Looking back at the Iraq War and forward at Syria and Iran

The February episode of Communist Voice (6pm Tuesdays on cable access in the Durham and Chapel Hill areas) is a double feature from 911TV on the brutal occupation of Iraq, comprising Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre and Poison DUst.

The first program is by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta and was shown on the Italian channel RAI November 8, 2005. It is about the US attack on Fallujah, Iraq in November 2004, especially the illegal use of white phosphorus and napalmlike weapons. The program starts with some background on the use of napalm in Vietnam, and shows footage from the bombing of Trang Bang by the Republic of Vietnam in 1972, which resulted in the famous photo of a girl, Kim Phuc, fleeing naked from the napalm. The narration says no one won the Vietnam War, but the Vietnamese liberated their country from Japanese, French, and American occupation and division. The use of napalm against civilians or military targets near civilians was apparently banned in 1980, but former Labour parliamentarian Alice Mahon forced the British military to reveal that the US military used napalmlike Mark-77 in Fallujah. According to an Army veteran interviewed, Garret Reppenhagen, there were many intentional civilian casualties. White phosphorus (WP) can be used to illuminate a battlefield, but it causes terrible burns if it touches flesh, burning that can't be stopped by just washing with water. At Fallujah, white phosphorus was used in an urban area and in March-April 2005 Field Artillery magazine said "WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired "shake and bake" munitions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

In between the two main programs is a segment of Trophy Video, which appears to show an infrared film of an aircraft shooting at a tractor and then killing the crippled driver when he is writhing on the ground and other clips show vehicles driving in traffic in Iraq and shooting any cars behind them, yet allowing many vehicles to pass by in the other lane.

Poison DUst is about the use of thousands of tons of radioactive and possibly toxic depleted uranium weapons used against Iraq since 1991 and the alleged effects on civilians and US soldiers. These weapons have been used by the US elsewhere, such as in the former Yugoslavia and presumably in Libya. Personally I was afraid this program would contain overblown claims about radioactivity, but it is actually reasonable and convincing and includes interviews with well-known physicist Michio Kaku. .

One of the reasons given for the aggression against Iraq was the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction, but these two programs argue that the country using chemical and radioactive weapons, and using them on civilians, is the US.

How quickly Iraq has been forgotten, because now the Obama Administration and other imperialists want to start wars with Syria and Iran. As with Libya, they first claim they will not get involved, but then grab whatever UN figleaf they can get for wars to topple governments for geopolitical reasons. Our representative in the UN, Susan Rice, is disgusted by Russia and China's vetoes of the Security Council resolution against Syria, but what I find disgusting is this government's desire to start yet another war to control the Middle East, saying it is war for the sake of the Syrian people. The US is just as self-interested as the others in the Security Council and is trying to set up a friendly government in Damascus that is against Iran and Palestinian and Lebanese national liberation forces, to further isolate Iran and prepare for war. The US was late in backing demonstrators in Egypt and didn't do anything about the violence in Bahrain or Israeli violence and mistreatment of Palestinians. The situation in Syria is not the business of the US and it is in the interest of working class Americans to attack Syria. If the majority of Syrians want a more democratic government, they should overthrow Assad themselves and not ask imperialist powers to attack their country.

It also looks like Obama wants a war with Iran, when there is little evidence of the nuclear weapons program being used as justification. Meanwhile Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and is occupying and brutalizing Arab countries and Obama's recent comments could be taken as threatening Iran with nuclear attack. Obama certainly isn't doing much to reduce international tensions and war propaganda in the media.     

Durham Bill of Rights Proclamation Monday and Loose Change on Communist Voice

The 9th annual Bill of Rights/Human Rights Proclamation will be presented at the beginning of the Durham City Council meeting December 5th at 7pm in City Hall.  The Durham Bill of Rights Defense Committee invites people to attend and it can also be seen live on cable's DTV8. 

 

Communist Voice is showing a one hour version of Loose Change - Final Cut this month, starting this Tuesday at 6-7pm on both Durham Community Media and The Peoples Channel.  Loose Change is a famous 9/11 truth documentary, available in several versions covering many of the holes in the official story and this version leaves out some questionable claims in previous versions.  This cable access version was provided by www.911tv.org.  There are enough shows on 9/11, US war crimes, Soviet history, leftist music, etc. available now and our cable access channels have space for new programming, so Communist Voice now has an hour every week on Tuesdays.     

Commemorating the Russian Revolution on TPC/DCM

The October Socialist Revolution began November 7th (October 25th by the calendar the Russian Empire was using at the time), 1917, so this month's showing on Communist Voice is the 1986 Soviet video Chronicle of October - 1917, starting tonight.  The Occupy Movement should study the proletarian revolutions in Russia and elsewhere, instead of relying on small capitalist discourse, as it seems to right now.  Chronicle of October has been shown in full on The Peoples Channel before, but the Cyrillic credits and the opening scenes in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) had to be cut for space.  The video was donated by the US Friends of the Soviet People.  Communist Voice might soon switch to an hour long time slot, probably around the same time.      

IAC statement on NATO's war against Libya

Below is a statement from the anti-imperialist International Action Center (www.iacenter.org) on the NATO attack on Libya.  Whether it is Bill Clinton attacking Iraq and Yugoslavia, George Bush attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, or Barack Obama attacking Libya, these are wars of aggression for geopolitics, markets, and resources, justified as "humanitarian intervention."  The US government claims to have humanitarian concern for Libya, but rewards the bloody repression in Bahrain, which hosts a US naval base.  Russia and China allowed the war against Libya to have UN Security Council approval, and then protested as if they didn't know NATO intended to topple the government.   

People who opposed Bush's wars were duped by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Obama or revealed that they believe in imperialism as much as Obama and the Democratic establishment does.  The strange result was that Republicans were referred to as anti-war in the media.  The media, including NPR and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now attempted to delegitimize the sovereign government of Libya by referring to "Gadhafi forces" and the media in general trumpeted opposition statements that turned out to be false, such as the claims about Viagra and sub-Saharan African mercenaries.  .     

With its success in Libya, and the killing of Gadhafi in a way reminiscent of what the Afghan warlords did in the early 90's, NATO might now turn to Syria and Obama may be creating the foundations for an attack on Iran.  Since this statement, it has been revealed that Somalia is being secretly bombed by the US, in addition to Yemen and Pakistan.  

- Murder of Gadhafi is next step to wider U.S. wars in Africa

INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER STATEMENT ON LIBYA: Lynching in Libya – Made in U$A

The brutal lynching of Moammar Gadhafi, the leader of Libya, is the latest criminal act in NATO's seven-month war of regime change and conquest.

Gadhafi died resisting to the very end U.S.-NATO war, as he said he would. He refused to negotiate with NATO an ignominious departure for himself or to surrender. He chose a martyr's death for Libya's independence and sovereignty. Despite ridicule in the West, in Africa Gadhafi will be remembered as an anti-imperialist fighter.

The gross and disrespectful behavior of the National Transitional Council (TNC) in the display of Moammar Gadhafi's body confirms to the world in the most graphic way that these elements, who the imperialist powers have given official recognition, are in fact crude, low-life gangsters.

Instead of burying Gadhafi within a day as required under Islamic law, they chose to display Gadhafi's battered, half naked body -- bloody, unwashed and uncovered -- on a soiled mattress in a meat locker at a shopping center.

This affront to religious and national custom will further deepen outrage and resistance.

TNC militias did no real fighting. These divided, competing military bands operate as scavengers or vultures, calling in air strikes and lying in wait to pick over the death that NATO bombers have blasted in front of them. In seven months of NATO bombing they have shown themselves capable of firing endless weapons in front of cameras and brutalizing Black Libyans, yet incapable of conducting any independent military action.

U.S. and NATO forces bear responsibility for this latest crime and the way it was carried out. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded like a gunslinger in a Hollywood western in Tripoli the day before Gadhafi's murder, demanding his capture – dead or alive.

Loyalist forces in the city of Sirte, Bani Walid and several other cities have held out heroically two months after NATO seizure of Tripoli.

NATO bombers targeted Sirte and Bani Walid's electrical grid, communications, food storage, the city water supply, the water towers on apartment buildings and even the water tower on the roof of the hospital. Again and again the TNC has announced that all resistance in these small cities have has been destroyed, only to be driven out each time.

The imperialist war in Libya is reminiscent of past colonial wars in Africa and Asia. Targeting of any civilian necessities, such as water, food, medicine, and communication is specifically prohibited under international law and considered a war crime under the Nuremburg and Geneva Conventions. Yet during seven months of war those are exactly the civilian targets that NATO planners focused on again and again.

The bombing of lines of cars fleeing the NATO besieged city of Sirte that led to Gadhafi's capture is an example of systematic targeting of civilians.

U.S. British, French and Italian imperialist forces claimed to be protecting civilians and implementing a United Nations Security Council No-fly zone. But the Libyan government used no aircraft at all. U.S. and other NATO jets ruled the skies and civilians were their targets. This is an expanding war. Today U.S. drones strike with impunity at defenseless peoples around the world.

Gadhafi's greatest threat to the imperialist countries was promoting a development plan for an African Federation and a stable African currency backed by Libya's $90 billion reserves to help Africans free themselves from the IMF and World Bank's onerous dictates.

Forty-two years ago Libya was one of the poorest, least developed countries of Africa. Gadhafi and other young military officers overthrew the Western-supported Libyan monarchy of King Idris in 1969, then held the imperialist's off as the Libyans built with nationalized oil revenues a series of modern cities and infrastructure. Before the NATO bombing this year, the Libyan people had achieved the highest educational and health standards in Africa, according to UN development statistics.

In the same week that Secretary of State Clinton traveled to Tripoli and that Gadhafi was murdered, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. Special Forces and military advisors to Uganda, South Sudan, Central Africa Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo. These are countries that hold a vast reservoir of strategic minerals, including cobalt, coltan, industrial diamonds, copper in Congo and newly discovered oil in Uganda and South Sudan.

Anyone who expects that U.S./NATO forces or their corrupt collaborators will rebuild the schools, hospitals, modern housing, sports complexes, vast underground water system, electricity, advanced communications, reorganize free health care or reconstruct essential infrastructure that they have laid waste to in months of bombing need only look at their ignominious record in Iraq after eight years or in Afghanistan after ten years. The promised peace, national reconciliation, democracy and development were empty words.

Today, the vast majority of Iraqi people, even in the capital city of Baghdad, still struggle with a few hours of electricity a day. Potable water is a memory of a past, pre-occupation epoch, so is free education and health care. NATO is a war machine for corporate profit, not a social service agency. It has shown itself as incapable of reorganizing a decent life.

In Afghanistan after a decade of occupation, the rubble of U.S. bombs and rusting tanks still litter the roads. None of the promised social progress has reached beyond Pentagon press releases and politicians visits.

In Iraq the indignities and humiliations were so numerous and such an affront that even the government of compliant collaborators established by the U.S. has been forced by mass sentiment to refuse immunity to U.S. troops scheduled to remain in Iraq as relabeled trainers and advisors.

As in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen the resistance in Libya to U.S. NATO domination will continue and take on new forms.

The imperialists never expected mass mobilized resistance to their plans. They predicted a war that would be over within a week. Instead a small population of six million, spread across a largely desert country, managed through mass mobilizations of millions of people, military resistance and emergency measures to withstand more than 200 days of non-stop bombardment, more than 9,000 air strikes.

U.S., British and French corporate looters are planning a new assault on Africa, but they are finding that this is not the world of 100 years ago.

The tens of thousands of youth occupying sites in cities across the U.S. and Europe need to stand in solidarity with resistance to corporate domination at home and to imperialist wars abroad.

Occupy Wall Street!

NOT Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Part Two of Truth and Politics Starts 10/4

Part 1 of Truth and Politics: Unanswered Questions About 9/11 / A Talk by David Ray Griffin ended rather abruptly, so viewers contacted me thinking it was cut off, but there is a Part 2, starting on Communist Voice tomorrow evening. Because of the time limit, a few minutes had to be cut at the beginning and the end.

 

Part 1 left off with Dr. Griffin questioning why the Secret Service didn't rush Bush out of the Florida elementary school he was visiting that morning, in contrast to how they hurried Cheney into a bunker. He says this reflects the 9/11 Commission's typically uncritical acceptance of whatever officials say, and that when questions were asked, they were not included in the final report. Griffin says the 9/11 Commission Report's general consistency indicates that it was edited by one person, Executive Director Philip Zelikow. The 9/11 Commission did not examine the numerous very general to very specific warnings received before 9/11, and in his remarks Griffin mentions San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown being warned not to fly on 9/11 and how Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped taking commercial flights that summer. Part 2 starts with a discussion of how Ashcroft rebuffed former Clinton impeachment prosecutor David Schippers, who was trying to bring to Ashcroft's attention a group of FBI agents who knew six weeks beforehand the general time and location of the attack in New York, who would carry it out, and how it was funded.

 

The credits also had to be cut:

 

Videography: Jim Terrell, Celestine Star, Lee Beale, Brad Larsen, and Gabriel Kish

 

Video Recording: Hummux

 

Graphics: www

 

Editor & Technical Director: Ken Jenkins

 

They recommend that viewers educate themselves and others, and support these organizations:

 

911truth.org

justicefor911.org

septembereleventh.org

9/11 Truth on DCM/TPC

A new episode of Communist Voice is premiering tonight on Durham Community Media and The Peoples Channel, part 1 of Truth and Politics:  Unanswered Questions About 9/11, which is a recording of a 2004 address by philosophy of religion professor and leading 9/11 truth author David Ray Griffin.  Griffin and others raise many important questions about the al Qaida conspiracy theory put foward by the government to explain how 9/11 could have occurred and what happened that day.  It is clear that the government knew an attack was coming, and knew at least some of the details, and benefitted from the attack.  I'm more agnostic about issues like what crashed into the Pentagon and whether explosives were planted in the three buildings that collapsed at the World Trade Center.  Defenders of the official theory argue over these issues, rather than the evidence that the Bush Administration knew 9/11 was going to happen, and let it happen so they could invade Afghanistan and Iraq and carry through their domestic policies.

 

It should be noted that I critically endorse the content of Communist Voice, and the programs may or may not have been created by members of a communist party.  I have no reason to think David Ray Griffin is a Marxist, but I think it is important for people to hear his arguments and communists should not join capitalist media and opportunists in attacking the 9/11 truth movement with a broad brush, as some have.     

 

 

Manchuria - August 1945

Starting this evening, the Communist Voice series on The Peoples Channel and Durham Community Media will be showing Manchuria – August 1945, a Soviet documentary about the USSR's role in liberating northeastern China from Japanese occupation. The program was donated by US Friends of the Soviet People. In September 1931 Japan attacked China and seized Manchuria, and in July 1938 the Sino-Japanese War began, lasting until the defeat of Japan in 1945. In this way WWII's roots extend back to the 20's and 30's, and in a few decades, US aggression against Iraq in the 90's and the invasion in 2003 may be seen as the quiet beginning of the next inter-imperialist war.

As the Allied powers had agreed at conferences, the USSR was to have a role in the war against Japan, but by August 1945 Roosevelt was dead and President Truman wanted a free hand. Japan's fascist government, all but defeated already, knew it had lost when the USSR and Mongolia entered the war, but the US still dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima August 6^th and on Nagasaki August 9^th. It can be argued that, other than the radiation, there is not a huge difference between being incinerated or boiled by a nuclear bomb versus the conventional firebombings that struck other Japanese and German cities. Two cities were destroyed and tens of thousands of Japanese and Korean civilians were killed so the US would be the sole occupier of Japan and could intimidate the USSR, an attempt which failed (ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/All30iii.htm). The US went on to preserve part of Japan's fascist leadership for use during the Cold War, divided the Korean nation, and fomented the Korean War (ml-review.ca/aml/China/KoreaNS.htm). China liberated itself from imperialist domination and feudalism, and helped defend the DPRK, but its revisionist leadership did not build socialism, and now openly advocates capitalism and supports imperialism, from Haiti to Libya.

There is an annual vigil in August commemorating the atomic bombing of Japan at the Chapel Hill Post Office on Franklin Street.