It Was A Drone

I'm going to be very brief today, my friends. It was a Drone.

The Turkish F-4 Phantom apparently shot down over Syria 3 days ago, was in fact a QF-4, an unmanned, remotely controlled model used as a target drone. The reason they cannot find the pilot or the backseater is simply because there never were any humans aboard the aircraft.

Now, let's ask ourselves, what point was there to sending an unmanned target drone conversion of a usually-piloted aircraft into Syrian airspace? One could argue that perhaps it had been fitted with a reconnaissance package of some sort. But, in a day when the US and its allies regularly deploy swarms of purpose-built recon drones, with abilities far superior to anything that might be retrofitted to a badly-aging F-4 designed back in the 1950's, how would this make any practical sense?

The other possibility that suggests itself to the twisted, cunning and slightly-paranoid mind of your faithful correspondent is this - it was a setup. How would they have managed this? Well, they would have sent the drone in on what looked like an attack profile, and then when the Syrians launched a SAM at it, reversed course as fast as the airframe would allow and headed back out of Syrian airspace, back over the Mediterranean.

Listen to the rhetoric carefully, my friends. The key phrase being repeated is "where the plane was shot down", that's what they keep saying, over and over, in order to fix it in the minds of the media and the public.

But that's not what matters. What matters is where the drone/plane was at the time the SAM was launched at it.

One must give the powers-that-be full credit for a cleverly-managed media campaign. They're definitely not subtle, and they're not nearly as clever as they seem to think they are, but they do know how to manage public opinion, and they do know how to focus attention on the red herring.

Now they have their casus belli. And we all know what comes next.

Rio+20, What a Joke

Twenty years ago, in 1992, the so-called leaders of the world met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss climate change. At that conference, actual meaningful measures to combat the issue were discussed, and legally-binding agreements were signed.

Today, 20 years later, in a follow-up conference, the story is very different. Rio+20 is little more than a corporate-sponsored sham.


(Open Salon readers can watch the video here)


This, dear reader, is not an abstract problem. This is an issue which threatens the very survival of our species on this planet, (not to mention the survival of literally thousands of other species). Yet the "leaders" of the world's major nations seem blithely unconcerned. Are they blind? Are they stupid? Are they simply incapable of opposing the will of the big multi-national corporations? The first two seem unlikely, and the third possibility still doesn't explain the utter lack of apparent long-term concern.

We've all read science-fiction novels in which the Earth has become either partially or completely uninhabitable. In 1943, Henry Kuttner published, (under the nom de plume of Lawrence O'Donnell), a story entitled Clash By Night, which took place on Venus, where the remnants of humanity struggled to survive after Earth had been consumed by runaway nuclear power plant accidents. This was very prophetic stuff for the year 1943, and shows that there was considerable publicly-available information on "Atomic" energy several years prior to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Laugh at Science Fiction if you will, it has proven again and again to be the best venue for imagining future events. And if we cannot imagine the future, how then shall we prepare ourselves for it?

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with Rio+20? Or is your favorite beady-eyed marsupial varmint simply maundering pointlessly about days gone by, and days to come? The answer is simply this - the future will come, whether we will or no. The future will happen to us, prepared or unprepared. If we do not take action now, to shape that future for our own benefit, (indeed our own survival, if the ugly truth be spoken aloud), if we do not act now, then that future will be a nightmare shaped only by chaos and the ruthlessly inhumane greed of the rich elites and the corporations which they control.

What are we going to do about it?

Israel Attacks US Navy Ship

Forty-Five years ago today, the USS Liberty was attacked in international waters by unmarked aircraft and torpedo boats of the Israeli Navy.

The attack lasted two hours. Out of the crew of 294 officers and men, which included three civilians, 34 were killed and 173 wounded.

The whitewash of this incident continues to the present day, but the apparent facts of the matter are that the attack was absolutely deliberate, and carefully planned as a false-flag attack, with Egypt intended to take the blame. Israel, and their vehement lobby of apologists, continue to assert that the whole thing was a mistake. But the use of unmarked aircraft and boats, the fact that the USS Liberty was flying an enormous US flag throughout the attack, the fact that no other ship in the world had a profile like the USS Liberty, these things alone would be enough to refute the claims that it was a mistake.

Crew attempting to abandon ship were attacked in their lifeboats by the Israelis. This is a war crime, whoever the ship might have belonged to.

Twice, aircraft dispatched by the US Sixth Fleet to assist the Liberty were recalled, both times by direct order of the White House. This is betrayal, cold, stark, and undeniable.

Twice, there have been investigations of the USS Liberty incident. Both investigations have absolved Israel of blame. But, tellingly enough, in neither investigation have any of the surviving members of the Liberty's crew been allowed to testify. How does one explain this, other than as a blatant cover-up?

Links below for further information-

USS Liberty veterans organization

Dead In The Water, a BBC Documentary

USS Liberty Memorial, a site by Jim Ennes, a survivor of the attack

Statement by Adm Thomas H Moorer

Lies About Syria

Let's be blunt here. The entire media narrative we are being fed about Syria is a reeking crock of shit. The whole song and dance about -
Evil Assad is murdering his people and the Syrian resistance are a group of high-minded freedom fighters struggling to liberate their nation from tyranny and establish a democratic Syrian state with freedom and equality for all.

All of that is BS. The ugly truth of the matter is that the Syrian resistance are, in large part, foreign mercenaries backed by Qatar, Saudia Arabia, and the USA, and that said resistance are acting as agents provocateurs in an attempt to justify military intervention by NATO, in order to bring about regime change in Syria and install a puppet government.

As evidence of this, the Houla massacre is being distorted and exploited by a media campaign which was obviously prepared well in advance. The statement by the chief of the UN’s observer mission to the effect that the killers were unknown and further investigation needed was ignored. The UN resolution immediately submitted called upon the Syrian Army to stop using heavy weapons against inhabited areas, despite the Houla victims having been killed with small arms; the eye witnesses described the attackers as "men in plain clothes.”

Out of one side of their mouth the UN talking heads say that Houla was caused by heavy bombardment with tanks and artillery. Out of the other side of their mouth, they say that “the majority of the victims were killed execution-style”. Well, which is it? The hasbara isn’t even internally consistent, let alone consistent with external reality.

And yet nation after nation has booted its Syrian diplomats, under this pretext, even France, to my utter disappointment. (Then again, Hollande may not be completely in charge. DGSE has often seemed to act independently, regardless of the wishes of France’s civilian government).

The people who run the nations of the West are indescribably evil, yes, but they are not stupid. It is inconceivable that these European nations are actually deceived by the hasbara. They must know the truth. Therefore, it logically follows that they find it to be in their own best interests to pretend to believe.

Then again, one of the greats of early science-fiction (Asimov perhaps?) once said something like – “Never postulate conspiracy to explain that which could be explained equally well by incompetence”. And incompetence, dear reader, is a condition which can afflict even the most intelligent of men and women.

I’m really quite puzzled by the international reaction to all of this. I can usually sort out, at least roughly, what is going on behind the scenes, if only via a process of triangulating all the various lies. But the response to recent events in Syria leaves me standing here scratching my head and muttering, “Uhhh, whiskey tango foxtrot, over?”

Breitbart - Obama was born in Kenya after all

Like most of you, I never placed any credence in the "birther" claims. Granted, there has been some wild inconsistency in the administration's responses to the claims. First they said there was no birth certificate, because he was born at home. Then they published a birth certificate. Erm, which is it, folks? You can't have it both ways.

None the less, I have always dismissed the birther claims as right-wing propaganda.

But now Breitbart has uncovered a pamphlet from 1991 in which Obama's publisher listed him as "born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii". Now, I don't know what to think.

Link to Breitbart report here

Claims like this are always suspect in an election year, and doubly so in the current election, but...

Another Billion Dollars For Israel

Sometimes, it's enough to make even a strong man cry, let alone a wimp like me.

The House of Representatives has just approved the new defense spending bill, totaling some 608 billion US dollars. Included in that bill is roughly a billion US dollars for Israel, to pay for Tel Aviv to build various missile systems.

We are told there's no money for a jobs program, we are told there's no money for extended unemployment benefits, there's no money for Food Stamps, there's no money for Medicare or Medicaid, there's no money for anything to help the long-term unemployed.

But hey, there's always money for the military, hundreds of billions of dollars, no problem. And of course, it's no problem to soak the US taxpayer in order to subsidize the brutally racist apartheid occupation state known as Israel. Of course. AIPAC has decreed that it must be so, and every elected official in Washington worships at the anus of AIPAC.



(Open Salon readers can watch the video here)

Sometimes, dear reader, sometimes, the utter wretched injustice of it all is simply overwhelming. There are roughly 10 million of us 99ers out here, people who have worked all their lives, paid their taxes, voted their conscience, done their best to be good citizens. And now, when we have reached late middle age, we find ourselves unemployed and unable to find any work, at any wage. So how does the government deal with this crisis? How do they react to the fact that 75% of the 99ers are over fifty years of age, how do they respond to the blatant age discrimination to which this indisputably attests? They deny that we exist. They say that we are "no longer looking for work", and don't even include us in the unemployment figures. Because of they did, if the USA figured unemployment rates by the same standard that Europe uses, Obama would have to own up to the actual unemployment rate of over 20%.

And, of course, that would ruin Obama's chances of re-election.

So, Mr President, after you've spent the last 4 years raping us up the ass, we're supposed to vote for you again? After the NDAA, and the extension of the bitterly mis-named Patriot Act, after all the other atrocities you have perpetrated upon those of us who were naive enough to believe your lies and vote for you, after you've killed Habeas Corpus, and presided over the gutting of the Bill of Rights, we are supposed to vote for another 4 years of this crap? When your best argument is that you defrosted the frozen body of OBL, (who never had anything to do with 9/11), and peddled a bullshit story about having gunned him down, and a year later that's the best thing you can come up with, you expect us to vote for you again? Just how stupid do you think we are?

 If I was that much of an idiot, (or that much of an asshole), I'd be a Conservative.