by cameron | Feb 2, 2009 | Cuba, Iraq, Podcast, US politics
When I was visiting my girl Chrissy in Seattle last October, I met her best friend Jed Montgomery. The four of us (including Jed’s partner Chris) had some vigorous debates about American politics. I was trying to make my point that for all of Obama’s intelligence and oratory, at the end of the day he’s a member of the Democratic Party. In the last 60 years, the Democrats have provided a pretty appalling list of Presidents:
Harry Truman – Among other things, authorized the only use of nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history
John Kennedy – Among other things, authorized the attempted invasion of Cuba, nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, etc.
Lyndon Johnson – Among other things, escalated the Vietnam war. Possibly implicated in the Kennedy assassination.
Jimmy Carter – Actually, a pretty good guy, defender of human rights.
Bill Clinton – Bombed and starved the people of Iraq, decided the best way to spend his days in the White House was to get blowjobs and stick cigars up an intern’s vag.
So… will Obama be another Jimmy Carter? Or… one of the others?
Anyway, Jed joins me on the show today to talk about our hopes and concerns for the Obama administration.
by cameron | Jan 15, 2009 | Atheism, Iraq, Podcast
Rapper Greydon Square joins me again on the show to talk about his new album The CPT Theorem.
If you haven’t heard of 27 year-old Greydon before (or heard my first interview with him), his story is interesting: he grew up (as Eddie Collins) in a Group Home in Compton, California, got involved with a gang at a young age, was busted for a crime, and given the choice of prison or joining the US Army. He chose the latter and ended up in the US Army in 2001 and Iraq in 2004. During this time he was a committed Christian who studied the Bible. The more he studied the Bible the more questions he had about his religion which lead to his becoming an atheist, with many of the lyrics of his rap songs focus on atheism and the skeptic inquiry. He also is completing a physics major. His fans include Richard Dawkins, Penn Jillette… and yours truly.
This time, instead of focusing on his atheism, I wanted to talk to Greydon about how he writes his music. He’s a one man band – producer, composer, lyricist, performer, businessman. And, as you’ll here on the tracks I’ve laid into the interview, his shit is excellent.
You can buy his albums through iTunes or from the link on his MySpace.
by cameron | Dec 15, 2008 | CIA, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, US politics
Were the Mumbai attacks a false flag operation co-ordinated by the CIA?
Perhaps, according to this post:
informationliberation – Pakistani Security Consultant Calls Mumbai Attacks A “Botched” False Flag
False flags ops happen regularly and are a standard technique for creating violence and then blaming it on your enemies. Hitler used it in the burning of the Reichstag. According to “Legacy Of Ashes”, the CIA has funded and organised quite a few over the last 60 years, in places such as Iran and Cuba, as well as in Chile and Zaire.
Why would the CIA want to escalate the conflict between India and Pakistan?
Well in recent months, there have been growing tensions between Pakistan and the USA, in large part because of continual US bombings on Pakistani territory which have resulted in the deaths of Pakistani soldiers. The USA claims it is attacking “terrorists” (the catch-all excuse for everything these days) but the reality is probably that they are using drones to locate and destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, as part of their long-term plan to protect Israel, their most important military base in the middle east, from attacks by regional Islamic interests.
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the USA agree to assist India’s nuclear program and Australia do a deal with India to sell them uranium, despite India’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Australia’s historical position to NOT sell uranium to any nation not signed up.
Musharaff, until recently the President/military dictator of Pakistan, was a strong puppet ally of the USA during their “War On Terror”, especially after Bush’s Undersecretary of State, Richard Armitage made the General an offer he couldn’t refuse… “either cooperate with us militarily, against the will of your own military, security service and people…and accept more than $10 billion over the next five years…or we will bomb you back to the stone age.”
Then, of course, we saw the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, just as she seemed poised to bring a new era of democratic leadership to Pakistan, one which might have significantly altered the view of them worldwide. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardar, won the election just after her death and is the current President, after Musharaff was finally abandoned by George Bush and faced impeachment. Last week, Bhutto was posthumously awarded a human rights prize by the U.N. As we know, the last thing the USA truly wants is democracy in places like Pakistan. History has taught them that when a nation like that (take Venezuela for example) gets a democracy, they start looking after their citizens first and USA corporations end up getting the rough end of the stick. One can only imagine what kind of quid pro quo Musharaff signed up for when he took the $10 billion. It looks like the current administation aren’t as keen to get raped by the IMF.
So – back to Mumbai. If – and I have no evidence for this, it’s just a thinking point – if the CIA orchestrated a false flag op, blamed it on Pakistani ISI, and got their press puppets around the West to spin out the Pentagon-written media releases, just like they did during the Iraq invasion, then it might be their way of sending a message to the Zardar administration – “Take the money – and give in to our demands – or else.”
by cameron | Aug 13, 2008 | Iraq, Uncategorized
In the comments section to my post on the Pentagon’s propaganda, Marcelo pointed me to this post in ConsortiumNews.com about how Bush and the American media are screaming about Russia’s invasion of Georgia is pretty interesting.
Apparently, context is everything. So, the United States attacking Grenada or Nicaragua or Panama or Iraq or Serbia is justified even if the reasons sometimes don’t hold water or don’t hold up before the United Nations, The Hague or other institutions of international law.
However, when Russia attacks Georgia in a border dispute over Georgia’s determination to throttle secession movements in two semi-autonomous regions, everyone must agree that Georgia’s sovereignty is sacrosanct and Russia must be condemned.
U.S. newspapers, such as the New York Times, see nothing risible about publishing a statement from President George W. Bush declaring that “Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.â€
No one points out that Bush should have zero standing enunciating such a principle. Iraq also was a sovereign nation, but Bush invaded it under false pretenses, demolished its army, overthrew its government and then conducted a lengthy military occupation resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I wasn’t aware of all of the background to the South Ossetia War but this Wikipedia article contains some interesting information.
by cameron | Aug 13, 2008 | activism, Culture Jamming, Iraq
From the Center for Media and Democracy:
Today, we struck a blow against propaganda, and for transparency and accountability.
In early 2002, the Pentagon began cultivating retired military officers who frequently serve as media commentators to help make the case for invading Iraq. The pundit program continued — promoting the Bush administration’s stance on the Guantanamo Bay detention center, warrantless wiretapping and other controversial issues — until New York Times reporter David Barstow exposed its existence in April 2008.
Thanks to Blake Hall of our IT staff and senior researcher Diane Farsetta, now you and anyone with web access can search the massive cache of military documents detailing the Pentagon’s illegal attempts to shape U.S. public opinion. The New York Times first obtained the documents. After the Times reported on the covert pundit program, the Pentagon posted the documents online in a desperate attempt at damage control. But the documents weren’t text searchable, making systematic analysis of this important information nearly impossible.
But we’ve now cracked the Pentagon’s code and made the 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents fully text searchable, posting them all on our SourceWatch website, for journalists, researchers and concerned citizens.
What’s great about this is that it is a further demonstration that the media has been compromised. We all need to understand that EVERY time we see a so-called “expert commentator” on mainstream media, the chances are they are a front for one organisation or another and CANNOT BE TRUSTED as an impartial source. This, by the way, goes for leftist commentators as well as those from the right. The system is played the same way by both camps. Our initial position on anything you see on the news or any current affairs show is “TRUST NO1” unless you are really sure of their credentials as an independent commentator.
by cameron | Jun 26, 2008 | Australian politics, Iraq
America – your tax dollars have been well spent. What can you buy with one trillion dollars? No-bid contracts:
Nearly Four Decades Later, U.S. Oil Companies Return to Iraq
Four oil companies are in the final stage of contract negotiations to regain drilling rights in Iraq — thirty-six years after they lost them. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — founding partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are currently in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry “for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.” Joining them are Chevron and several smaller oil companies. The deal is expected to be approved by the end of the month and “will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.” The no-bid process has frozen out 40 other oil companies, including Indian, Russian and Chinese competitors. A spokesperson for the Oil Ministry said that “the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.” He added that the companies chosen already had a relationship with the government, “advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts.” While the current contracts are relatively small, they represent a foot in the door for much more lucrative future deals.
Source: New York Times, June 19, 2008 via Center for Media and Democracy
