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua, and US military support for death squad regimes elsewhere in Central America, were likewise motivated by a longing for freedom and democracy.

As FAIR (9/30/16) has noted, the most important function of major editorial boards is to be gatekeepers of national security orthodoxy. And there is no more axiomatic orthodoxy than American exceptionalism. One can handwring over “mistakes,” even occasionally do harsh reporting on American war crimes—so long as one arrives back at the position of American moral superiority. “Yes, America has made mistakes,” the good liberal insists, “but at least we don’t do this other bad thing that is, unaccountably, uniquely disqualifying.”

Clearly, Trump’s motives in questioning American innocence were anything but liberal or noble. He was evoking America’s own sins not to challenge them, but to apologize for those of the Russian president and, preemptively, his own. But the outrage over Trump’s comments from pundits and editorial boards did not seek to spotlight his cynicism and its dark implications, but rather to insist that the United States is, in fact, on a higher moral plane than Russia. This is a childish assertion that serves to flatter the ego of American readers while legitimizing their government’s crimes.

Bravo, Donald! The Imperial City Can’t Stand The Truth About Its ‘Bloody Hands’

February 11, 2017

by David Stockman

AntiWar

When President Trump blurted out the truth about Washington’s “bloody hands” during his interview with Bill O’Reilly this weekend, the mainstream media, Imperial City politicians and War Party factotums instantly broke into a chorus of spleen-busting outrage.

Now they are remonstrating and harrumphing feverishly because Trump called out Washington’s monumental conceit about “American exceptionalism”.

As it happened, Fox News’ #1 bloviator and all around jackass responded to Trump’s eminently sensible suggestion of cooperation with Putin in the campaign against ISIS with what amounted to a verbal sucker punch:

O’Reilly: “But he’s a killer though. Putin’s a killer.”

Trump shrugged the comment off, saying: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?”

Truer words have never been spoken in the Imperial City – at least since the post-Vietnam era of the 1970’s.

Back then, Washington’s bloody hands in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians and the sacrifice of 58,000 American soldiers for no earthly reason could not be denied. For a few years, anyway, the people saw through the lies and propaganda of the Warfare State, and their elected representatives seemed to harken to Eisenhower’s warning about “undue influence” of the military-industry complex.

Congress actually throttled the defense budget by 30% in real terms, investigated and exposed the CIA’s illegal interventions and coups, and, via the Boland Amendment in the 1980s, even forbade covert actions to undermine the democratically-elected government in Nicaragua.

Indeed, by the end of that decade the specious “domino theory” propagated in the 1950s by the evil Dulles brothers during their tenures heading the CIA and State department had collapsed completely. The Soviet Union was not conquering the world one country at a time. Instead, the laws of free markets and personal liberty were inexorably sweeping the mutant Soviet state toward the dustbin of history.

Yet it was on the actual disappearance of the Soviet military threat after 1991 that the naked power lurking behind General Eisenhower’s prescient warning fully manifested itself. That is, when Boris Yeltsin starred down the Red Army, and when the aging communist oligarchs in Beijing realized that the printing press and export mercantilism, not the barrel of a gun, were more likely to guarantee their rule in the impoverished economy and starving countryside that was Mao’s horrendous legacy, Imperial Washington was left without an enemy.

And so it invented one through a policy of global hegemony. Washington declared itself, as the world’s only superpower, to be the “indispensable nation”. It began to aggressively impose its will on the nations of the Persian Gulf and Middle East, the Balkans and elsewhere, and for obvious reasons.

None of these petty disputes were material to the safety and security of the American people in their homeland. It didn’t matter a whit whether Kosovo was a province of Serbia or the majority Albanians or whether the greedy Emir of Kuwait or the brutal dictator of the artificial and unnecessary state of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, owned the drilling rights to the Rumaila oilfields which straddled their borders.

Yet without a tangible threat to national security, the vast conventional war machine that Ronald Reagan had inadvertently brought back to life in his mistaken defense build-up – and all the related apparatus of the American imperium in the CIA, State Department, foreign aid and security assistance and the various agencies of US propaganda – would have been pointless and redundant.

The post-communist world of the early 1990s was thus a mortal threat to their power, budgets and existence. So as we documented at length in Part 3 of Trumped! the CIA and its auxiliaries and cohorts in the Deep State demonized Iran, Saddam Hussein and eventually the rulers of Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, among others, in order to block the kind of full-bore military demobilization that was warranted by the vastly more pacific state of the world after 1991.

The resulting interventions, invasions and occupations succeeded wildly from the perspective of the Warfare State. To wit, not only did this destroy nation after nation and turn the greater middle east into a hell-hole of economic ruin and physical rubble, sectarian strife and anti-western blowback and murderous vengefulness, but it fostered in Washington an overweening arrogance and self-righteousness like nothing the world had seen since Imperial Rome.

In fact, check the modern history books. During the cold war decades when America had real industrial state enemies and the nuclear Sword of Damocles hung over the planet, the Washington foreign policy narrative was mainly about sober realism and avoidance of nuclear Armageddon. There was not much breast-beating about American exceptionalism and self-righteous moralizing.

To that end, Eisenhower came near to a major disarmament agreement with Kruschev in late 1959 and early 1960 and Johnson tried again with his meeting on US soil in Glassboro, New Jersey with Kosygin in 1967. Likewise, Nixon went to Moscow and signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) agreement with Brezhnev in May 1972 – not long after his historic meeting with Mao earlier that year in Beijing.

In short, most of today’s insufferable cant about American exceptionalism emerged during the last 25 years after the cold war ended. That’s when neocon ideology caused Washington to wreak murderous high-tech military destruction on much of the greater middle east – from Kabul to Tripoli – and then to justify it with an utterly spurious theory of moral superiority.

Any nation that has inflicted the pointless and wanton destruction that is evident in the Pashtun homelands of Afghanistan, the rubble that remains in Anbar Province of Iraq or the wreckage of Aleppo and Benghazi is not exceptional at all; it has blood on its hands like few empires that went before.

So after Donald Trump by inadvertence or honesty, as the case my be, stated the obvious, Imperial Washington came down on his head with rhetorical guns blazing. The archetypical expression came for the Wall Street Journal‘s insufferable neocon warmonger, Bret Stephens, who tweeted,

“Trumps puts US on moral par with Putin’s Russia. Never in history has a President slandered his country like this……”

The truth undoubtedly hurts, but moral equivalence was not even Trump’s point. If anything, he was just suggesting that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And that, more to the point, whatever Putin has done or hasn’t done in his own country is no basis for America’s foreign policy nor does it bear on the safety and security of the American people.

Within hours, however, every robo-writer of headlines and all the Kool-Aid drinking pundits were gesticulating loudly about Trump’s alleged “moral equivalence” outrage.

Not to be outdone from the right, Nancy Pelosi piled-on with even more hysterical rhetoric:

“I want to know what the Russians have on Donald Trump. I think we have to have an investigation by the FBI into his financial, personal and political connections to Russia and we want to see his tax returns so we can have truth in the relationship [with] Putin, whom he admires……”

Right. For the sin of stating the obvious truth about Imperial Washington’s bloody hegemony and Putin’s self-evidently reasonable fear of NATO’s provocative encroachments on his borders – including the US instigated overthrow of a Russia-friendly government in its historic Ukrainian vassal state – the entire Washington establishment has come down on the Donald like a ton of bricks.

Yet the foolish boys and girls of Wall Street continue their daredevil antics in the stock market on the hideously erroneous theory that Donald Trump is going to preside over a renaissance of the American economy.

There is no point in asking about what they are smoking. Donald Trump is not going to usher in a giant Fiscal Stimulus or preside over anything that resembles a revival of capitalist prosperity.

Imperial Washington has flat-out gone mad in its delusional self-righteousness and risible claims that the wanton destruction inflicted on the world by current US policy is justified by American exceptionalism. Its response to the O’Reilly interview is just one more piece of evidence that Trump will not be allowed to govern – or even remain in the Oval Office for much of his term.

You have been warned to get out of the casino.

Again.

Bringing Freedom and Liberty to All!

A short history of US forceful military actions, worldwide and domestic, for over a hundred years

February 11, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

1890 SOUTH DAKOTA

Troops- 300 Lakota Indians massacred at Wounded Knee.

1890 ARGENTINA

Troops- Buenos Aires interests protected.

1891 CHILE

Troops- Marines clash with nationalist rebels.

1891 HAITI

Troops- Black workers revolt on U.S.-claimed Navassa Island defeated.

1892 IDAHO

Troops- Army suppresses silver miners’ strike.

1893 HAWAII

Naval, troops- Independent kingdom overthrown, annexed.

1894 CHICAGO

Troops- Breaking of rail strike, 34 killed.

1894 NICARAGUA

Troops- Month-long occupation of Bluefields.

1894 CHINA

Naval, troops- Marines land in Sino-Japanese War.

1894-96 KOREA

Troops- Marines kept in Seoul during war.

1895 PANAMA

Troops, naval- Marines land in Colombian province.

1896 NICARAGUA

Troops- Marines land in port of Corinto.

1898-1900 CHINA

Troops- Boxer Rebellion fought by foreign armies.

1898-1910 PHILIPPINES

Naval, troops- Seized from Spain, killed 600,000 Filipinos.

1898-1902 CUBA

Naval, troops- Seized from Spain, still hold Navy base.

1898 PUERTO RICO

Naval, troops

Seized from Spain, occupation continues.

1898 GUAM

Naval, troops- Seized from Spain, still in use as military base.

1898 MINNESOTA

Troops- Army battles Chippewa at Leech Lake.

1898 NICARAGUA

Troops- Marines land at port of San Juan del Sur.

1899 SAMOA

Troops- Battle over succession to throne.

1899 NICARAGUA

Troops- Marines land at port of Bluefields.

1899-1901 IDAHO

Troops- Army occupies Coeur d’Alene mining region.

1901 OKLAHOMA

Troops- Army battles Creek Indian revolt.

1901-14 PANAMA

Naval, troops- Broke off from Colombia 1903, annexed Canal Zone 1914-99.

1903 HONDURAS

Troops- Marines intervene in revolution.

1903-04 DOMINICAN REP.

Troops- U.S. interests protected in Revolution.

1904-05 KOREA

Troops- Marines land in Russo-Japanese War.

1906-09 CUBA

Troops- Marines land in democratic election.

1907 NICARAGUA

Troops- “Dollar Diplomacy” protectorate set up.

1907 HONDURAS

Troops- Marines land during war with Nicaragua.

1908 PANAMA

Troops- Marines intervene in election contest.

1910 NICARAGUA

Troops- Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto.

1911 HONDURAS

Troops- U.S. interests protected in civil war.

1911-41 CHINA

 

Naval, troops- Continuous occupation with flare-ups.

1912 CUBA

Troops- U.S. interests protected in Havana.

19l2 PANAMA

Troops- Marines land during heated election.

19l2 HONDURAS

Troops- Marines protect U.S. economic interests.

1912-33 NICARAGUA

Troops, bombing-20-year occupation, fought guerrillas.

19l3 MEXICO

Naval- Americans evacuated during revolution.

1914 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Naval- Fight with rebels over Santo Domingo.

1914 COLORADO

Troops- Breaking of miners’ strike by Army.

1914-18 MEXICO

Naval, troops- Series of interventions against nationalists.

1914-34 HAITI

Troops, bombing- 19-year occupation after revolts.

1916-24 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Troops-8-year Marine occupation.

1917-33 CUBA

Troops-Military occupation, economic protectorate.

19l7-18 WORLD WAR I

Naval, troops- Ships sunk, fought Germany  and Austria-Hungary

1918-22 RUSSIA

Naval, troops- Five landings to fight Bolsheviks.

1918-20 PANAMA

Troops-“Police duty” during unrest after elections.

1919 YUGOSLAVIA

Troops- Marines intervene for Italy against Serbs in Dalmatia.

1919 HONDURAS

Troops- Marines land during election campaign.

1920 GUATEMALA

Troops- 2-week intervention against unionists.

1920-21 WEST VIRGINIA

Troops, bombing- Army intervenes against mineworkers.

1922 TURKEY

Troops-Fought nationalists in Smyrna (Izmir).

1922-27 CHINA

Naval, troops- Deployment during nationalist revolt.

1924-25 HONDURAS

Troops- Landed twice during election strife.

1925 PANAMA

Troops- Marines suppress general strike.

1927-34 CHINA

Troops- Marines stationed throughout the country.

1932 EL SALVADOR

Naval- Warships sent during Faribundo Marti revolt.

1932 WASHINGTON DC

Troops- Army stops WWI vet bonus protest by force.

1941-45 WORLD WAR II

Naval, troops, bombing, nuclear Fought Axis for 3 years; 1st nuclear war.

1943 DETROIT

Troops- Army puts down Black rebellion.

1946 IRAN

Nuclear threat- Soviet troops told to leave north (Iranian Azerbaijan).

1946 YUGOSLAVIA

Naval- Response to shooting-down of U.S. plane.

1947 URUGUAY

Nuclear threat- Bombers deployed as show of strength.

1947-49 GREECE

Command operation- U.S. directs extreme-right in civil war.

1948-49 CHINA

Troops- Marines evacuate Americans before Communist victory.

1948 GERMANY

Nuclear threat-Atomic-capable bombers guard Berlin Airlift.

1948-54 PHILIPPINES

Command operation- CIA directs war against Huk Rebellion.

1950 PUERTO RICO

Command operation- Independence rebellion crushed in Ponce.

1950-53 KOREA

Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats-U.S.& South Korea fight China & North Korea to stalemate; A-bomb threat in 1950, & vs. China in 1953. Still have bases.

1953 IRAN

Command operation-CIA overthrows democracy, installs Shah.

1954 VIETNAM

Nuclear threat- Bombs offered to French to use against siege.

1954 GUATEMALA

Command operation, bombing, nuclear threat CIA directs exile invasion after new gov’t nationalizes U.S. company lands; bombers based in Nicaragua.

1956 EGYPT

Nuclear threat, troops- Soviets told to keep out of Suez crisis; Marines evacuate foreigners

1958 LEBANON

Troops, naval- Marine occupation against rebels.

1958 IRAQ

Nuclear threat- Iraq warned against invading Kuwait.

1958 CHINA

Nuclear threat-China told not to move on Taiwan isles.

1958 PANAMA

Troops- Flag protests erupt into confrontation.

1960-75 VIETNAM

Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; 1-2 million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in 1968 and 1969.

1961 CUBA

Command operation CIA-directed exile invasion fails.

1961 GERMANY

Nuclear threat Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.

1962 CUBA

Nuclear threat,Naval-Blockade during missile crisis; near-war with USSR.

1962 LAOS

Command operation- Military buildup during guerrilla war.

1964 PANAMA

Troops-Panamanians shot for urging canal’s return.

1965 INDONESIA

 

Command operation Million killed in CIA-assisted army coup.

1965-66 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Troops, bombing- Marines land during election campaign.

1966-67 GUATEMALA

Command operation Green Berets intervene against rebels.

1967 DETROIT

Troops-Army battles Blacks, 43 killed.

1968 UNITED STATES

Troops-After Martin Luther King is shot; over 21,000 soldiers in cities.

1969-75 CAMBODIA

Bombing, troops, naval Up to 2 million killed in decade of bombing, starvation, and political chaos.

1970 OMAN

Command operation U.S. directs Iranian marine invasion.

1971-73 LAOS

Command operation, bombing U.S. directs South Vietnamese invasion; “carpet-bombs” countryside.

1973 SOUTH DAKOTA

Command operation Army directs Wounded Knee siege of Lakotas.

1973 MIDEAST

Nuclear threat World-wide alert during Mideast War.

1973 CHILE

Command operation CIA-backed coup ousts and kills elected Marxist president.

1975 CAMBODIA

Troops, bombing Gas captured ship, 28 die in copter crash.

1976-92 ANGOLA

Command operation CIA assists South African-backed rebels.

1980 IRAN

Troops, nuclear threat, aborted bombing- Raid to rescue Embassy hostages;  8 troops die in copter-plane crash. Soviets warned not to get involved in revolution.

1981 LIBYA

Naval jets- Two Libyan jets shot down in maneuvers.

1981-92 EL SALVADOR

Command operation, troops Advisors, overflights aid anti-rebel war, soldiers briefly involved in hostage clash.

1981-90 NICARAGUA

Command operation, naval CIA directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbor mines against revolution.

1982-84 LEBANON

Naval, bombing, troops Marines expel PLO and back Phalangists, Navy bombs and shells Muslim and Syrian positions.

1983-89 HONDURAS

Troops- Maneuvers help build bases near borders.

1983-84 GRENADA

Troops, bombing Invasion four years after revolution.

1984 IRAN

Jets- Two Iranian jets shot down over Persian Gulf.

1986 LIBYA

Bombing, naval Air strikes to topple nationalist gov’t.

1986 BOLIVIA

Troops- Army assists raids on cocaine region.

1987-88 IRAN

Naval, bombing US intervenes on side of Iraq in war.

1989 LIBYA

Naval jets- Two Libyan jets shot down.

1989 VIRGIN ISLANDS

Troops- St. Croix Black unrest after storm.

1989 PHILIPPINES

Jets- Air cover provided for government against coup.

1989-90 PANAMA

Troops, bombing- Nationalist government ousted by 27,000 soldiers, leaders arrested, 2,000+ civilians killed.

1990 LIBERIA

Troops-Foreigners evacuated during civil war.

1990-91 SAUDI ARABIA

Troops, jets Iraq countered after invading Kuwait; 540,000 troops also stationed in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Israel.

1990 IRAQ

Bombing, troops, naval Blockade of Iraqi and Jordanian ports, air strikes; 200,000+ killed in invasion of Iraq and Kuwait; no-fly zone over Kurdish north, Shiite south,   large-scale destruction of Iraqi military.

1991 KUWAIT

Naval, bombing, troops Kuwait royal family returned to throne.

1992 LOS ANGELES

Troops- Army, Marines deployed against anti-police uprising.

1992-94 SOMALIA

Troops, naval, bombing U.S.-led United Nations occupation during civil war; raids against one Mogadishu faction.

1992-94 YUGOSLAVIA

Naval-Nato blockade of Serbia and Montenegro.

1993-95 BOSNIA

Jets, bombing No-fly zone patrolled in civil war; downed jets, bombed Serbs.

1994-96 HAITI

Troops, naval-Blockade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup.

1995 CROATIA

Bombing- Krajina Serb airfields attacked before Croatian offensive.

1996-97 ZAIRE (CONGO)

Troops- Marines at Rwandan Hutu refuge camps, in area where Congo revolution begins.

1997 LIBERIA

Troops- Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

1997 ALBANIA

Troops- Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

1998 SUDAN

Missiles- Attack on pharmaceutical plant alleged to be “terrorist” nerve gas plant.

1998 AFGHANISTAN

Missiles- Attack on former CIA training camps used by Islamic fundamentalist groups alleged to have attacked embassies.

1998 IRAQ

Bombing, Missiles- Four days of intensive air strikes after weapons inspectors allege Iraqi obstructions.

1999 YUGOSLAVIA

Bombing, Missiles- Heavy NATO air strikes after Serbia declines to withdraw from Kosovo.

2000 YEMEN

Naval -Suicide bomb attack on USS Cole.

2001 MACEDONIA

Troops-NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels.

2001 UNITED STATES

Jets, naval- Response to hijacking attacks.

2001 AFGHANISTAN

Massive U.S. mobilization to attack Taliban, Bin Laden. War could expand to Iraq, Sudan, and beyond.

2003 IRAQ

Massive U.S. invasion to secure Iraqi oil. Iraqi Resistance kills over 3,000 U.S. troops, injures 15,000. Civilian losses between 15 and 30,000.

2003 LIBERIA 

Troops- Brief involvement in peacekeeping force as rebels drove out leader.

2004-05 HAITI

Troops, naval-   Marines & Army land after right-wing rebels oust elected President Aristide, who was advised to leave by Washington.

2005-? PAKISTAN

Missiles, bombing, covert operation CIA missile and air strikes and Special Forces raids on alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban refuge villages kill multiple civilians. Drone attacks also on Pakistani Mehsud network.

2006-? SOMALIA

Missiles, naval, troops, command operation Special Forces advise Ethiopian invasion that topples Islamist government; AC-130 strikes, Cruise missile attacks and helicopter raids against Islamist rebels; naval blockade against “pirates” and insurgents.

2008 SYRIA

Troops Special Forces in helicopter raid 5 miles from Iraq kill 8 Syrian civilians

2009-? YEMEN

Missiles, command operation Cruise missile attack on Al Qaeda kills 49 civilians; Yemeni military assaults on rebels

2011-? LIBYA

Bombing, missiles, troops, command operation NATO coordinates air strikes and missile attacks against Qaddafi government during uprising by rebel army. Periodic Special Forces raids against Islamist insurgents.

2014-? IRAQ

Bombing, missiles, troops, command operation

Air strikes and Special Forces intervene against Islamic State insurgents; training Iraqi and Kurdish troops.

2014-? SYRIA

Bombing, missiles, troops, command operation- Air strikes and Special Forces intervene against Islamic State anti-Syrian government insurgents; training other Syrian and IS insurgents.

German firm refuses key component for US grenade launcher over 1868 international law

February 11, 2017

RT

A German arms producer has refused to deliver key components for a new US grenade launcher, citing an 1868 convention prohibiting grenades being fired straight at a person. The German company is now facing penalties.

Mass production of the US, state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired grenade launcher XM25 has stalled since German company Heckler & Koch (H&K) has refused to deliver a key detail, fearing the weapon would hit people directly in violation of the 19th century international treaty, DPA reported.

Heckler & Koch is referring to 1868 St Petersburg international law convention that says grenades can’t be fired directly at a person. According to the document, grenades may be thrown at a building or near a person, but not straight at them.

The German company has already received €33 million (more than $35 million) for the services it failed to provide, according to ATK group. The Germans did deliver the launching mechanisms in question for the first test models, but the delivery didn’t go further after that.

Twelve years devoted to the development of the XM25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement System (CTDE) may result in nothing and now the US Orbital ATK group, the producer of the XM25, filed a lawsuit early February, going after €23 million in damages.

For now, the German company is demanding a declaration from ATK that would guarantee they would follow the international rule.

However, the US wasn’t a party to the 1868 convention and thus doesn’t find itself legally obliged to obey the rules listed there.

The rule, however, is “generally accepted,” and the US is not an exception, head of Heckler & Koch Norbert Scheuch stressed, Germany’s N-TV reported.

“I need legal certainty about the delivery, I don’t have it now. It’s not that we do not want to deliver, but we can’t deliver,” he added.

ATK Orbital responded by saying: “H&K is looking for excuses for its failure.”

The company had already delivered components for some prototypes, but “all of a sudden” started to talk about the convention only now.

The CTDE, a semi-automatic grenade launcher that fires grenades set to explode in mid-air or near a target, targeting enemies with shrapnel, was supposed to revolutionize the US army, its manufacturers said last year.

There has been high expectation for the grenade launcher that is reportedly capable of shooting around the corner.

The US Army called the XM25 a “number one materiel solution to mitigate a critical capability gap” for dismounted soldiers. The first production batch was supposed to include 105 launchers.

Saudi Lobbyists Recruiting Veterans to Kill 9/11 Lawsuit

Veterans told they’re shielding the U.S. military—in reality, they’re only protecting the Saudi monarchy

February 9, 2017

by Brian P. McGlinchey

28 Paages

Using misinformation and lots of cash, Saudi Arabia is recruiting well-meaning U.S. military veterans into its campaign to eviscerate a recently-passed law allowing 9/11 families to sue the monarchy for its alleged role in facilitating the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

It’s a brazen effort, considering 9/11 inspired so many veterans to enter military service. However, working through hired American proxies who don’t draw attention to their Saudi sponsorship, the kingdom is finding success by taking advantage of veterans’ patriotic instincts.

Specifically, lobbyists are telling veterans that, if other countries reciprocate by passing laws like the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), military service members and veterans will be sued in foreign courts.

Veterans who do their own research will discover an essential fact Saudi Arabia doesn’t want them to know: JASTA only allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments for supporting terrorism—not individuals.

Saudi lobbyists also falsely claim that JASTA is a major departure from the previous U.S. approach to sovereign immunity; in fact, it is a narrow adjustment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which already allowed Americans to sue foreign state sponsors of terror.

Veterans Enticed with Free Airfare and Luxury Hotels

Misleading arguments aren’t the only weapon in the Saudi arsenal—its lobbyists are also putting the kingdom’s deep pockets to work, reportedly enticing veterans to lobby legislators on the issue by picking up the tab for airfare and stays at luxury Washington hotels—specifically, the Trump International (a choice that raises thorny legal questions for the Trump administration).

Combat veteran Malachias Gaskin told Daily Caller that he was solicited via email to travel to Washington, and that his suitor was slow to reveal what cause he was being asked to join and who would be paying for his trip. After being asked to sign an online petition opposing JASTA, Gaskin researched the issue and concluded the law shouldn’t be amended or repealed. “I was like, ‘this is why they aren’t giving me information,’” said Gaskin.

Daily Caller also reported that Dauntless Communications, sub-contracted by PR giant Qorvis, operated a booth at a gun show in Reno, Nevada on January 28 and 29. Beneath a banner exhorting passers-by to “protect our troops from JASTA backlash,” the hosts gathered names of veterans and others who would help oppose JASTA. (Qorvis helps lead Saudi Arabia’s far-reaching public relations and lobbying effort.)

While some veterans are winging their way to Washington and staying at luxury hotels on the Saudi dime, others have been convinced to put their names on the bylines of anti-JASTA opinion pieces. Identical language in these pieces seems to indicate the presence of a behind-the-scenes ghost-writer.

For example, retired Air Force general William Russel Cotney “wrote” this for Nashville’s The Tennessean:

“The principle known as sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. In international relations, it preserves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

…while former Army medical specialist Angela Sinkovits “wrote” this for The Denver Post:

“The principle of sovereign immunity has governed relations between states for centuries. It holds that governments cannot be sued for civil wrongs without their consent. In international relations, it preserves the right and responsibility of governments to settle disputes with other governments on behalf of their citizens.”

Using Veterans to Silence 9/11 Families

Given their high standing in American society, veterans are extremely valuable in shaping public opinion and influencing legislators about a wide variety of issues. What’s remarkable in this instance is the fact that a foreign monarchy, accused of aiding the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on U.S. soil, is enlisting veterans to prevent the victims of that attack from presenting their evidence in a court of law.

That evidence includes 28 pages from a congressional 9/11 inquiry that were partially declassified in July 2016, revealing many financial and other connections between Saudi government officials, 9/11 hijackers and their close associates. The trail of clues points to high places: One of the officials who figures most heavily in the pages is the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Allegations of Saudi ties to terror don’t end with 9/11: Veterans of the war on terror should also note that a leaked 2014 email from Hillary Clinton said the government of Saudi Arabia was “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups.”

Family members of those killed in the 9/11 attacks have condemned Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of veterans. “We find the recently revealed actions made on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ‘co-opt our troops’…absolutely appalling,” said the September 11th Advocates, Kristen Breitweiser, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, in a statement issued yesterday.

McCain and Graham Aid the Saudi Cause

Perhaps one reason why Saudi Arabia’s fallacious arguments against JASTA have been successful with veterans is the fact that they’ve been embraced by a variety of current and former officials who’ve routinely protected the kingdom, such as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and Arizona’s John McCain.

In December, Graham and McCain introduced a measure that would amend JASTA and make it far harder for 9/11 families to pursue justice in the courtroom.

Graham once said he would hesitate to declassify those 28 pages on Saudi government links to the 9/11 attacks if doing so could “damage” the kingdom. Meanwhile, the Saudis appear to be very grateful for McCain’s ongoing support: In 2014, the Saudi embassy donated $1 million to the The McCain Institute for International Leadership.

Graham and McCain have been among Capitol Hill’s chief alarmists about alleged Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election. Seizing on that, and well aware of the duo’s anti-JASTA stance, the September 11th Advocates used their statement to demand equal scrutiny of Saudi influence on U.S. law:

“We call upon the leading voices in Congress who have spoken out regarding the dangers of foreign intervention (in U.S. politics)—Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham—to address these facts that have now come to light regarding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its actions to manipulate and use members of our armed forces against 9/11 family members and JASTA.”

Why Democrats can’t just obstruct their way back into power

February 11, 2017

by Aaron Blake

The Washington Post

Democrats are preparing to try to stop President Trump’s agenda at all costs. Senate Democrats have voted more and more in unison against Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and now there is even talk of an unprecedented filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. It’s what the party’s base is demanding right now.

But there is a difference between doing what feels good and what is strategically sound. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said it well this week: “You’ve got to pick which ones you’re going to fight about; not every pitch has to be swung at.”

To which some Democrats quickly respond: What about Republicans?

Republicans, they point out, stood firmly against most anything Barack Obama did for much of his presidency, and while they didn’t unseat him in 2012, they won back the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and after 2016 they’re in as powerful a position as they have ever been. Call it what you want — “obstruction” or “principled opposition” — it seems to have worked out quite well for the GOP.

But that’s not a sure sign that it will also work for Democrats.

The reason I say this is polarization in this country favors Republicans more than Democrats, at least when it comes to Congress. Republicans have something of an inherent advantage in both the House and Senate, and polarization helps reinforce those advantages these days.

Why? There are simply more red states and more red congressional districts. Republicans took over the House and Senate in recent years largely because they knocked off some of the final hangers-on among Democrats in conservative-leaning places. It first happened in the South; then it spread to Appalachia and the Midwest.

Thanks to that trend and that Republican-controlled state legislatures drew party-friendly U.S. House maps in many key states before the 2012 election, a straight-partisan vote for Congress pretty much ensures a Republican majority.

The 2016 election is a good example of this. Trump, as everyone knows, lost the popular vote by two full points, 48 percent to 46 percent. But despite that loss, he actually won 230 out of 435 congressional districts, compared with 205 for Hillary Clinton, according to numbers compiled by Daily Kos Elections. And in the Senate, he won 30 out of 50 states.

So basically, 53 percent of House districts are Republican and 60 out of 100 senators hail from red states, according to the 2016 election results (in which the GOP, again, lost the popular vote).

The question from there becomes how much — and how — Democrats will need to overcome this inherent disadvantage.

The median House district in this country in the 2016 election was Virginia’s 2nd District, which went for Trump by 3.4 points. Democrats hold just five districts that went stronger for Trump than that median district — a reflection of our polarization and how predictably these districts tend to mirror the national vote. So Democrats would need to win just about every district that went for Clinton or narrowly for Trump.

Republicans also have more districts “in the bag,” so to speak. Trump won 186 districts by double digits, compared with 171 for Clinton. And he won 211 districts by five or more points, compared with just 185 for Clinton.

Trump won majority of House districts, nearly half by 5+ points

So Trump won more districts by at least five points than Clinton won overall, and he won more districts by 10 points than Clinton won by at least five. If we consider every district decided by less than 10 points in 2016 to be a battleground, Democrats need to win more than 60 percent of them to win the House majority back. And if you define the battleground more narrowly as every district decided by five points or fewer, Democrats need to win 85 percent of them.

What a lot of people don’t realize about the Republicans’ big wins in 2010 and 2014 is that they didn’t really penetrate a whole lot of Democratic territory. Here’s what I wrote when there was some chatter about Democrats retaking the House last year:

… in the big GOP wave of 2014, Republicans only took over four districts that leaned toward Democrats, according to the Cook Political Voting Index (PVI). Were Democrats to win back the House this year, they would likely have to win a dozen or more seats that clearly lean toward Republicans, just by virtue of how friendly the map is to Republicans (both because of natural partisan sorting and gerrymandering). Republicans have an inherent advantage in holding the House that serves as essentially a sand dune beating back whatever wave Democrats can produce.

And that’s even more the case in the Senate, where Democrats’ path back to the majority in 2018 is difficult, to say the least. Given the states that are holding elections, Democrats will need to reelect every Democratic senator in big Trump states like Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, while also stealing GOP seats in Arizona, Nevada and a heavily Trump state like Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas. Are they really going to do that if they go against everything Trump does?

What got the GOP over the top in 2010 and 2014 was largely nailing down districts and states that, in a strictly partisan world, would have been theirs in the first place. Being partisan in Congress seems to have helped them accomplish that task.

But for Democrats, being completely partisan and playing to their base without expanding the party’s appeal has less upside when it comes to winning House and Senate majorities. That’s not to say they can’t do it — just that the strategic road map Republicans used doesn’t necessarily apply to Democrats.

The Forward Base Falcon Disaster and the MV Iran Deyanat cover-up

February 11, 2017

by Arthur Royster

Late on the evening of October 10, 2006, Iraqi resistance groups lobbed mortar and rocket rounds into the immense ‘Forward Base Falcon,’ the largest American military base in Iraq. In addition to accurate mortar fire, Grad and Katyusha rockets were also used.

Falcon base was designed to house a large contingent of American troops, mostly drawn from the 4th Infantry Division, stationed at Ft. Bliss, Texas. At the time of the attack, there were approximately 3000 men inside the camp, which also was filled with ammunition supplies, fuel, tanks and vehicles.

Iraqi contractors had assisted in the construction of the camp, which occupied nearly a square mile and was surrounded with guard tower-studded high concrete walls, and it is now apparent that the Resistance movement had been given important targets from “sources familiar with the layout” of the base.

After the initial shelling, fuel and ammunition stores began to erupt with massive explosions that could be heard, and seen, miles away inside the Green Zone where U.S. military and diplomatic units were heavily guarded.

The explosions, all of them termed “immense” by BBC reporters, continued throughout the night.

In response, US aircraft indiscriminately rocketed and bombed various parts of the city, BBC and AFP correspondents reported, trying to knock out the launch sites of the rockets

The BBC’s Andrew North, in Baghdad, said the explosions started at about 2300 (2100 BST) and were becoming “ever more frequent” as the huge fires spread throughout the base, punctuated by tremendous explosions as more fuel and ammunition dumps ignited.

“Intelligence indicates that civilians aligned with a militia organization were responsible for last night’s mortar attack,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Withington, spokesman for the U.S. 4th Infantry Division.

An after action report, issued by the Department of Defense, stated that: “On October 10, 2006, at approximately 10:40 p.m., a 82mm mortar round, fired by militia forces from a residential area in Abu T-Shir, caused a fire at an Ammunition Supply Point (ASP) at FOB Falcon. The ASP, containing tank and artillery rounds, in addition to smaller caliber ammunition, set off a series of large explosions. About 100 troops from the 4th Infantry Division were reported to be stationed at the base at the time, but no injuries were reported.”  (Emphasis added.) “The damage to the area will not degrade the operational capability of MND-B (Multinational Division Baghdad),”

When the flames had been brought under control on the morning of the 11th of October, primarily because the entire camp had been gutted, nine large American military transports with prominent Red Cross markings were observed by members of the foreign media taking off, laded with the dead and the wounded.

Over 300 American troops, including U.S. Army and Marines, CIA agents and U.S. translators were killed outright or died immediately afterwards en route to hospital or in hospital and 165 seriously injured requiring major medical attention and 39 suffering lesser injuries 122 members of the Iraqi armed forces were killed and 90 seriously injured members of same, were also evacuated to the U.S. military hospital at al-Habbaniyah located some 70km west of Baghdad.

Satellite pictures from neutral sources showed that Camp Falcon was almost totally destroyed and with it, almost all the U.S. military’s supply of small arms ammunition, artillery and rocket rounds, tons of fuel, six Apache helicopters, an uncounted but large number of soft-skinned vehicles such as Humvees and supply trucks. Foreign press observers noted “an endless parade” of military vehicle recovery units dragging burnt-out heavy tanks and armored personnel carriers to another base outside Baghdad.

The walls and towers of the camp were completely leveled as were all the barracks, maintenance depots, the huge mess halls that could hold 3000 soldiers, the huge recreation center with its basketball courts and indoor swimming pools and all the administration buildings

Although official U.S. DoD statements indicated that there were no deaths, that only a hundred men were inside the base guarding billions of dollars of vital military equipment and that there were “only two minor injuries to personnel,” the truth is far different.

Not only had the U.S. military machine lost most of its armor and transport, its entire reserves of ammunition and special fuel, but the casualty list for only the first day is immense.

Another serious matter, the MV Iran Deyanat story, was also totally ignored by the media in the United States, but not outside of it.

This heavily-suppressed story about the Iranian ship laden with highly radioactive waste, bound for the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is typical of how the government sits on inconvenient stories. They imposed a silence on the Forward Base Falcon disaster and have not posted all the U.S.dead in Iraq and now we have the interrupted saga of the MV Iran Deyanat being blocked from all regular media sites. The story, cut off initially by a dismissive article in late September in the ‘Long War Journal,’ a “very friendly government (DoD) entity” was renewed by an article by Brian Harring at the beginning of October. It then got a tremendous reading around the world…in the millions…but never a word in our controlled press, or government-controlled sites like ‘Wikipedia’ basically controlled in toto by the CIA.

On August 21st, 2008, the Iranian MV Iran Deyanat, a 44468 dead weight tonnage carrier that is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for its false manifests and traffic in forbidden nuclear materials, was seized by Somali pirates to be held for their usual ransom.

The ship had set sail from Nanjing, China, July 28, 2008

The Old Nanking Port of Nanjing is the largest inland port in China, yearly reaching 108.59 million tons in 2007. The port area is 98 kilometers (61 mi) in length and has 64 berths including 16 berths for ships with a tonnage of more than 10,000. Nanjing is also the biggest container port along the Yangtze River; in March 2004, the one million container-capacity base, Longtan Containers Port Area opened, further consolidating Nanjing as the leading port in the region.

During her stay at Nanjing, the MV Iran Deyanat was loaded primarily with eight cargo containers, lined with lead and with electronic locks. The 20 ft containers are  8’ wide, and carry a load of 48,060 lb per container. This special container cargo had a total load of 384,480 pounds which consisted of packaged of nuclear waste that originated at the Tianwan 1&2 Atomic plants from Jiangsu Province (built in 2007) Once the radiation death of many of the pirates (16) became known, reporters attempting to contact responsible officials in the Pentagon and the Department of State were told these officials refused to comment on any of the implications of the cargo. The ship’s manifest was falsified but the deadly cargo was supposed to be headed for Rotterdam and an unspecified “German client.”

Much of the story was covered in a London Times article which was subsequently removed from that paper’s archive and the initial story was tailored by the ‘Long War Journal,’ a website with close connections to the Department of Defense and the CIA. It tended to dismiss the entire question of a radioactive cargo and instead, discussed unspecified chemicals.

Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, Commander, US Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain Combined Maritime Forces, said the U.S.-led coalition patrolling the Gulf of Aden “does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region,”

Russia said it will soon join international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast.However, it will conduct its operations independently, RIA-Novosti news agency reports Navy commander Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky as saying .”We are planning to participate in international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast, but the Russian warships will conduct operations on their own,” he said.

Russian nationals are frequently among the crews of civilian ships hijacked by pirates off the Somalia coast, notes RIA-Novosti.

At the beginning of June, the UN Security Council passed a resolution permitting countries to enter Somalia’s territorial waters to combat “acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea.”

The American media has given no coverage of any kind to this incident,

Russian sources have disclosed that when American Naval personnel, attached to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, finally boarded the MV Iran Deyanat and took all of her crew, including the Iranian captain, into what was called “protective custody,” and while the opened cargo container containing Chinese atomic waste was being sealed and decontaminated, the bridge and the captain’s quarters were thoroughly searched.  An “intensive” interrogation of the initially recalcitrant captain plus documents obtained from his safe showed a truly horrifying picture to the trained naval intelligence people.

The Deynant was not the only cargo ship to load containers of radioactive waste at Nanjing; and two others had preceded her July, 2008 visit. The problem is that the captain did not know either the names of the two Iranian -controlled ships nor their destinations.

His destination was the eastern end of the Mediterranean but it now appears that the ship was not intended to be blown up. Instead, the eight cargo containers were to be taken to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean. Haifa is the largest of Israel’s three major international seaports, which include the Port of Ashdod, and the Port of Eilat. It has a natural deep water harbor which operates all year long, and serves both passenger and cargo ships. Annually, 22 million tons of goods pass through the port..In 2007, the U.S. DHS’ CBP initiated a joint security agreement with Israel whereby U.S. agents, working with Israel, would develop and install programs to protect the ports from terrorist attacks..

CBP’s Container Security Initiative, (CSI), is a cooperative effort with host country governments to identify and screen high-risk shipments before they leave participating ports. More than 80 percent of all cargo containers destined for U.S. shores originate in or are transshipped through 55 CSI ports in North, South and Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

CSI addresses the threat to border security and global trade posed by the potential for terrorist use of a maritime container to deliver a weapon. CSI proposes a security regime to ensure all containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism are identified and inspected at foreign ports before they are placed on vessels destined for the United States.

The initiative seeks to:

Identify high-risk containers. CBP uses automated targeting tools to identify containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism, based on advance information and strategic intelligence.

Prescreen and evaluate containers before they are shipped. Containers are screened as early in the supply chain as possible, generally at the port of departure.

Use technology to prescreen high-risk containers to ensure that screening can be done rapidly without slowing down the movement of trade. This technology includes large-scale X-ray and gamma ray machines and radiation detection devices.

If a cargo container ship sails from another port that has the U.S. –controlled CBP system, and does not stop at another port enroute, it is able to enter another port equipped with the CBP system and unload its cargo without interference.

Let us say that a mythical ship, the Extreme Venture, picks up a cargo at an approved port and sails off to another port that is also approved. Again, if a country or entity wanting to take a dangerous cargo to the same port, it need only paint out its name, change its radio call signs, and using the methodology instituted by the U.S., enter, for example, the port of Haifa a day in advance of the real Extreme Venture. Having passed all the approved requirements, it can enter the harbor, proceed to an assigned dock, unload its containers onto waiting trucks and sail out of the harbor without let or hindrance. And the next day when the real Extreme Venture arrives, one can expect that the security people would be in a state of frenzy. By that time, the fake Extreme venture has put yet another name on her bows and stern, run up another flag and using shipping information easily available on the internet, become another innocent cargo ship among many.

The American view, known to several other countries, is that as both the United States and Israel have been at the forefront of violent verbal attacks against, and threats of violence to, Iran, they are now the prime targets of what, at the worst case scenario, could amount to a commercial delivery of least 16 containers of deadly radioactive material, mixed with high explosives.

One of the largest cargo container ports in America, Long Beach, California, has DHS inspection teams at work on a round the clock basis but because of the huge volume of traffic, only 2% of the cargo containers can be checked thoroughly at any given time. This means that should another Iranian cargo container, sailing under a false flag and with a false manifest, dock at Long Beach and offload her deadly cargo, there is a 98% chance that it could avoid any kind of inspection, be loaded onto waiting trucks and shipped to destinations all over the United States.

It is extremely doubtful if the Bush administration would have attacked Iran who has the means to retaliate.  This explains the stunned silence on the subject of the Deyanat affair and the tight blackout imposed on any news of her or the purpose of her cargo of powdered death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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