Israel as a Rogue State 129

The fatal cocktail of fanatic Jewish fundamentalism, ugly settler colonial racism and the rise of internal fascism does not bode well for anyone, particularly given the fact that Israel owns hundreds of nuclear weapons. Little wonder many consider Israel a major threat to world peace!

Ovadia Yosef is the spiritual leader of the hugely influential Mizrahi fundamentalist party Shas, a partner in the current Israeli coalition government.

Imagine the leader of a major European party in any coalition government daring to say something as hateful, racist and extreme: "Jews are like our cattle, born to serve us." Most likely, that leader will sit in jail for a long time, his party will be kicked out of government and perhaps out of political life altogether, and, in all likelihood, the government will collapse after profusely apologizing and distancing itself from this criminally racist speech. In Israel, such utterances and direct calls for "annihilating the Arabs" have not only become the norm, failing to raise any serious protest; they are inciting real racist violence against Palestinians everywhere. 

Israel's impunity must be checked before it is too late for all of us. BDS now! 

Given this, Palestinians have very warmly welcomed the prominent filmmaker Mike Leigh's cancellation of his planned visit to Israel in protest over its oppression of the Palestinians, colonial expansion and the loyalty oath, which he regarded as "the last straw." 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/oct/18/mike-leigh-cancels-israel-visit

Omar Barghouti

http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782

The Jerusalem Post October 18, 2010

Yosef: Gentiles exist only to serve Jews By JONAH MANDEL18/10/2010 According to Rabbi, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.

The sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator. “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat. According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews. “In Israel, death has no dominion over them... With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant... That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew,” Yosef said. “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created,” he added. Yosef’s Saturday night sermons have seen many controversial statements from the 90-year-old rabbi. In August, Yosef caused a diplomatic uproar when he wished a plague upon the Palestinian people and their leaders, a curse he retracted a few weeks later, when he blessed them along with all of Israel’s other peace-seeking neighbors. Now, my question is what the new Dutch pro-Israel secretary of state, Uri Rosenthal, is planning to do with this information while at the same time the Dutch government is busy upgrading its relations with the 'Jewish state'. I' ll keep you informed.

Willem van Genugten en de Mensenrechten 41

Willem van Genugten is al vele jaren hoogleraar internationaal recht aan de Universiteit van Tilburg, een katholiek bolwerk. Hij is tevens voorzitter van de Commissie voor de Rechten van de Mens van de Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken die ondermeer de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken intellectueel bijstaat in deze barre tijden. Let op: mensenrechten is een zaak die goed is voor een flitsende carriere en een vorstelijk inkomen. Tegelijkertijd is het fenomeen mensenrechten een politiek wapen bij uitstek, een mijnenveld dus. Ik geef een voorbeeld:

Bijna een jaar geleden, begin November 2009, beweerde Van Genugten ineens, zonder duidelijke aanleiding, het volgende:

Verhagen handelt Gaza-rapport goed af

OOK MINISTER VERHAGEN WIL STRAFFELOOSHEID TEGENGAAN, VERGIST U ZICH NIET. DE KUNST IS DAT ZO TE DOEN DAT VREDE WORDT BESPOEDIGD, ZEGT WILLEM VAN GENUGTEN.

 Dit oordeel werd met gefronste wenkbrauwen ontvangen door mensen die serieus nadenken over de schendingen van de mensenrechten door Israel en de Nederlandse steun daarbij.

Welnu, in het voorafgaande stukje schreef ik dit:

Terwijl voor Marokko de mensenrechten wel een rol spelen, spelen die geen rol voor het Nederlandse kabinet, waarvan de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken de banden met Israel wil aanhalen, waardoor duidelijk wordt dat zijn joodse achtergrond een belangrijkere rol speelt in zijn beleid dan de Nederlandse opvattingen over mensenrechten en het internationaal recht.  Let u eens op hoever de volksvertegenwoordiging in de polder bereid is deze politiek te accepteren.

En niet alleen onze volksvertegenwoordiging maar ook de academici die groot zijn geworden via de mensenrechten. Zou bijvoorbeeld hoogleraar Van Genugten nu ook ongevraagd een uitspraak kunnen doen over Uri Rosenthal, wiens joodse achtergrond hem blind heeft gemaakt voor het international recht en de schendingen daarvan door de zogeheten ‘Joodse staat’? Ik ben benieuwd. Vergeet niet dat Van Genugten zowel zijn status als zijn inkomen te danken heeft aan het bestaan van de mensenrechten.

Israel as a Rogue State 128

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• Published 20:59 17.10.10
• Latest update 20:59 17.10.10

Peres cancels Morocco trip after king refuses request to meet

Moroccan King Mohammed VI wrote Peres last Friday that such a rendezvous was impossible at the moment; President's Bureau believes decision was made to protest Israeli policy.

By Nir Hasson

President Shimon Peres has canceled his upcoming visit to Morocco after the king of the North African state rejected his request to meet during the trip.
Peres had been invited to take part in the World Economic Forum in Morocco next week and had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address to the event. But according to the policy of the President's Bureau, Peres is entitled to refuse a visit to any country in which he is not able to meet the head of state.
Moroccan King Mohammed VI wrote Peres last Friday that he would ordinarily be pleased to meet with him, but that such a rendezvous was impossible at the moment.
The President's Bureau believes that the king's refusal is based on protest of Israeli policy and thus decided to cancel Peres' trip.

"Never take the same road twice" - Ibn Battuta, 14th century Moroccan traveler, philosopher, medic, theologian

"Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it" - Chinese Proverb

"I want to pour water into hell and set paradise on fire, so that these two veils disappear and nobody shall any longer worship God out of a fear of hell or a hope of heaven, but solely for the sake of God's eternal beauty" - Rabi'ah Al-Adawiyya,  8th century mystic saint, Basra, Iraq  

Terwijl voor Marokko de mensenrechten wel een rol spelen, spelen die geen rol voor het Nederlandse kabinet, waarvan de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken de banden met Israel wil aanhalen, waardoor duidelijk wordt dat zijn joodse achtergrond een belangrijkere rol speelt in zijn beleid dan de Nederlandse opvattingen over mensenrechten en het internationaal recht.  Let u eens op hoever de volksvertegenwoordiging in de polder bereid is deze politiek te accepteren.


http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/peres-cancels-morocco-trip-after-king-denies-request-to-meet-1.319623

Western Terrorism 1

The War On Terror

By Paul Craig Roberts

October 15, 2010  "Information Clearing House" ---- Does anyone remember the “cakewalk war” that would last six weeks, cost $50-$60 billion, and be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues?

Does anyone remember that White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired by Dubya because Lindsey estimated that the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion?

Lindsey was fired for over-estimating the cost of a war that, according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, has cost 15 times more than Lindsey estimated. And the US still has 50,000 troops in Iraq.

Does anyone remember that just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, the US government declared victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Does anyone remember that the reason Dubya gave for invading Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, weapons that the US government knew did not exist?

Are Americans aware that the same neoconservarives who made these fantastic mistakes, or told these fabulous lies, are still in control of the government in Washington?

The “war on terror” is now in its tenth year. What is it really all about?

The bottom line answer is that the “war on terror” is about creating real terrorists. The US government desperately needs real terrorists in order to justify its expansion of its wars against Muslim countries and to keep the American people sufficiently fearful that they continue to accept the police state that provides “security from terrorists,” but not from the government that has discarded civil liberties.

The US government creates terrorists by invading Muslim countries, wrecking infrastructure and killing vast numbers of civilians. The US also creates terrorists by installing puppet governments to rule over Muslims and by using the puppet governments to murder and persecute citizens as is occurring on a vast scale in Pakistan today.

Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.

Most Americans cannot see what is happening because of their conditioning. Most Americans believe that their government is the best on earth, that it is morally motivated to help others and to do good, that it rushes aid to countries where there is famine and natural catastrophes. Most believe that their presidents tell the truth, except about their sexual affairs.

The persistence of these delusions is extraordinary in the face of daily headlines that report US government bullying of, and interference with, virtually every country on earth. The US policy is to buy off, overthrow, or make war on leaders of other countries who represent their peoples’ interests instead of American interests. A recent victim was the president of Honduras who had the wild idea that the Honduran government should serve the Honduran people.

The American government was able to have the Honduran president discarded, because the Honduran military is trained and supplied by the US military. It is the same case in Pakistan, where the US government has the Pakistani government making war on its own people by invading tribal areas that the Americans consider to be friendly to the Taliban, al Qaeda, “militants” and “terrorists.”

Earlier this year a deputy US Treasury secretary ordered Pakistan to raise taxes so that the Pakistani government could more effectively make war on its own citizens for the Americans. On October 14 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered Pakistan to again raise taxes or the US would withhold flood aid. Clinton pressured America’s European puppet states to do the same, expressing in the same breath that the US government was worried by British cuts in the military budget. God forbid that the hard-pressed British, still reeling from American financial fraud, don’t allocate enough money to fight America’s wars.

On Washington’s orders, the Pakistani government launched a military offensive against Pakistani citizens in the Swat Valley that killed large numbers of Pakistanis and drove millions of civilians from their homes. Last July the US instructed Pakistan to send its troops against the Pakistani residents of North Waziristan. On July 6 Jason Ditz reported on antiwar.com that “at America’s behest, Pakistan has launched offensives against [the Pakistani provinces of] Swat Valley, Bajaur, South Waziristan, Orakzai,and Khyber.”

A week later Israel’s US Senator Carl Levin (D,MI) called for escalating the Obama Administration’s policies of US airstrikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas. On September 30, the Pakistani newspaper, The Frontier Post, wrote that the American air strikes “are, plain and simple, a naked aggression against Pakistan.”

The US claims that its forces in Afghanistan have the right to cross into Pakistan in pursuit of “militants.” Recently US helicopter gunships killed three Pakistani soldiers who they mistook for Taliban. Pakistan closed the main US supply route to Afghanistan until the Americans apologized.

Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.”

In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

To keep Pakistan in line, the US government changed its position that the “Times Square Bombing” was the work of a “lone wolf.” Attorney General Eric Holder switched the blame to the “Pakistani Taliban,” and Secretary of State Clinton threatened Pakistan with “very serious consequences” for the unsuccessful Times Square bombing, which likely was a false flag operation aimed at Pakistan.

To further heighten tensions, on September 1 the eight members of a high-ranking Pakistani military delegation in route to a meeting in Tampa, Florida, with US Central Command, were rudely treated and detained as terrorist suspects at Washington DC’s Dulles Airport.

For decades the US government has enabled repeated Israeli military aggression against Lebanon and now appears to be getting into gear for another Israeli assault on the former American protectorate of Lebanon. On October 14 the US government expressed its “outrage” that the Lebanese government had permitted a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who is the focus of Washington’s intense demonization efforts. Israel’s representatives in the US Congress threatened to stop US military aid to Lebanon, forgetting that US Rep. Howard Berman (D,CA) has had aid to Lebanon blocked since last August to punish Lebanon for a border clash with Israel.

Perhaps the most telling headline of all is the October 14 report, “Somalia’s New American Primer Minister.” An American has been installed as the Prime Minister of Somalia, an American puppet government in Mogadishu backed up by thousands of Ugandan troops paid by Washington.

This barely scratches the surface of Washington’s benevolence toward other countries and respect for their rights, borders, and lives of their citizens.

Meanwhile, to silence Wikileaks and to prevent any more revelations of American war crimes, the “freedom and democracy” government in DC has closed down Wikileaks’ donations by placing the organization on its “watch list” and by having the Australian puppet government blacklist Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is now akin to a terrorist organization. The American government’s practice of silencing critics will spread across the Internet.

Remember, they hate us because we have freedom and democracy, First Amendment rights, habeas corpus, respect for human rights, and show justice and mercy to all.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26610.htm

11 september 2001 (55)

Pentagon author exposes Zelikow’s key role in 9/11 cover-up

---

By Maidhc Ó Cathail

17 October 2010

Maidhc Ó Cathail views recent evidence provided by a former US intelligence official indicating that Philip Zelikov, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, had deliberately withheld key evidence from the  9/11 Commission.

In an interview on “Fox Business Network”, a retired US intelligence officer accused the official in charge of the 9/11 Commission of a cover-up of intelligence failures leading up to the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001.

Appearing on the political talk show “Freedom Watch”,  Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer and the author of  Operation Dark Heart, a much-hyped new book on the war in Afghanistan,  spoke about his mid-October 2003 encounter with  Dr Philip Zelikow, then executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

“‘Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?’ Zelikow asked... In a rare moment of candour, Zelikow proceeded to explain that the real reason for preemptive war against Iraq was ‘the threat against Israel’.”

During a fact-finding mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Zelikow’s team was briefed by Shaffer on Able Danger, a DIA data mining project that had allegedly identified Mohammed Atta as a threat to the US a year before 9/11.

Parenthetically, the “Mohammed Atta” identified by Able Danger may have been an imposter operating under a stolen identity, as occurred in the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai. In an interview with a German newspaper, reported by the Guardian, Mohammed Atta’s father claimed that his son had nothing to do with the attacks and was still alive a year after 9/11.

Whichever Mohammed Atta was referred to by Shaffer in Bagram, Zelikow reportedly “fell silent with shock at the news”.

According to Shaffer, Zelikow came to him at the end of the meeting, gave him his card, and said: “What you said today is critically important, very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington DC.”

On his return to Washington in January 2004, Shaffer immediately contacted Zelikow’s office and was told to “stand by”. After a week passed, Shaffer called again, and this time was told by Zelikow’s staff: “We don’t need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need. Thank you anyway.”

None of the information provided by Shaffer appeared in the 9/11 Commission’s
585-page  report, however.

In September 2005, more than a year after the publication of the 9/11 report, Shaffer said he met with one of the 9/11 commissioners in Philadelphia. Over lunch, he told the commissioner what he had told Zelikow in Afghanistan. The commissioner said that “he had never heard any of this”, adding that, “had he heard of it, it would have been something that was very much of interest to he [sic] and the commission”.

“So there’s a lot of things that never made it in that 9/11 report?” asked Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of “Freedom Watch”.

“Things were either by negligence left out, or, and I believe, by purpose left out,” Shaffer replied.

Another guest on the show,  Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, spoke of a similarly frustrating experience with the 9/11 Commission staff director.

Describing the 9/11 Commission Report as “a whitewash, and a lie from top to bottom”, Scheuer said he provided Zelikow with over 400 pages of official government documents detailing intelligence failures before 9/11.

“I never heard one word back from Zelikow,” he said.

“They all seemed very interested in what you had to say,” the former CIA officer added, referring to meetings he had with Zelikow and his staff, “but at the end of the day, it didn’t make it into the report.”

This is not the first time that questions have been raised about Zelikow’s handling of the 9/11 Commission.

In his 2009 book, The Commission, Philip Shenon, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, wrote about “how tightly Zelikow was able to control the flow of information on the commission”, and that “everything” was “run through” him.

While Zelikow’s tight control of the commission excluded disturbing evidence from national security experts like Shaffer and Scheuer, a dubious scholar like  Laurie Mylroie was afforded ample opportunity to promote the most spurious justification for the Iraq war. Mylroie, whose major booster in government was Deputy Defence Secretary  Paul Wolfowitz, argued that Iraq had been involved in every major terrorist attack against the United States since the early 1990s, including 9/11. During commission hearings on Al-Qaeda, Zelikow, writes Shenon, “made sure that she had a prominent place at the witness table”.

And why wouldn’t he? After all, Zelikow had an important role in, as Shenon puts it, “developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war”. It was Zelikow who had authored a 31-page “preemptive war” doctrine which George W. Bush announced to the world in 2002 as “The National Security Strategy of the United States”.

“Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?” Zelikow asked an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. In a rare moment of candour, Zelikow proceeded to explain that the real reason for preemptive war against Iraq was “the threat against Israel.”

Judge Napolitano asked Lt-Col Shaffer if the commissioner in Philadelphia had said whether anyone on the 9/11 Commission “had an agenda, or was covering up for somebody, or was protecting somebody”. The commissioner’s reply was, according to Shaffer: “Everybody on the commission was covering for someone.”

Given the fatal career implications of broaching such a  taboo subject, not to mention Rupert Murdoch’s well-known devotion to the State of Israel, it’s hardly surprising that the Fox presenter didn’t probe too deeply into who Philip Zelikow might have been covering for.

http://www.redress.cc/americas/mocathail20101017

Israel as a Rogue State 127

Why Israel will never define its borders

---

By Alan Hart

17 October 2010

Alan Hart explains that Israel will never produce a map of its internationally-recognized borders because no Israeli leader would ever have the courage and leadership to stand up to and remove Jewish squatters from the occupied territories.

Better late than never! A very senior Palestinian official in Ramallah, Yasser Abed Rabbo, has found the right way to challenge Israel and the US. As reported by AFP news agency on 13 October, he said: "We officially demand that the US administration and the Israeli government provide a map of the borders of the state of Israel which they want us to recognize."

That’s a completely logical and totally reasonable demand.

If Israel was interested in peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, the map provided would show Israel with borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war. An accompanying note would say that, subject to agreement in final negotiations, Israel seeks minor border adjustments here and there. The note would also propose that Jerusalem should be an open, undivided city and the capital of two states.

If such a map with the note as above was presented, it would open the door to peace.

"...Sharon convened a secret meeting of some of our generals and other top military and security people. They signed in blood an oath which commits them to join with the settlers and fight to the death to prevent any government of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank.” Ezer Weizman, former Israeli president and defence minister

But the implementation of such land-for-peace deal would require the Israeli army to confront and forcibly remove illegal Jewish settlers who refused to leave; and that would open the door to a Jewish civil war – the price Israel’s Jews would have to pay for 62 years of contempt for and defiance of international law.

Of course it won’t happen. As I reveal in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, why not was explained to me as far back as I980 by Shimon Peres. At the time he was the leader of the Labour Party, the main opposition to Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Likud-led coalition. Peres was hoping to win Israel’s next election and deny Begin a second term in office. (President Carter was hoping and possibly praying for such an outcome). My purpose in talking with Peres in private was to establish whether or not he was interested in me acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between himself and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. Peres was interested but before I went off to Beirut to seek Arafat’s agreement to participate in a little conspiracy for peace, he said to me, “I fear it’s already too late”.

I asked Peres what he meant and this was his answer:

Every day that passes sees new bricks on new settlements. Begin knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s stuffing the West Bank with settlers to create the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot Jews out of the West Bank. [pause] I’m not.

When Peres spoke those words to me there were 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers on the occupied West Bank. If it was “too late” then, in 1980, how much more too late is it today when the number of illegal Jewish settlers is in excess of 500,000 and rising on a daily basis?

Some weeks after that conversation with Peres, I had reason to talk in private with Ezer Weizman, then serving as defence minister in Begin’s first-term government. He gave me extraordinary and frightening insight into why any future Israeli prime minister would not and possibly could not order the army to remove settlers from the West Bank by whatever force was necessary. At a point in our conversation he said the following, very slowly and with quiet emphasis:

This lunchtime Sharon convened a secret meeting of some of our generals and other top military and security people. They signed in blood an oath which commits them to join with the settlers and fight to the death to prevent any government of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank. [pause] I know that’s what happened at the meeting because I’ve checked it out and that’s why I was late for this appointment with you.

(I tell the full story of this conversation with Weizman in ”The Blood Oath”, Chapter 12, Volume Three, of the American edition of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews).

So no, there won’t be a Jewish civil war because no Israeli prime minister is ever going to risk provoking it.

So there will be no map. (I mean not one that could come even close to satisfying the Palestinian demand and need). Yasser Abed Rabbo knew that when he put the demand into words.

So what was the point of his challenge?

I presume he was hoping that Israel’s refusal to come up with a map based on more or less pre-June 1967 borders will help to convince more and more people, Americans especially, that Israel simply is not interested in peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, and for which there is universal support (minus only the opposition of the Zionists and the mad, fundamentalist Christians who support them right or wrong, an opposition which in numbers of people is only a tiny, almost invisible fraction of the global whole).

If it does that, the challenge will not have been made in vain.

Footnote

The day after Yasser Abed Rabbo issued the challenge, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had the gall (chutzpah) to say that Israel “has already made many gestures to the Palestinian Authority to facilitate restarting direct negotiations”, and now “the other side must show goodwill”. In one sense Lieberman was right. Israel has made many gestures to the Palestinians. But all of them have been of the “Go to hell” type.

http://www.redress.cc/palestine/ahart20101017

The Empire 672

The Way We Forget

Sunday 17 October 2010

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: betenoir, Capt. Matt Molinski / Ohio National Guard, Staff Sgt. Marcus J. Quarterman / U.S. Army)

This country of ours has a monstrous capacity to forget. We are able to forget - if we ever knew - what happened two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago. Worse, we are able to forget what happened one year ago, last month, last week, and even yesterday. We forget, we ignore, we refuse to know, and in our deliberate ignorance are found the seeds of further destruction, widely sown and also to be forgotten.

It has been made far too clear that our national amnesia certainly extends over the last two years. After an era of Republican rule that saw vast economic collapse, the abrogation of basic rights, the trashing of Constitutional law, two decade-long wars that still have no end in sight, a catastrophic terrorist attack that could have been prevented, the virtual annihilation of a major American city that could have been prevented, and the theft and waste of trillions of dollars, every available poll appears to indicate that the American people have already forgotten all about it, and are perfectly ready to let the wolves back inside the fence.

For proof, if proof is even required, I offer an article from Friday's New York Times:

It has been going on there for nine years and counting. Nearly 100,000 American troops are currently deployed there. More than 1,300 American service members have lost their lives there. The United States has spent over $300 billion on the effort so far. Yet polling suggests that the war in Afghanistan is barely a blip on voters' radars as the midterm elections approach.

In a nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last month, 60 percent of Americans said that the economy or jobs were the most important problems facing the country. A mere 3 percent mentioned Afghanistan or the war.

(Emphasis added)

Three percent mentioned as important a war that has been grinding out death and calamity for more than nine years. Three percent. The war in Afghanistan is all but forgotten.

The dying, however, continues apace.

From the eighth of October through the fifteenth of October, a Friday through a Friday, 28 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Seventeen were killed in the last three days of that week. One was from the United Kingdom, one was from Poland, four were from Italy, twelve were from the United States, and the names of ten more have not been released at the time of this writing. The oldest of the dead was 34 years old, a Sergeant. The youngest was 19. Each and every one of them died from hostile fire - rocket, IED, mortar or small arms. For the week ending October 13th, 188 casualties - both the dead and the wounded - were officially reported. The total number of American soldiers killed as of the 15th stands as 1,334, and the total number of NATO fatalities stands at 2,161.

There is also this, a fact within facts:

The number of U.S. soldiers who have suffered amputations in Afghanistan has increased sharply over last year as more troops move into Taliban territory, according to Army data.

Amputations rose from 47 in 2009 to 77 through Sept. 23 of this year, or an increase of more than 60%, the Army reports. The chief cause of the injuries are improvised explosive devices - or IEDs - that are planted in the ground or along roads, according to the International Security Assistance Force, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.

Coalition forces have been hit by more IEDs in recent weeks as the surge in U.S. troops allows for expanded operations into traditional Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in southern Afghanistan.

The vast majority of amputations involve the loss of either an arm or leg, but a dozen soldiers this year have had multiple amputations, twice the number of such cases in 2009. At the NATO hospital, doctors amputated a major limb - a leg or arm - an average of once every other day in September, according to Navy Capt. Michael Mullins, a hospital spokesman. The operations included not only U.S. troops, but also NATO troops, Afghan soldiers and civilians, Mullins said.

Coverage of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is spotty at best - the "We don't do body counts" ethic continues apace - but the Predator drones have been hard at work, along with the rest of our fearful conventional arsenal, and the number of civilian dead and wounded stands tall in the thousands.

Argue against the war, or for it. Say we must withdraw, or that we must "finish the job," whatever that means. It would be nice if such a debate were actually taking place, because the debate is sorely needed. But we are incapable of even beginning to begin such a conversation. People are not disagreeing about the war. They are not even thinking about it, by a count of 97 to 3 percent.

The media is to blame for this. The politicians are to blame for this. The economy is to blame for this.

We are to blame for this.

It is amazing, astonishing, appalling, horrifying the way we forget.

http://www.truth-out.org/the-way-we-forget64242