John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Please, yet another “conspiracy theories” put-down.

You’ve done at least three of them in the last few weeks, almost as plentiful as attacks and put-downs on Jeremy Corbyn.

This kind of article is just about as brainless as the conspiracy mutterings of a poor homeless schizophrenic.

Thoughtful people do not need preaching to on this subject.

The truth is we live in a civilization in which conspiracies – genuine ones – are a normal part of our landscape.

And why is that?

Because where great wealth and power are at risk – as they frequently are in our western world of unprecedented affluence – there is the constant attraction to manipulate events to remove the risk, thus conspiracies.

In recent decades, we so many events which have been secretly manipulated, thus rendering them conspiratorial in nature, it seems to me laughable when someone publishes a piece such this one.

For example, the United States overthrew governments secretly in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and kept a huge secret operation against Castro going for decades, a genuine secret terrorist operation which made bin Laden’s mountain redoubt resemble a boy scout camp. Troops were trained, weapons distributed, assassins launched, bombings undertaken (including one Cuban airliner), and immense resources squandered on America’s trying to get its own way.

The genuine holocaust of America’s invasion of Vietnam (3 million left dead there) was launched with a staged provocation called the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Later secret bombings and surreptitious incursions into peaceful Cambodia resulted in the fall of a neutral government and gave the world “the killing fields,” and ultimately the deaths of another million people.

The fall of Sukarno in Indonesia – an event manipulated by the CIA – resulted in a massive terror campaign. Half a million people were hacked to death as though in a spontaneous uprising and had their bodies thrown into rivers. The American State Department was burning the telephone wires into the night submitting lists of names of “communists” it regarded as suitable for such treatment.

The Soviet downing of Korean Air lines 107 was held up as an example of Soviet brutality, but what we learned later from Sy Hersh, the world’s best investigative reporter, was that the plane was on a secret mission for the CIA to test Soviet air defences.

America has launched dozens of lesser coups, interventions, and minor invasions in the last fifty years. The invasion of Panama, on the pretext of drugs, removed a disliked leader. Recent manipulations in Venezuela have destabilized that government. The first Gulf War was just such an operation with America’s ambassador in Iraq having told Saddam the U.S. had no interest in what he did in Kuwait, then using his minor invasion as a pretext for a massive war and horrible aftermath.

How about the supply of poison gas to Saddam during the long (American manipulated) Iraq-Iran War? It was used to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers, and no war crimes accusations were made.

Look at events in Syria. What a completely deceitful destruction just to topple a leader America and Israel hate. And to this day, there’s no honesty about what has gone on, the only truths we’re receiving coming out of Russia’s government-invited intervention.

Look at the mess made of Libya.

Look at the mess made of Iraq, once the Mideast’s most progressive and economically capable state. How was that miracle of destruction accomplished? A river of lies and manipulations about “weapons of mass destruction,” false papers about purchases of yellowcake, and even the CIA career of an honest Republican figure’s wife ended over his refusal to go along with the lies of Bush and Cheney.

The Dr. Kelly incident, about which we’ve never been told the truth. Kelly knew where the bodies were buried in the business of weapons – including importantly what happened to South Africa’s fissile stockpile after the fall of the apartheid government. Did it go to Israel? Dr. Kelly’s handedness made completely implausible the published version of his death.

The recent Sarin poison gas incidents in Syria are completely fraudulent. The gas was used on some poor people, but it was not used by Assad’s army, it was used by the ISIS or al-Nusrah terrorists up until now secretly supported by America. It was to provide a pretext for an American air assault – thus creating another Libya – but the Russians foiled the plot.

Israel’s entire modern history is riddled with such activity. It is not for nothing that Mossad’s motto is, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” The Lavon Affair. The bombing of the King David Hotel. The assassination of Count Bernadotte. The manipulation of events to create the 1967 War which Israel knew it could win while grabbing Palestinian and other land they coveted. The long air assault on the USS Liberty. America’s refusal to come to the ship’s aid. Israel’s lame stuff about a mistake. Secret assistance to ISIS and al Nusrah.

One could continue writing along these lines for a long time, so the article and its predecessors are nothing but propaganda to discredit those with genuine doubts and concerns.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget the journalism practices of the newspapers belonging to David Cameron’s country-house buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Corruption and lies and manipulation on quite a grand scale, and likely never to be all sorted out.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Why does The Guardian quote a man like Ash Carter saying absolutely nothing?

This is puke tossed from high places, so much so that it is almost comic but for the deadly serious underlying facts.

All thinking people who keep informed on world affairs know it is America putting the world increasingly at risk.

Good God, America has killed millions in the last half century in many pointless wars and interventions.

And the entire, insane war on terror is largely its responsibility, a result of its arrogant and terribly unjust policies in the Middle East for decades.

Russia is a civilized and relatively peaceful country by comparison.

And all of today’s disasters – Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine – are either America’s direct doing or benefit from America’s cooperation and support.

And virtually every tyrant we see – Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Turkey – has America’s blessings.

This is propaganda so completely twisted from truth, it resembles a bad dream.

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Response to a reader referring to MH-17:

Yes, one of America’s “keyhole” satellites was overhead at the time of MH-17 being shot down.

These satellites have cameras comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope plus many other technologies of observation.

The Russians knew this of course, and they said so very early.

But not one scrap of data was ever submitted to investigators by America.

Clearly, there was a cover-up of MH-17’s downing to protect America’s infant coup-government in Ukraine.

And the pathetic Dutch, under America’s thumb, worked a year to produce a report containing nothing but the bits we already knew.

And in this case in Egypt, after days we have idiots asserting what happened with no evidence.

_____________________

If it was a bomb – and it is very premature to say it was – a strong suspect would be Israel’s secret service.

ISIS has no capacity for doing this on its own. Since ISIS and al-Nusra are very much doing Israel’s (and America’s) work in Syria, Israel’s displeasure with Putin is important.

Israel, as we know from many past events including in Iran, has often used timed explosive devices.

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Response to a comment from another reader:

Your words reveal you as one of the pathetic boys who diligently search internet sites for discussions in which Israel is mentioned, and then post crap like this, being paid so much a line for the work.

I know perfectly well “ISIS” claimed credit. So what?

Indeed, ISIS is in part an Israeli creation.

Ever note how ISIS never attacks Israel in any way, which is exactly what such a wild-eyed bunch would do, were they authentic. They are frauds, mercenaries supplied and paid by America, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to destroy Syria.

Now, Israel has used time bombs countless times, so involvement in the Russian airline downing would be nothing new. It used MEK members in Iran to murder a number of scientists with timed car bombs.

These ugly practices of Israel’s go all the way back to the Lavon Affair in 1954, when it was caught red-handed planting bombs in in Egypt. Even before, in 1946, there was the King David Hotel atrocity killing about a hundred people, the work of a Jewish terror group headed by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister. And need I remind readers yet again of Israel’s deliberate attack on an American surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, to cover up illegal activities in the Sinai during the 1967 War?

Yet another well-known example of deception involved President Reagan’s bombing of Gadhafi. That was the direct result of fake transmissions originating in Israel which succeeded in fooling the U.S. into attacking Gadhafi over his presumed guilt for an attack in Europe against American soldiers, something never proved, by the way, although innocents like Gadhafi’s young son died for it.

Israel also tried this dirty trick around the time of the sarin poison gas use in Syria. There were fake transmissions trying to make the Syrian Army look responsible for the attack in the hope America would bomb Assad, but in this case the truth became known in a timely fashion. It was the very terrorist forces Israel is known to support who used poison gas in Syria, gas perhaps supplied by Israel.

No one who criticizes such dirty work is guilty of hating anyone or anything except a government which behaves very much like that of the old Soviet Union.

People like you have pretty close to succeeded in making the term “anti-Semite” meaningless by using it dozens of times a day against people you don’t even know. For all you know, this writer could be Jewish.

How appallingly ignorant you are, and that is a pure fact and not name-calling.

People such as you are succeeding also in speeding the day when Israel collapses, again much like the Soviet Union, by trying to maintain a state built on endless injustice thickly coated with lies.

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FOOTNOTE: A MUCH LATER STATEMENT FROM THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER AS QUOTED IN “SOUTHFRONT”

 

“WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?”: MALAYSIAN PM SLAMS MH17 INVESTIGATION AS NOT IMPARTIAL AND POLITICALLY MOTIVATED

 

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that the investigation into the 2014 crash of the Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing in Ukraine was not conducted in an impartial manner, but was rather focused on simply pinning the blame on Russia for political reasons.

“For some reasons, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened. We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians. This is not a neutral kind of examination,“ the prime minister said, as quoted by the Malaysian National News Agency.

“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine. You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians, it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile”.

Both Malaysia and Russia were excluded from partaking in the investigation.

If one translates the recent remarks by the Malaysian prime minister from diplomatic language to direct speech, we see that he stated that Malaysia has little doubts that the MH17 was intentionally shot down by the Ukrainian government. He also points out that the side controlling the JIT and thus the investigation is concealing the criminals, hiding data, and limiting the participation of third parties in the ‘international’ investigation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANDED FROM A POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY EINAT WILF AND NOAH SLEPKOV IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This piece is a set of words strung together almost without meaning and certainly without logic. Its only intention is to plant certain suggestions in readers’ minds, one of the key purposes of any propaganda. According to the authors, John Baird, Canada’s current foreign minister, was not guilty of provocation in blundering into East Jerusalem as a guest of Israeli politicians, rather he was being “brave” in the cause of peace.

Brave? John Baird?

Baird has always been a coward because only a coward acts aggressively towards the weak, as he does regularly in both domestic politics and in trips abroad, and certainly the Palestinians are weak, living at the mercy of Israel’s brutal and dishonest behavior.

The leaders of Israel do not want what any normal person calls peace. Their behaviors over decades make that abundantly clear to all but biased observers.

Israel has always followed the policy advocated by early Zionists called “the iron wall” in its attitude towards the Palestinians.

How much better would have been a policy of generosity towards its neighbors, but no, generosity in Israel’s attitude has never received the slightest consideration. The one prime minister who came just a little closer to altering the county’s brutal policies was assassinated, as it happened by an Israeli.

Israel holds all the cards – armaments, economic power, American influence, and absolute rule over millions of people – but it has never made a truly honest effort for genuine peace. Words, words, and more words combined with arrogant and impossible preconditions set even for discussions.

What we see is a garrison state, armed to the teeth, threatening its neighbors constantly, ready at the smallest provocation to kill thousands, and we see that state rule over 4.5 million conquered people with a heavy-handed system of apartheid, a system recognized as apartheid by every sensible and decent observer in the world from Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu to Jimmy Carter.

And, week by week, Israel slowly steals the land on which those 4.5 million people live, stealing it through all kinds of cynical and dishonest laws – an ongoing, slow-motion practice of ethnic-cleansing in every sense of the term.

What other state could accurately claim as its national symbol a D-9 armored bulldozer used to destroy the homes of others and sometimes simply to crush opponents?

Canada’s arrogant and ill-informed foreign minister, John Baird – and Canadians all know that he is arrogant and ill-informed owing to his everyday behavior at home – steps in to validate Israel’s ghastly behavior in East Jerusalem, never once saying anything about human or democratic rights.

And why does John Baird choose to behave in this obtuse fashion?

Because he is a creature of the Harper government which has as its goal, by its leader’s own admission, the elimination of the Liberal Party in Canada, a party which was always been even-handed in the Middle East, reflecting the attitude of a majority of Canadians.

Harper’s strategy includes having ended state support for political parties, using every disagreeable parliamentary dodge he can think of, being an enemy of transparency in government, suppressing the voices of experts in the civil service, and actively seeking a new and substantial flow of private financing, as it happens, from apologists for Israel eager to fund a turn in Canada’s historic and fair-minded policies.

In the United States, this pattern of funding is now an integral part of its foreign affairs. In just one example – and there are countless examples – the unpleasant Newt Gingrich received the best part of $20 million from just one wealthy American heavily involved in Israel’s affairs to run his presidential bid.

The price for that money? Newt’s peppering his speeches with ignorant assertions like “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” In another notorious example, Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader, once openly suggested that Israel just go ahead and run all the Palestinians out of the occupied territories – surely the kind of assertion that does not come naturally from an ultra-conservative economics major for whom property rights are virtually religious dogma.

And just so, John Baird’s bull-in-a-china-shop behavior in East Jerusalem and at the UN or Peter Kent’s sudden outbursts, almost like someone given to speaking in tongues, about Canada defending Israel or Harper’s regular speeches claiming credit as a warrior against (virtually non-existent) anti-Semitism and deliberately conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

In the normal world, we know peace in any violent disagreement is often only obtained by outside intervention and patient talks and mutual respect, but somehow when it comes to Israel, this common understanding just disappears. Israel is never pressured to treat its neighbors with respect, and it is never pressured to talk to them without arrogant preconditions. Never.

No one dares say a word about the decades of abusing 4.5 million people, of Israel’s endless torture and assassinations. Nor do the “brave” John Bairds of this world raise their voices when Israel kills 400 children as it did in its invasion of Gaza or when it commits piracy on the high seas or when it murders a Canadian officer serving as a UN observer or when it drops a million hideous cluster bombs on civilians as it did in Lebanon. No condemnation over the theft of farms and homes is ever heard. Not a word about endless illegal arrests and the imprisonment of thousands. Nor a word about the seizure of taxes and foreign aid moneys from their rightful owners.

Of course, there is never a word about the Six Day War so many decades ago, the very event which put all those people at Israel’s mercy, a war which Israel cynically started knowing it could win, aiming ultimately to create what is known as Greater Israel. Nor was a word said about Israel’s attacking a well-marked American intelligence ship, of which they had been advised in advance, during that war to silence signals informing Washington that Israel was turning around its armor to seize all of what it controls today. And there was not a word about the mass murder of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai to expedite that turnaround.

Does anyone in his right mind believe peace is obtained the way Israel has claimed to pursue it? Only if your definition of peace is Israel’s taking all the additional land it covets without any of the people who own it and live there, which is pretty much what the concept of Greater Israel involves. I suppose that is a kind of peace, the kind of peace brutal American soldiers achieved in My Lai, Vietnam, or in Fallujah, Iraq.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“He’s more like Ted Kaczynski, who didn’t care what he blew up…”

That is simply appalling, Ms Wente. It is both uninformed and ignores the elephant in the room.

Assange’s organization combed through the material and did not release names in highly sensitive cases.

The biggest chunk of missing material is from communications with Israel.

There are two theories for this.

First, that Assange made a deal with Israeli authorities ahead of time to withhold material.

Second, that WikiLeaks is being used by Mossad to “get out” certain messages.

And we know from history there is tons of material on Israel.

The embarrassment and hurt to the United States is nothing new for the Israelis.

For decades, they have done as they please regardless of what the U.S. thinks.

Just consider the 1967 war, whose ghastly results persist to this day.

And consider Israel’s two hour all-out attack on the USS Liberty, a spy ship, during that war. Israel did everything it could to sink it, killing a large portion of the crew. It made lame excuses afterward for the attacking the well-marked ship which it had been advised would be on station to keep Israel to its secret promises around the war.

The attack was covering General Dayan’s movement northward from the Sinai of armor – something it had previously told the U.S. in private it would not do. The resulting conquest mess we live with to this day. Those conquests were Israel’s entire secret purpose in making that war happen as a big black operation.

There are countless other instances, including Israel’s duplicitous nuclear program, something Kennedy was totally against when he discovered it. Well, the program is still there, but Kennedy isn’t.

How about Israel’s participation in the Suez Crisis with Britain and France, something Eisenhower put an end to?

How about the many insults like that offered the Vice President recently?

The icing on the cake, as it were, was the most damaging spy in American history, Israeli hero, Jonathon Pollard. Some of what he stole was sold to Russia.

Israel never even blushes over Pollard, and to this day, they continue to beg and plead for his release, despite the fact that a quarter of the senior American intelligence agents would tender their resignations were that to happen. There have been dozens of formal and informal requests – immense pressure – to release a man that under other circumstances would have been shot.

And there have been many spying instances, right down to a group of Mossad spies who were right behind the 9/11 guys, a group of phony “house movers” arrested in New York and deported and a group of “art students.” None of it ever explained.

It is well known that the United States is more intensively spied on by Israel than it is by any other ally.

Note: for those not familiar, Ms Wente is one of Canada’s most persistent and blind defenders of Israel’s bloody excesses.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALUF BENN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Too early to write-off direct talks?

Please.

Representatives for these “direct talks” on the Palestinian side in a sense do not even exist: Abbas’s election mandate timed out a year ago, and he stays in office under emergency measures – i..e,, he has absolutely no democratic legitimacy.

But even poor Abbas, a kind of Palestinian “step’n’fetch it” figure if ever there was one, wanted nothing to do with such talks while Israel continued stealing land. The American administration browbeat him for months, threatening him with loss of all aid, into attending.

The only genuinely elected government in any of the territories of Palestine, Hamas in Gaza, remains under Israel’s brutal blockade and imprisonment – that is, those elected representatives who were not illegally arrested by Israel or murdered in assassinations or murdered in Operation Cast Lead.

Representatives for these “direct talks” on the Israeli side are from the Netanyahu government, a group of people who have not the least interest in what any normal person would call peace. The “foreign minister” qualifies surely as a David Duke figure.

Now David Duke in the United States – former Klu Klux Klan chief and minor politician – is treated anytime in the press as a lowlife. Avigdor Lieberman is every bit the hateful racist as Duke, but he is far more poisonous, being the foreign minister he is in a position to make his hate wreck the lives of millions. Because he is an Israeli, Lieberman is treated with respect he does not deserve.

Does anyone but a madman believe anything can come out of that set of circumstances?

The only possibility is that Abbas is virtually beaten down into signing something utterly inappropriate for his people. In that case, the “agreement” won’t be worth the paper on which it is written.

This entire matter is utterly meaningless as statesmanship, it is brutal political theater, intended to please the Israel Lobby in the U.S. to get the Democrats through the mid-term elections without a catastrophic loss of campaign contributions.
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The Six Day War was an elaborate black operation by Israel. It prodded the Arabs over and over with many aggressive acts into hostility, and then it attacked first.

The intention was to seize the lands not seized in 1948 with the terrors of Irgun and Stern – that is, to create Greater Israel, a self-defined concept that has always motivated Israel’s government.

The attack on the USS Liberty, a US spy ship on station in the Mediterranean, was intended to blind the US administration while General Dayan turned around his armor to attack in the North.

It was not a “mistake.” It was a deliberate two-hour attack on a well-marked ship, one moreover that Israel had been advised would be on station to guard against its ambitions.

Dayan felt that if he had the slot of time, he could achieve all Israel’s goals of conquest, and he pretty much did, presenting the world with the fait accompli whose ghastly consequences we have endured since.

It was all a neat trick, wage a lightning war of conquest while getting sympathy as little David fighting off hoards of nasty Philistines, but Israel knew from its first planning it was sure to win.

And we’ve learned since that the “little David” image is a sentimental fairy tale: Israel behaves the part brutal bully in its part of the world, attacking and terrorizing every neighbor that it has, even now threatening people a thousand miles away who have never attacked anyone.

See:
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/was-einstein-right/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CON COUGHLIN IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Well, if the leaders of Israel are not war criminals, just who in the world qualifies?

 

Murdering 400 children in Gaza? Deliberately targeting UN observers bravely doing their job in Lebanon? Laying a blanket of nightmarish, barbaric cluster bombs across Southern Lebanon? And refusing to cooperate in removing them?

Keeping a million and half souls in Gaza under siege, even after killing 1,400 of them? Institutionalizing slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Jerusalem and the West Bank? Stealing homes and farms from families who have lived there for centuries to hand over to immigrants from London or New York?

Over forty years of humiliation and abuse for the people of the territories occupied in 1967, captured in a war which Israel is known to have engineered to this very purpose? Many thousands held in prison with no proper legal procedures? Building a new Berlin Wall and building it on the property of others?

Arresting the members of a cleanly elected government – far more so than was the case for Mr. Bush – because you disagree with their party? Refusing even to talk to those you disagree with?

Assassinating scores of individuals with no charges or trial or legal procedure, an exact copy of the bloody activity of juntas in South America who made people disappear?

The only reason Israel’s leaders are not all severely dealt with by the Western world is the immense, smothering influence of the United States whose foreign policy in many parts is virtually written in Israel.

A United States, by the way, whose last president was the world’s reigning living war criminal with a million dead souls to his credit.

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Footnote on the USS Liberty attacked by Israel in the 1967 war. Previous comments have made some ridiculous claims about bloody event.

The ship was extremely well marked. The lead pilot of the Israeli attack force made low passes over the ship before the attack, exchanging waves with sailors on deck.

Then, suddenly, a savage two-hour assault with every weapon the Israeli planes had – guns, bombs, and torpedoes. The lame claim made afterward: it was a mistake.

Of course, Israel was trying to get the US into the war. It would have blamed Egypt for the attack.

There is also speculation that Israel was destroying the recorded evidence – the ship was a sophisticated spy craft – of its atrocities in the Sinai where Israelis murdered hundreds of Egyptian troops who had surrendered rather than be burdened with them in advancing.