Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Provoking nuclear war by media

Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the "butcher of the Balkans" who was responsible for "genocide", especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against "this new Hitler". David Scheffer, the US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered by Milosevic's forces.

This was the justification for Nato's bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia's economic infrastructure.  It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious "peace conference" in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were "worth it"

Saturday, October 22, 2016

CIA's continuing mentality that it isn't bound by US law


the US unwittingly played into Soviet propaganda that the US was really no different than the Nazis themselves.

In addition, as Simpson make very clear, much of what these former Nazis fed the OSS and CIA as information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe turned out to be baseless, and in many cases their spy networks turned out to have been deeply compromised by the USSR. The spy networks consistently overestimated the actual military threat posed by the USSR. But as Simpson points out, these CIA paid assets had ever incentive to overstate the danger. They were on the payroll, and as long as the Soviet menace appeared imminent, they would remain so. But start to say that there was no threat and the gravy train might come to an abrupt halt. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

Finally, because they fed the CIA, which admittedly had few Company assets on the ground in Eastern Europe after the war, a steadily hawkish line about the USSR and its intentions, they helped to contribute to the shrill political hysteria that emerged. I don't want to be misunderstood: the Soviet Union was evil, its methods vile and I don't weep any tears for its demise. But in our fear and in our ignorance, we made serious policy errors in those post-war years, and in doing so, we relied to a significant degree on people we should have known better than to trust: a group of ex-Nazis and collaborators who we knew were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, as I have suggested here, we helped inculcate our national security apparatus with a view that the ends always justified the means, and that as intelligence gatekeepers, the CIA was not bound by US law or public policy, but merely by its own secret determination of what was in the country's best interests.


Tuesday, October 18, 2016

The unmaking of world order

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Are Danish women the most abused women in Europe?

One in three women report physical or sexual abuse since age of 15, with largest number of victims in Denmark

  • A total of 43,000 women were interviewed – 1,500 in Denmark.
  •  One in three women reported having been the victim of physical and/or sexual abuse at some point in her life.
  •  8% reported having been sexually assaulted by their partner, ex-partner or a third party within the last year, and 5% had been raped.
  •  12% of all Danish women between the ages of 18 and 77 had been physically or sexually assaulted by their partner at some point, compared to an EU average of 8%.
  •   Every second Danish women reported that she had been the abused or assaulted by her partner, ex-partner or a third party at some time in her life, compared to one in three in the EU in general.
  •   4% of Danish women reported having been abused by a partner within the last year, compared with 3% in the EU in general.