noting the irony that the U.S. “seems on the verge of okaying the biggest arms deal in American history to the country that provided fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, much of the critical funding for al Qaeda and was home to Osama bin Laden.”
Military recruiters, who often have offices in high schools, prey on young men like Alex, who was first approached when he was 16. They cater to their insecurities, their dreams and their economic deprivation. They promise them what the larger society denies them. Those of Latino descent and from divorced families, as Alex was, are especially vulnerable. Alex’s brother Brian was approached by the military, which suggested that if he enlisted he could receive $60,000 in signing bonuses and more than $27,000 in payments for higher education. The proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, is designed to give undocumented young people a chance at citizenship provided they attend college—not usually an option for poor, often poorly educated and undocumented Latino youths who are prohibited from receiving Pell grants—for at least two years, or enlist and serve in the military. The military helped author the pending act and is lobbying for it. Twelve percent of Army enlistees are Hispanic, and this percentage is expected to double by 2020 if the current rate of recruitment continues. And once they are recruited, these young men and women are trained to be killers, sent to wars that should never be fought and returned back to their families often traumatized and broken and sometimes dead.
Georgetown University has recently announced that former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe will be named a “distinguished scholar in the practice of global leadership,” and will soon begin giving seminars at the university’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS). Uribe has said it is a “great honor” for him, and that his “greatest wish and happiness is to contribute in the continuous emergence of future leaders.”
Action details here.
- More than 3 million Colombians (out of a population of about 40 million) have been forced to flee their homes, giving Colombia the second-largest population of internally displaced persons in the world after Sudan.
- More than 70 members of the Colombian Congress are under criminal investigation or have been convicted for allegedly collaborating with the paramilitaries. Nearly all these congresspersons are members of President Uribe’s coalition in Congress, and the Uribe administration repeatedly undermined the investigations and discredited the Supreme Court justices who started them.
- Colombia has the highest rate of killings of trade unionists in the world. A clandestine gravesite of 2,000 non-identified bodies was recently discovered directly beside a military base in La Macarena, in central Colombia. When the news became public, Uribe flew to the Macarena and said publicly that accusing the armed forces of human rights abuses was a tactic used by the guerrilla. These comments put the lives of those victims who spoke at the event in grave danger.
- Starting in 2008, reports came out that the Colombian military was luring poor young men from their homes with promises of employment, then killing them and presenting them as combat casualties. The practice not only served to stack battle statistics, but also financially benefited the soldiers involved, as Uribe’s government had, since 2005, awarded monetary and vacation bonuses for each insurgent killed. Human rights groups cite 3,000 or more “false positives”.
A ‘distinguished scholar in the practice of global leadership‘, just as torturers teach law it seems the empire is intent on ensuring future generations of elite war criminals. Georgetown is also a Jesuit university, so is this furthering the right wing Catholic’s elite war on progressives/leftists, this is hardly taking the side of justice by honouring Uribe. Although Jesuits are not in the majority on the Board of Directors, if this is not their choice they should have the courage to speak out as opposition is growing from other catholic grassroots groups and human rights organisations.
Meanwhile the US catholic church, after excommunicating Fr. Roy Bourgeois in 2008 (who founded SOAW) for his views on the ordination of women and for taking part in an ordination of female priests, this year ceased its US foreign mission arm Maryknoll from donating to School of the Americas Watch.They again stated the reason was Bourgeois’ feminism. Roy Bourgeois belonged to The Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers who annually gave $17,000 to SOAW, however they apparently adjudge conforming to misogynistic doctrine more essential than actively stopping the US from training torturers for deployment in Latin America, this is their official statement emailed to me upon my request for clarification-
On May 24, 2010 Father Edward Dougherty, Superior General of the Maryknoll Society, met with Father Roy Bourgeois to discuss the Society’s decision to discontinue financial support to the School of the Americas (SOA) Watch.
Given Father Bourgeois’ central role as the founder and public face of the SOA Watch, Society leadership has determined that it cannot continue its financial support of that organization without giving the impression that it also supports the actions of its leader concerning the issue of women’s ordination. (Those actions led to his automatic excommunication by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2008.)
This decision is not intended to be punitive and is not designed to put pressure on Father Bourgeois, or on the SOA Watch organization and its activities. Maryknoll continues its solidarity with the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, and is unambiguous in its support of the goals of the SOA Watch.
Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants UK troops out of Afghanistan within five years. Mr Cameron, who is in Canada for the G8 and G20 summits, was asked whether he wanted the troops home by the next general election. ”I want that to happen, make no mistake about it,” he said. But, ahead of talks with US President Barack Obama on Saturday, he said he preferred not to “deal in too strict timetables”.
U.S.-Vietnamese panel endorsed a 10-year, 300-million-dollar “plan of action” to deal with the deadly health and environmental legacy of the U.S. military’s widespread use of “Agent Orange”
By contrast, the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) last year alone paid out nearly two billion dollars to Vietnam veterans whose current ailments are believed to be tied to exposure to dioxins.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a five-year court battle by refusing to hear an appeal by Vietnamese plaintiffs from judgements by lower courts that the main producers of the chemicals, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, could not be held liable for birth defects allegedly caused by exposure to Agent Orange.
It should be remembered the Saville report is an official one and therefore already watered down and censored with due deference given to the establishment who perhaps ordered the advance of paratroopers into the Bogside knowing killings would be the end result, nevertheless it has found all deaths on Bloody Sunday were ‘unjustified‘ so, murder then. Already every establishment figure in Christendom is rushing to be the best at apologising so people will be misdirected from asking ‘where’s the prosecutions for murder then?’ murders that occurred 38 years ago. So with justice still not done will the ConDems and Army manage to wriggle out of this bearing in mind it is the Conservative & Unionist party still on many local branch nameplates?
Update: Eamonn McCann-
“I’ve never felt so euphoric in my life.
“The Bloody Sunday dead and families have been entirely vindicated. The families won what they fought for for 38 years and the parachute regiment disgraced.
“Consequences follow from that.
“The responsibility for Bloody Sunday doesn’t simply rest with those on the ground, it rests with the senior officers who sent the paras into the Bogside in full knowledge of what was likely to happen.
“When people talk about prosecutions I think it would be unfair if they were made to carry the entire burden of guilt. There are people more culpable than them.”
Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam by Mark Curtis is published on 1st July. An excerpt of an interview from New Left Project-
Mark Curtis is an independent author, journalist and consultant. He is the author of ‘Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses’ and ‘Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World’, amongst other works. He spoke to NLP on the topic of British collusion with radical Islam.
Can you tell us what your new book – ‘Secret affairs: Britain’s collusion with radical Islam’ is about. What do you want to convey? What are your hopes for the book?
The book tells the story of the long history of British collaboration with radical Islam, including terrorist groups. 7/7 and the present broader terrorist threat to Britain is to some degree a product of British foreign policy – the bombings derived from a terrorism infrastructure established by a Pakistani state long backed by Whitehall and involving Pakistani terrorist groups which had benefitted from past British covert action. Throughout the postwar period Britain has covertly supported radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, Indonesia and Egypt, and the book aims to documents this drawing on the declassified British files.
British funding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt began in the 1940s; the following decade Britain was conniving with the organization to kill Nasser (and also to overthrow nationalist governments in Syria). The reason for supporting Islamist organizations in the early postwar period was to counter popular nationalism, and Whitehall regularly sided with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East. The covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s in support of the mujahidin, which of course gave birth to al-Qaida, was simply an extension of already-existing British policy, but this was Whitehall’s biggest covert operation since world war 2 involving support for various of the Afghan/foreign groups fighting the Soviets (against some of whom Britain is now fighting in Afghanistan). Since then, there have been a plethora of similar operations involving Britain working alongside Islamist forces to counter enemies – Milosevic in Yugoslavia, Qadhafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, for example. To a certain extent, the policy is still continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan, although in different form – the British are now reliant on doing a deal with the Taliban to secure an ‘honourable exit’ for example, and in Iraq Britain de facto empowered Islamist militias throughout its occupation of southern Iraq.
I also think that the policy of “Londonistan” – allowing London to act as a base for jihadist terrorist organizing around the world – has been intimately related to securing British foreign policy goals. The book also documents Britain’s extremely deep strategic alliance with the two major state sponsors of radical Islam – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is one of the most remarkable features of postwar British foreign policy – the files show that Britain struck several investment deals with the Saudis in 1973 (around the oil price crisis) and basically appended the British economy to the Saudi at this time, from which Britain has never recovered.
The roots of all this are in the ‘divide of rule’ policies of empire when Britain used Islamic forces to promote imperial interests in various countries such as India, Palestine, Jordan and Yemen. The book tries to show how British collusion with radical Islam is intimately related to its postwar imperial decline – policy-makers have been expedient and pragmatic, lacking any moral compass, and have aimed to counter nationalist forces in a desperate attempt to uphold their power in a changing world.
Given the mainstream “war on terror” narrative the idea that Britain colludes with radical Islam will seem counterintuitive to many. How do you justify such claims?
The reality is often the exact opposite of mainstream discourse – in fact, this is not far off being a general rule, on major issues. The ‘war on terror’ has clearly been a war on targets specially designated by London and Washington, not a war on terrorism. After 9/11 the objective case for bombing Riyadh and Islamabad was as strong as bombing Kabul and infinitely stronger than bombing Baghdad. The fact that Britain’s allies have been at the centre of global terrorism for at least three decades is simply a fact, and is rarely mentioned in the mainstream. The US and British ‘war’ has left many of the real sources of terrorism in the world untouched. In my view, there’s a strong argument for promoting a war on terrorism (although I don’t like the word war), but if serious it would focus on some interesting places, including London.
When attempting to justify such policies it is often argued that Britain is supporting lesser evils. What do you make of such claims?
I’m not sure I completely understand the question since few attempts are made to justify such policies – they are either not known about or simply taboo. I’m not sure there’s much that is more evil than terrorism. When Britain connived with the Muslim Brotherhood to kill Nasser in the 1950s, the Brotherhood at that time had a secret apparatus responsible for various assassinations and bomb attacks in Egypt; their aim was to remove a basically popular (though far from angelic, and increasingly authoritarian) government. In the Kosovo war to defeat Milosevic, Britain was training Kosovo Liberation Army Forces linked to al-Qaida that the British government recognized were terrorists. And so on.
If foreign policy is not dictated by ethics what is it dictated by?
