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Old November 22nd, 2015 #1
Robbie Key
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Default 'The Global War on Terror'

The Greatest Racket of All Time

By Pater Tenebrarum
Acting Man
November 21, 2015

One would think that the so-called “Global War on Terror”, which has been given fresh impetus by the Paris attacks, must be going swimmingly. What else could explain the great enthusiasm with which it is pursued? It may be recalled that it started in earnest after the WTC attack – also a declaration of war, as it was put at the time.

As is often the case when Islamist fundamentalists strike, the actual attackers immolated themselves on occasion of the attack itself, making it impossible to exact retribution. Except by proxy, that is. This was playing right into the hands of those who had planned the attacks. It seems to us that they have ultimately succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Not to put too fine a point to it, our wise political leaders have evidently been outfoxed by a bunch of turbaned cave dwellers and goat buggerers in the Hindu Kush.

To wit, between 2013 and 2014, the global death toll from terrorist attacks has increased by yet another 80%,setting a new sad record. So 15 years of bombing places far and wide to smithereens, engaging in extremely costly “nation building” exercises, droning assorted terrorist groups so thoroughly that selected Al Qaeda leaders can by now boast of having been killed up to 17 times (only to miraculously reappear again), have produced thisby way of bottom line results:


The result to date of 15 years of “Global War on Terrorism” – there is more terrorism than ever before – click to enlarge.

This is eerily reminiscent of the US government’s “War on Poverty”, which stopped the decline in poverty dead in its tracks the moment it began, or the even worse effort known as the “War on Drugs”, which has done nothing to decrease the drug epidemic, but has given birth to the largest and most brutal criminal cartels the world has ever seen. Can people really be that stupid? Unfortunately the answer is yes, they can. This is only half of the answer though.


Death by terrorism in 2014. Not a single Western country even makes the list (and even now, France would not make it). The biggest number of victims can be found in places like Iraq and Nigeria. Boko Haram has killed even more people than ISIS in 2014 (the deaths in Iraq are not exclusively attributable to IS) – click to enlarge.

The Greatest Racket of All Time

The other half of the answer has been already been supplied decades ago by the legendary Smedley Butler: War is a racket. However, most people are blissfully unaware of how big a racket it actually is. It is in fact the greatest scam ever – even the more recent “climate change” scam is comfortably put in the shade by it.

Why are all Republican presidential candidates (apart from two exceptions) and Democratic front-runner Billary alike loudly screeching for more war, in spite of the sobering evidence? When confronted with such seemingly intractable questions, it is usually a good idea to follow the money. Should the mafia be aware of the associated statistics, it is presumably green with envy. Readers should definitely take the time to read Tom Engelhardt’s recent article “It’s a $cam” in its entirety. Below we are presenting just a handful of morsels from the first few paragraphs:

Quote:
“Let’s begin with the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills, Iraqi oil money held in the U.S. The Bush administration began flying it into Baghdad on C-130s soon after U.S. troops entered that city in April 2003. Essentially dumped into the void that had once been the Iraqi state, at least $1.2 to $1.6 billion of it was stolen and ended up years later in a mysterious bunker in Lebanon. And that’s just what happened as the starting gun went off.

It’s never ended. In 2011, the final report of the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion taxpayer dollars had been lost to fraud and waste in the American “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, for instance, there was that $75 million police academy, initially hailed “as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security.” It was, however, so poorly constructed that it proved a health hazard. In 2006, “feces and urine rained from the ceilings in [its] student barracks” and that was only the beginning of its problems. When the bad press started, Parsons Corporation, the private contractor that built it, agreed to fix it for nothing more than the princely sum already paid.

[…]

Typically enough, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, a $40 million prison Parsons also contracted to build, was never even finished.

[…]

And why stick to buildings, when there were those Iraqi roads to nowhere paid for by American dollars? At least one of them did at least prove useful to insurgent groups moving their guerrillas around (like the $37 million bridge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built between Afghanistan and Tajikistan that helped facilitate the region’s booming drug trade in opium and heroin).

[…]

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hired an American nonprofit, International Relief and Development (IRD), to oversee an ambitious road-building program meant to gain the support of rural villagers. Almost $300 million later, it could point to “less than 100 miles of gravel road completed.” Each mile of road had, by then, cost U.S. taxpayers $2.8 million, instead of the expected $290,000, while a quarter of the road-building funds reportedly went directly to IRD for administrative and staff costs. Needless to say, as the road program failed, USAID hired IRD to oversee other non-transportation projects.”
(emphasis added)

The article continues in this vein and believe it or not, the above was just the harmless stuff. It becomes evenmore absurd as one reads on. Not only do the numbers become ever more staggering, the failures become concomitantly greater and more bizarre (such as the $43 million compressed natural gas station in Afghanistan, similar to one built in neighboring Pakistan for $300,000, located in an area bereft of infrastructure capable of delivering natural gas; or the $8.4 billion pumped into an Afghan “drug eradication program”, which was followed by a hitherto unbroken string of record opium harvests).

That is however not all. Even more astounding is the fact that most of the individuals who demonstrably bear personal responsibility for these cases of fraudulent theft of taxpayer funds have not only not been sanctioned, but have in fact been rewarded and promoted. As Engelhardt puts is:

Quote:
“In short, there turns out to be much good fortune in the disaster business, a fact which gives the whole process the look of a classic swindle in which the patsies lose their shirts but the scam artists make out like bandits.”
We have long had a cynical view of government and its endless follies and outrages. There is little that can surprise us anymore. We must confess though that the sheer size and audacity of this racket still manages to impress us.

The war on terror is the best racket yet – it is a gift that will likely keep on giving for a very long time. It possesses a certain fateful inevitability: Western governments go about poking assorted hornet’s nests, until the hornets come swarming out to sting us, providing fresh reasons to expand the war.



This is not meant to imply that one shouldn’t defend oneself against terrorism, but it might be a good idea to reevaluate the strategy (as Justin Raimondo noted, at this juncture, simply quarantining IS may be worth considering). Doing more of what clearly hasn’t worked so far is certainly likely to keep the above mentioned racket going, but based on the evidence it isn’t going to achieve much else.

Miscalculations Coming Home to Roost

The conflict in Syria specifically has been characterized by miscalculations galore. It seems everybody is finally realizing that IS may be more of a threat than was hitherto assumed. As a number of governments in the region that are allied with the West have found out, they are in a situation akin to that the sorcerer’s apprentice found himself in. The spirits they have summoned are now ignoring their commands – and they can no longer get rid of them.

Arab potentates aren’t the only ones in the region beginning to wonder what they have cultivated next door in their eagerness to see Syrian tinpot despot Assad toppled. Even the Grand Poobah of Turkey has recently begun to sound a bit worried.

As an aside to all this, Abdel Hamid Abaaoud (born in Belgium, natch), the suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, seems blessed with an extraordinary amount of luck. He keeps getting caught, but manages to escape every time. He enjoys freedom of movement all over the show, in spite of having starred in truly gruesome IS videos, meaning he’s not exactly Mr. Anonymous. Some people are beginning to wonder how this is possible, since Allah seems highly unlikely to have anything to do with it, contrary to Abaaoud’s claims. It smells of state support actually.

Bigger than expectedHelloooo dogg…doggie? My, how big you are! And what big teeth you have!

Addendum: Deep State Piping Up, Resurgent Putin

Meanwhile, Deep State representatives are once again sensing an opening. They have already reiterated their nonsensical, nay, downright dangerous demand to do away with encryption on a “just trust us” basis (see the assessment of cyber-security specialist Brian Krebs here). The idea is totally hare-brained, i.e., par for the course for government bureaucrats.

And wouldn’t you know, it’s all Edward Snowden’s fault, for having provided proof of the unconstitutional misdeeds of certain spook agencies. Presumably he has magically caused the French authorities to ignore warnings about the terrorists and the planned attacks they received from at least three different foreign intelligence services by inundating them with his traitor-rays from Moscow.

Finally, in an exceedingly amusing development, Vladimir Putin appears to have morphed overnight from pariah and enemy du jour to the “go to man”/ “hottest ticket in town” on fighting IS (or the “problem solver who cannot be ignored”, as the FT averred). Not that he is doing anything different – he is also poking the hornet’s nest and getting stung in return. However, everybody knows he is different in at least one respect.

As we remarked to a friend recently, whatever one thinks of Putin, it is clear that he is an implacable enemy of Islamist radicals. The Chechen war stands as a monument to his Machiavellian ruthlessness in dealing with such people. So-called collateral damage definitely wasn’t on his mind much. In order to pacify the place, he simply ordered his military to raze the capital Grozny. Once Grozny was reduced to sufficiently small pieces of rubble, the army combed the surrounding landscape and shot everything that moved funny. Then a sort of local mafia boss was installed as the new governor, to ensure the place remained pacified.

We suspect that the Middle East is a different kettle of fish though. Restoring something akin to the decades of pan-Arab nationalist oppression seems a highly dubious proposition. Too much has happened, and the place is packed with armed groups that will continue to be at each other’s throats no matter what.

Putin is merely acting in line with old KGB traditions though. Here is an excerpt from a 20 year old newspaper report on how the KGB treated Islamist kidnappers aligned with Hezbollah who had taken Soviet diplomats hostage in Lebanon and had made the mistake of killing one of them:

Quote:
“The incident began when four Soviet diplomats were kidnapped last September by Muslim extremists who demanded that Moscow pressure the Syrian government to stop pro-Syrian militiamen from shelling rival Muslim positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. The militiamen, the Jerusalem paper said, did not cease their attacks, and the body of one of the Soviet diplomats, Arkady Katkov, was found a few days later in a field in Beirut.

The KGB then apparently kidnapped and killed a relative of an unnamed leader of the Shi’ite Hezbollah (Party of God) group, a radical, pro-Iranian group that has been suspected of various terrorist activities against Western targets in Lebanon.

Parts of the man’s body, the paper said, were then sent to the Hezbollah leader with a warning that he would lose other relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not immediately released. They were quickly freed.


The newspaper quoted “observers in Jerusalem” as saying: “This is the way the Soviets operate. They do things – they don’t talk. And this is the language Hezbollah understands.”
(emphasis added)

One could probably call that an exchange of messages of increasing intensity.

Of course there remain differences over Assad’s fate, but they may be smaller than appears on the surface. Perhaps Syria will end up partitioned at some point, with Assad’s Alawite clan controlling the part that contains Russia’s Mediterranean port.

Conclusion

It seems it is high time for a strategic rethink in the GWoT, but powerful forces are arrayed against it. Apart from the fact that a truly huge racket is at stake, the situation is also reminiscent of the proverbial guy with the hammer – everything looks like a nail to him. So we should reasonably expect more of the same, only in even grander style (as the so-called “surge” has shown, any successes tend not only to be temporary, but have a habit to soon give way to even greater disasters).

At least we can all be comforted by recent news that there is no reason to worry about the euro zone. As Mish relates, Keynesian economist Nouriel Roubini has rediscovered the broken window fallacy by arguing that the Paris attacks will “help the euro zone economy”. What is it with these geniuses? Paul Krugman has made similar arguments after the WTC attack and the Katrina hurricane. Obviously, it would be best if we just nuked all our cities. We’d have growth out the wazoo!

However, this is perhaps less surprising than it should be. No-one can accuse Keynesians (regardless which prefixes adorn them by way of sect differentiation, i.e., New, neo-, post-,…) of being founts of economic literacy. After all, their master thought aimless ditch digging and pyramid building were viable “economic policies”.

Addendum

Rumor has it that Mr. Abaaoud was actually killed in Paris last night, when police raided an apartment in the St. Denis district in which a second terror commando was hiding out. However, it is not yet certain whether Abaaoud was actually among the killed.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/...t-racket-time/
 
Old November 22nd, 2015 #3
Robbie Key
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NEWS & POLITICS

5 Ways the 'War on Terror' Has Changed Your Life

From having your phone and internet data collected to the militarization of the police, the war on terror is having a major affect on American lives.

By Alex Kane / AlterNet August 6, 2013

31 COMMENTS

The leaks from National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden over the summer have made one thing abundantly clear: the war on terror has come to affect every single American. The justification for the NSA’s massive surveillance program has been that it helps prevent terrorist attacks, though journalists, analysts and U.S. politicians have cast doubt on those claims.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Muslims in the U.S. were systematically targeted, harassed and detained. But soon enough, the war on terror at home became a war where all Americans got caught up in its dragnet.

Now it’s not just Muslims who are affected, though they still remain the most under threat from government power. It’s all Americans--and the powers of the National Security Agency prove that. From having your phone and internet data collected to the militarization of the police, the war on terror is having a major affect on American lives.

Here are 5 ways the war on terror impacts you.

1. Phone Data

The first major Guardian story by Glenn Greenwald resulting from Snowden’s leaks was on a secret court order requiring Verizon to give the NSA information on all phone calls made on its system. The specific information collected from these calls is “metadata,” or the “information generated as you use technology” that can include the “date and time you called somebody or the location from which you last accessed your email,” as the Guardian notes. These calls included those within the U.S. and those between domestic and international callers. The secret Verizon order was renewed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last month, as it must be every three months.

But it’s not just Verizon callers who are having their “metadata” collected. After Greenwald’s first story was published, the Wall Street Journalreported that customers of AT&T and Sprint also have their metadata collected under a similar court order.

Millions and millions of Americans are having information about who they call and where they call from collected by the government. And that’s just a start to how the war on terror is impacting you.

2. NSA Data For Criminal Investigations

Yesterday, Reuters reported that information collected from government agencies, including the NSA, was being sent to local law enforcement for use in criminal investigations. It’s an example of how the war on drugs is bleeding into the war on terror.

Reuters reported that the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Special Operations Division (SOD) takes the lead on this. The SOD is comprised of a number of partner agencies, like the NSA, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security. Information that comes from phone records, foreign governments, wiretaps and more is funneled to local law enforcement authorities to crack crime cases, particularly drug cases.

What’s worse is that the law enforcement authorities who receive this information then try to cover up that they got it from this program. The data the NSA is collecting is now being used to target Americans accused of ordinary crimes.

3. Internet Data

In addition to phone “metadata” being collected, the NSA also collects all sorts of information from your Internet activities. One NSA program called PRISM collects “metadata” from a number of Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook.

While the NSA claims to have “direct” access to the servers of these companies, they have denied that and only say they comply with specific court orders. Whatever the case, it’s clear that the NSA collects data about Americans’ internet use.

Last week, the Guardian’s Greenwald published another major story on yet another NSA program that targets Internet use. Greenwald reported that “a top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

The program, called XKeyscore, show how individual analysts can easily search through massive databases about Americans’ internet use. No court order is needed for this type of searching.

4. Your Tax Money Pays for the NSA

At the same time that the NSA is collecting data on you, you’re paying for them to do so. The NSA’s budget comes from the American taxpayer, and so taxpayers are giving this powerful agency the money to carry out their surveillance.

As CNNreported in June, when the NSA scandal first broke out, “ it's impossible to say exactly how much money the NSA is given to conduct its surveillance efforts” because the details of its budget are classified. But there’s at least some information that gives a hint as to how much the NSA is costing the American taxpayer.

In total, the intelligence budget was $75 billion last year. And transparency advocate Steven Aftergood estimates that about $10 billion goes to the NSA.

Additionally, the American taxpayer is paying for the rest of the war on terror at home. That includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s budget, which is used for terror investigations and hiring informants to bait young, troubled Muslims into saying they want to commit terrorism--even if there was no real threat.

5. Militarized Police Force

Another way American taxpayers are footing the bill for the war on terror is how they’re paying for the militarization of America’s police force.

Police militarization began before September 11, as author Radley Balkonotes. After 9/11, the militarization continued apace. America’s police departments now needed to fight crime and terrorism.

Police departments were given high-grade weapons that were unnecessary to combat local crime. The departments received things like armored personnel carriers, aircraft and boats. They also began getting machine guns from the military in order to fight terrorism.

“The main effect of 9/11 on domestic policing is the DHS grant program, which writes huge checks to local police departments across the country to purchase machine guns, helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers,” Balko told VICE magazine.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...-impacting-you

Last edited by Robbie Key; November 22nd, 2015 at 05:46 PM.
 
Old November 26th, 2015 #4
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plenty of links at source

By WakingTimes November 18, 2015 25 Comments

6 Painful Truths About the War on Terrorism

Big Brother French FlagDylan Charles, Editor
Waking Times

If you were 4 years old when 9/11 occurred in 2001, then you’re now old enough to enlist and fight in the war on terror. Recent geo-political events suggest that this conflict may endure for some generations to come, so, regretfully, your children may also get to participate. The war on terrorism is apparently part of our culture and part of our lives now.

“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are at war now — with somebody — and we will stay at war with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.” – Hunter S. Thompson

By no means a prophet, Hunter S. Thompson was just an eccentric observer with a knack for connecting the dots between political events and the ongoing mainstream media narrative that supports and manufactures consent for the oligarchy. When taken at face value, the terror script is indeed a rather convincing and motivating story, but when you dismantle the official fiction and bring the hidden pieces into the picture, the truth about the war on terror is just too heavy for conscious people to ignore any longer.

As it persists, international terrorism is guaranteed to increase, and as time goes by, we learn more and more about the real reasons why we’ve been forced into this apocalyptic conflict. After nearly 15 years of kicking down doors, drone bombing villagers, shattering societies, and mourning our own senselessly dead, here are 6 things we now know for sure about the war on terrorism.

Quote:
“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” – Hiram W. Johnson
1.) The war on terror was never about ensuring the security of Americans at home or abroad, nor was the current situation the result of foreign policy blunders.

The conflict was engineered from the onset to break up, destroy and destabilize most of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The war on terrorism is about control of oil, about conquering national economies and turning them over to ‘foreign investors,’ about demonizing Muslim nations, about creating a lawless territory in which to develop Western controlled mercenary armies like ISIS, about protecting Israel’s interests in the region, about destabilizing Europe, about opening access to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and about punishing those nations which dared to defy the international banking cartel by moving to avert the petro-dollar.

The war on terrorism is also about radically altering the legal framework of Western governments to allow for greater surveillance, control and the militarization of once free societies. The aim is to continually broaden the definition of terrorism so that any act of defiance against the state or the corporate oligarchy, whether advocating for human rights, the environment, or any other issue of popular concern, can be persecuted without due process. The war on terror will be used to target American citizens who support the idea of limited government and strive to maintain the protections afforded by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.

Additionally, the war on terror is about creating new markets for the security industry and opening steady income streams for war profiteers and arms manufacturers, so that a relative minority can profit heavily from the continuance of the war and the waste, swindling and destruction involved.

2.) The war on terror doesn’t stop terror, because it is terror.

The Western nations most heavily invested in the war on terror are also the nations most heavily involved in global arms trading, which gives advanced weaponry to any despotic tin pot dictator with an oilfield. And France just happens to be the world’s number one exporter of arms per capita. The Western ‘coalition’ regularly kills civilians in other nations directly and indirectly, which is in and of itself a very real type of terrorism.

Quote:
“You cannot have freedom or peace in a country whose government is engaged in the global wholesale of advanced military arms and weaponry to national governments.” –Stefan Molyneux

Regional arms sales by the UK.

3.) Our worst terrorist enemies are the products of government, the military industrial complex and Western intelligence agencies.

The Mujahideen was originally organized, funded, trained and supplied by the CIA to oppose the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen became Al Qaeda with the assistance of Saudi Arabia and American training, arms and financial aid. Al Qaeda has morphed into, or been replaced with ISIS, who is the creation of the military industrial complex, the US, Israel, the UK and France, and is supported by some 40 other nations who knowingly trade and deal with ISIS.

Quote:
“They tax you in order to create weapons to sell to foreigners to attack you.” –Stefan Molyneux
ISIS, the new Islamic Caliphate as they call it, is the most barbaric, cruel and inhumane social movement to come about in some number of centuries, perhaps even a millenia or more. ISIS was given birth and nurtured into being by the West, and now, primarily Muslim people are suffering horribly in their own homelands while the war intensifies and extends into Europe in acts of urban terrorism.

4.) The mainstream media plays a crucial in perpetuating the war on terrorism.

The primary role of the corporate-owned and government-controlled mainstream media is to transform selected acts of terror into enduring symbols that can be used again and again to reinforce the war on terror narrative. Their secondary role is to keep the level of tension and stress as high as possible by ceaselessly over-reacting to non-events and over-reporting on non-issues, thereby keeping the public captivated and hypnotized by an ongoing drama so that when a major event does occur it has the greatest possible psychological impact.

Reporting on global terrorism is duplicitous and hypocritical because certain events have more franchise than others in influencing public support for government policy changes and military actions. In the practical world of marketing, French flags pictured draped over national monuments at night-time will go much further in promoting the war on terror than Kenyan flags draped over African monuments.

The media uses shock and awe in a war of psychological attrition against the public. The objective is to incapacitate and sideline people from participating in dissent, while scaring people into acquiescence to any imposed government authority or security measures.

5.) State-sponsored False flag attacks still work to achieve political objectives.

There is a tremendous continual international effort underway to expose the true facts behind each new terror attack, terror plot, and major government lie. The alternative media is growing in reach and effectiveness, however, the reality is that the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution still works on a shell-shocked public.

6.) Suicide is more deadly to our soldiers than any terrorist organization.

The war on terrorism represents the first time in US history that suicide has been the leading cause of death of US soldiers. The psychological impact of this type of conflict is unique and the suicide rate of returning soldiers may be our best evidence that the war is unwinnable.

Final Thoughts

The goal of the war on terror is transform people into willing participants in chaos, mayhem and murder, or to turn them into collateral damage. Nobody is born a terrorist, and we are all being set up as dispensable pawns in an orchestrated clash of civilizations.

The truth is out there. When you cut through the propaganda, emotional triggers, and the divisive nature of discourse today, what’s left is the truth that the war on terror is something that we must end. The rise in global consciousness and our willingness to speak out may
be our only hope.

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/11/1...-on-terrorism/
 
Old March 22nd, 2017 #5
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It's All Good: The Real Reason We Accept the Fraudulent War on Terror
March 21, 2017

by Chris Bollyn

After my latest speaking tour, I have decided to write a book about the fraudulent War on Terror, which is really a Zionist/Israeli war agenda in disguise.

Why write a book about the War on Terror?

The War on Terror has destroyed many thousands of lives as it has grossly perverted our thinking and plundered our national wealth. It has gone on now for fifteen and a half years and there is virtually no organized resistance to it. The main reason for writing this book is to help people understand the deception because we can only resist the War on Terror if we understand what it is - in reality.

The wars or "operations" waged under the rubric of the War on Terror since 9/11 are costing U.S. taxpayers $8.36 million per hour, for a total of $1.75 Trillion since 2001. Homeland Security, the domestic front against terrorism, is costing U.S. taxpayers $6.74 million per hour, or nearly $750 billion since 9/11. Together, the foreign and the domestic security operations have cost the U.S. more than $2.5 Trillion (i.e. 2,500 billions). (Source: NationalPriorities.org)

This is clearly not sustainable. Rather than rebuilding America and taking care of our people, we are pouring billions of borrowed dollars down the drain and getting absolutely nothing back that will benefit the American people, or the world, in any way. We are squandering money to destroy lives, nations, and infrastructure across the Middle East like the worst of barbarians, and have been doing so at a ferocious rate for 26 years – continuously since Desert Storm in January 1991.

With all the wars, and the millions of displaced refugees trekking about the planet, you might expect there would be a vibrant anti-war movement of concerned citizens demanding an end to the war fighting, but there isn't. Why are Americans not standing up in huge numbers and demanding an end to this utterly self-destructive War on Terror?

IT'S ALL GOOD.

The answer is simple. We have been deceived into thinking that the War on Terror is a good thing, a valiant struggle against terrorists who mean to attack us like we were attacked on September 11, 2001. I will use a comment from a reader to a recent post on Facebook to illustrate my point.

I posted something the other day about the 26,171 bombs dropped by the United States in 2016, under a president who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize when he was elected in 2008. Last year was the fifteenth year of the War on Terror, a year in which the U.S. bombed seven nations, dropping an average of 72 bombs per day.

Most of the bombs were dropped in Iraq and Syria, 12,192 in Syria and 12,095 in Iraq. Afghanistan was bombed 1,337 times and Libya 496. The numbers are based on the percentage of total coalition airstrikes carried out in 2016 by the United States in Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the counter-Islamic State campaign. Daily OIR strike data at: http://www.inherentresolve.mil/News/Strike-Releases/

As a response, I had the following exchange with a reader in Idaho:
D.S.: Well, if it's killing people who are killing innocent people, it's all good.

Bollyn: This is a very good comment because it reflects the thought that the masterminds behind the War on Terror want us to think. That our war-fighting in the Middle East is all about killing the bad guys in order to bring about good. It is, of course, not why we are fighting in Iraq or Syria. When was the last time the U.S. went to war to stop the killing of innocents?

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and killed 20,000 innocents, did the U.S. intervene to stop them? When Israel attacks Gaza and kills thousands of innocents, does the U.S. do anything to stop them?

No. So why would the U.S. do something it has never done in Syria or Iraq? We are not waging war in Iraq or Syria to protect innocent lives - that is the propaganda cover story that has worked amazingly well to neutralize any anti-war movement from gaining traction, but I am still trying.

D.S.: And you think different? How about you go and give them a big wet sloppy kiss then. When was the last time we went to war to stop the killing of innocents? Well, when Saddam invaded Kuwait comes to mind, did you forget that?

Bollyn: We certainly did not go to war against Iraq to save the lives of innocent people - again, that was the propaganda we were given (e.g. the contrived testimony from the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador about the babies being killed). Apart from the thousands we killed in Desert Storm in 1991, we then put sanctions on Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. You may recall Leslie Stahl's interview with Madeline Albright about the U.S.-imposed sanctions having killed 500,000 Iraqi babies? If not, see below…


D.S.: So, in a nut shell, you say we are the villains, and should mind out own business, as all this is trouble in the Middle East we brought on??? I agree, we helped them out in WWII, and then we had the audacity to find oil there, and show them how to pump it out of the ground. Yep, it's all America's fault.

Bollyn: No, we are not the villains; we are the deceived. I do agree, however, that we should mind our own business and stay out of these foreign conflicts. 9/11 was a false-flag deception to start the War on Terror, which is an Israeli war agenda to dominate the region by destroying the large Arab states and breaking them into weak ethnic statelets - at war with each other.

To understand how this foreign Zionist agenda was pushed onto our military in the wake of 9/11, the photo below shows the Israeli Chief of Staff, Shaul Mofaz, meeting at the Pentagon with the Zionist Neo-Cons (Wolfowitz, Zakheim, Feith) who made up the Defense Policy Board under President George Bush in January 2002. The list had already been drawn up of the seven Middle Eastern nations that the U.S. would overthrow in the next five years: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iran. Five of them have already been done.



This is, I repeat, a Zionist/Israeli war agenda disguised as the War on Terror. There is NO real U.S. national interest in this criminal war of aggression - NONE. Our nation has been deceived, perverted, and plundered in order to wage these wars.


http://bollyn.com/#article_15867
 
Old November 5th, 2017 #6
Robbie Key
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Defense Department: The War On Terror Has Cost $250 Million A Day For 16 Years
BY JAY CASSANO ON 10/31/17 AT 4:13 PM

American taxpayers have spent $1.46 trillion on wars abroad since September 11, 2001.

The Department of Defense periodically releases a “cost of war” report. The newly released version, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News blog, covers the time from the September 11th terrorist attacks through mid-2017.

The Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2014 and Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 account for the bulk of expenses: more than $1.3 trillion. The continuing presence in Afghanistan and aerial anti-ISIS operations in Iraq and Syria since 2014 have cost a combined $120 billion.

The report’s costs include only direct war-related expenses such as operating and maintaining bases, procuring equipment, and paying for and feeding troops. It most notably does not include the expense of veteran’s benefits for troops who serve in these wars or the intelligence community’s expenses related to Global War on Terror.

A 2011 paper from Harvard Kennedy School professor Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of veterans’ benefits as $600 billion to $1 trillion over the next 40 years. That number was based on 482,364 veterans who were receiving compensation for disability connected to service as of February 2011. Since then, the number of veterans receiving compensation for service-related disability has increased drastically.

According to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration’s 2016 annual benefits report , 1,060,408 veterans are receiving service-related benefits, averaging $15,907 a year. The total annual benefits for Global War on Terror veterans’ benefits are currently $16.8 billion per year, which over the next 40 years would total $674 billion, placing it firmly within Bilmes’ original 2011 estimate.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the only war in U.S. history to cost more than the Global War on Terror is World War II, at more than $4.1 trillion in present dollars. Direct war-related expenses from the Vietnam War cost $738 billion in today's dollars.

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-cap...-2608639?amp=1
 
Old November 6th, 2017 #7
littlefieldjohn
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The controlled media is—as usual—deliberately hiding the reasons for the ongoing Muslim terrorist attacks such as the recent one in New York City—because they do not want to admit that mass Third World immigration and pro-Israel US foreign policy in the Middle East is the real cause of the violence.

This fact—well known to all rational observers—was highlighted by a recent article in the Daily Mail newspaper which, possibly accidentally, broke ranks with the rest of the controlled media over the reason for the latest attack.

In that article, the Daily Mail journalist quoted a Pakistani, one Abu Mohammad, who worships at the same mosque in Paterson, New Jersey as the New York pick-up ramming attacker Sayfullo Saipov.

The article quotes Mohammad—who has been living in the US for nearly thirty years—as saying that he did not know Saipov personally, but had seen him several times at prayers.

He then “railed against the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly blaming the President Bush senior and son era for escalating tensions,” the Daily Mail article continued.

“’I totally get what he [Saipov] did,’ Abu said of the suspect. ‘It’s in response to Muslims dying every day as a result of this ongoing conflict. Why doesn’t the media cover that? The U.S. needs to get out and let us run our own affairs. But as long as they meddle and interfere, these terrorist attacks will continue to happen.’”

The quote—which somehow slipped through the normally tight censorship on this topic, is highly revealing in two aspects.

Firstly, it shows that Third World immigrants have been—and still are—pouring into the United States from all manner of countries for decades, the direct result of the race-denying immigration policies pursued by successive Republican and Democratic administrations.

These policies have caused the white percentage of the US population to decline from nearly 87 percent just a few decades ago, to less than 60 percent today—and which, left unchecked and unreversed, will plunge America into Third World majority status within the next few decades.


Secondly, the quote accurately reveals the major reason why the Third World—and Muslims in particular—feel justified in carrying out terrorist attacks such as the Saipov attack in New York: they see it as retaliation for the pro-Israel (and ipso facto, anti-Arab, or anti-Muslim) policies pursued by America in the Middle East.

These pro-Israeli policies are, of course, caused by the reality that the Jewish lobby—in either it’s “left wing” or “right wing” iterations—has, through its strict control of the US, ensured that American military might is always employed to benefit Israel, no matter what the cost is to the rest of the Middle East, or indeed to Americans themselves.

This control of foreign policy is not limited to America: it is also evident in other western nations, such as the United Kingdom, where even the secret service MI5 has admitted it—internally at least.

Just like the Muslim terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the media as a general rule continues to play dumb on the real causes of the anarchy currently enveloping the western world.

To admit that mass Third World immigration, and the Jewish lobby’s control and direction of western governments are, take together, the real cause of the disaster, would be to admit that the entire liberal societal construct is a fraud—a fact that the liars-in-chief will deny to their dying day.

http://newobserveronline.com/media-h...terror-attack/
 
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