Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's Journal
Fear via "Replacement Theory"
The Racist ‘Theory’ That Inspired Murderers Is Now GOP Dogmahttps://www.thedailybeast.com/the-racist-theory-that-inspired-murderers-is-now-gop-dogma
The for-profit barbarity of mercenary Erik Prince
By Dave Anderson
Boulder Weekly - January 7, 202
Donald Trump violated the U.S. government’s “obligations under international law” when he pardoned American mercenaries Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, according to the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries, a division of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The four men were employees of Blackwater, a private security firm owned by Erik Prince, a loyal Trump ally and brother of Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education.
In 2007, the firm’s armored convoy engaged in an unprovoked indiscriminate shooting frenzy in downtown Baghdad in the middle of heavy traffic at noontime. They opened fire with weapons including machine guns and grenade launchers. They murdered 17 unarmed civilians and seriously injured 20.
Snip…
The mercenaries killed two children ages 9 and 11, a mother and her infant son, a 26-year-old taxi driver, a 20-year-old medical student and his mother, a car dealer, a delivery truck driver, a 77-year-old gardener on a bus, a woman doctor, an Iraqi soldier standing at a military checkpoint, a blacksmith commuting to work on his motorcycle. No Iraqis fired shots, displayed weapons or threatened the Blackwater thugs in any way.
Snip…
John M. Patarini, the FBI’s lead investigator in the case, said he is “disgusted with the president’s actions” in a letter to the New York Times. He explained:
“We originally went to Iraq thinking this shooting was some form of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire between Blackwater guards and insurgents. After only one week, we determined that this incident was not as presented by Blackwater personnel and their State Department lackeys, but it was a massacre along the lines of My Lai in Vietnam.”
Quadruple Meltdown includes one plutonium reactor.
Not that that ever gets mentioned.
News Coverage of Fukushima Disaster Found Lacking
American University sociologist’s new research finds few reports identified health risks to public
By Rebecca Basu
American University, March 10, 2015
Four years after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the disaster no longer dominates U.S. news headlines, though the disabled plant continues to pour three tons of radioactive water into the ocean each day. Homes, schools and businesses in the Japanese prefecture are uninhabitable, and will likely be so forever. Yet the U.S. media has dropped the story while public risks remain.
A new analysis by American University sociology professor Celine Marie Pascale finds that U.S. news media coverage of the disaster largely minimized health risks to the general population. Pascale analyzed more than 2,000 news articles from four major U.S. outlets following the disaster's occurrence March 11, 2011 through the second anniversary on March 11, 2013. [font color="green"]Only 6 percent of the coverage—129 articles—focused on health risks to the public in Japan or elsewhere. Human risks were framed, instead, in terms of workers in the disabled nuclear plant.[/font color]
Disproportionate access
"It's shocking to see how few articles discussed risk to the general population, and when they did, they typically characterized risk as low," said Pascale, who studies the social construction of risk and meanings of risk in the 21st century. "We see articles in prestigious news outlets claiming that radioactivity from cosmic rays and rocks is more dangerous than the radiation emanating from the collapsing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant."
Pascale studied news articles, editorials, and letters from two newspapers, The Washington Postand The New York Times, and two nationally prominent online news sites, Politico and The Huffington Post. These four media outlets are not only among the most prominent in the United States, they are also among the most cited by television news and talk shows, by other newspapers and blogs and are often taken up in social media, Pascale said. In this sense, she added, understanding how risk is constructed in media gives insight into how national concerns and conversations get framed.
Pascale's analysis identified three primary ways in which the news outlets minimized the risk posed by radioactive contamination to the general population. Articles made comparisons to mundane, low-level forms of radiation;defined the risks as unknowable, given the lack of long-term studies; and largely excluded concerns expressed by experts and residents who challenged the dominant narrative.
[font color="green"]The research shows that corporations and government agencies had disproportionate access to framing the event in the media, Pascale says. Even years after the disaster, government and corporate spokespersons constituted the majority of voices published. News accounts about local impact—for example, parents organizing to protect their children from radiation in school lunches—were also scarce. [/font color]
Globalization of risk
Pascale says her findings show the need for the public to be critical consumers of news; expert knowledge can be used to create misinformation and uncertainty—especially in the information vacuums that arise during disasters.
"The mainstream media—in print and online—did little to report on health risks to the general population or to challenge the narratives of public officials and their experts," Pascale said. "Discourses of the risks surrounding disasters are political struggles to control the presence and meaning of events and their consequences. How knowledge about disasters is reported can have more to do with relations of power than it does with the material consequences to people's lives."
While it is clear that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown was a consequence of an earthquake and tsunami, like all disasters, it was also the result of political, economic and social choices that created or exacerbated broad-scale risks. In the 21st century, there's an increasing "globalization of risk," Pascale argues. Major disasters have potentially large-scale and long-term consequences for people, environments, and economies.
"People's understanding of disasters will continue to be constructed by media. How media members frame the presence of risk and the nature of disaster matters," she said.
SOURCE with Links: http://www.american.edu/media/news/20150310-Fukushima.cfm
Ex-CIA/NSA chief Hayden calls MAGAts "America's Taliban"
George W. Bush's CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden calls Trump supporters 'our Taliban' and suggests sending the 'the MAGA wearing unvaxxed' on planes to Afghanistan
* Retired General Michael Hayden bashed 'MAGA wearing unvaxxed' people after Donald Trump held a rally in Alabama criticized as a 'super spreader' event
* He appeared to endorse an image calling Trump supporters 'Our Taliban'
* GOP Congressman Jim Banks was one of the people calling out Hayden
* Hayden did not reply but retweeted another user dismissing Banks's comment
* Hayden was first appointed to the intel community by former President Bill Clinton before serving under President George W. Bush's administration
* The retired general was once accused of lying to Congress over CIA torture
By ELIZABETH ELKIND, U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
The Daiky Mail (UK) 23 August 2021
A retired top US military general and former CIA chief sparked outrage over the weekend by comparing supporters of former President Donald Trump to the Taliban and calling a suggestion to send 'the MAGA wearing unvaxxed' to Afghanistan a 'good idea.'
Retired four-star Air Force General Michael Hayden on Thursday retweeted a split image of armed militants in a caravan of white pickup trucks with the caption 'Their Taliban.' Under that was a picture of cars adorned with Trump 2020 and American flags along a highway.
The second image was captioned 'Our Taliban.'
On Sunday morning Hayden took another swing at the former president's fans.
Continues…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9918841/Bushs-CIA-chief-compares-Trump-fans-Taliban-suggests-sending-unvaxxed-MAGA-Afghanistan.html
Didn’t see this important story on the TV, but Sebastian Gorka did. Truth hurts, Nazi.
Remember Col. Ted Westhusing
He was training the Iraqi army and smelled the rat. He spoke up and soon, just before rotating home, was dead from “suicide.”
Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x126094
For the Seventeenth Time, Afghanistan Was Never "Winnable"
For the Seventeenth Time, Afghanistan Was Never “Winnable”
Forget what armchair generals say: disaster was foreordained three months into the 2001 invasion.
MIKE LOFGREN
August 21, 2021
The recent unpleasantness in Afghanistan has occasioned one of the usual cyclical national bouts of self-righteousness from the media, the chattering classes, and Very Serious People in general. Who could have let this outrage occur, they wail, and for God’s sake, what are we going to do about it in five minutes flat?
Snip…
The sudden collapse of the Afghan army and the scenes of panic in Kabul – a well-informed source tells me there wasn’t a real firefight anywhere in the country, the local commanders having simply negotiated dozens of individual capitulations – have occasioned a frenzy of moral posturing from people who, for at least a decade and a half, have done their best not to let Afghanistan even register on their consciousness. It is a politically disparate group whose common bond of sanctimoniousness has led to a curious tactical alliance.
Snip…
It’s no secret that the Republican Party and the conservative movement and religious Right that underpin it are absolutely saturated with misogyny. In the last couple of years, the incels have taken it to a whole new level, being distinguishable from the Taliban chiefly by virtue of wearing polo shirts instead of thawbs. And for a goose-stepping poltroon like Kevin McCarthy to be bleating about the rights of women is truly stomach-turning in its impudence.
Aside from that, Republicans seem more upset and judgmental about the overthrow of a central Asian government 7,000 miles away than the nearly successful overthrow, a few months ago, of the very government of which they are a part – an attempted overthrow that in which some of them may have participated. We eagerly await their indignant calls for an investigation of the fall of Afghanistan, yet only recently they soundly rejected a motion to investigate the events of January 6.
Continues…
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/08/21/seventeenth-time-afghanistan-was-never-winnable
How Bush Was Offered Bin Laden and Blew It
Here’s the buried story of Afghanistan.
How Bush Was Offered Bin Laden and Blew It
BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR - ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch.org, NOVEMBER 1, 2004
George Bush, the man whose prime campaign plank has been his ability to wage war on terror, could have had Osama bin Laden’s head handed to him on a platter on his very first day in office, and the offer held good until February 2 of 2002. This is the charge leveled by an Afghan American who had been retained by the US government as an intermediary between the Taliban and both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Kabir Mohabbat is a 48-year businessman in Houston, Texas. Born in Paktia province in southern Afghanistan, he’s from the Jaji clan (from which also came Afghanistan’s last king). Educated at St Louis University, he spent much of the 1980s supervising foreign relations for the Afghan mujahiddeen, where he developed extensive contacts with the US foreign policy establishment, also with senior members of the Taliban.
After the eviction of the Soviets, Mohabbat returned to the United States to develop an export business with Afghanistan and became a US citizen. Figuring in his extensive dealings with the Taliban in the late 1990s was much investment of time and effort for a contract to develop the proposed oil pipeline through northern Afghanistan.
Snip…
By the end of 1999 US sanctions and near-world-wide political ostracism were costing the Taliban dearly and they had come to see Osama bin Laden and his training camps as, in Mohabbat’s words, “just a damn liability”. Mohabbat says the Taliban leadership had also been informed in the clearest possible terms by a US diplomat that if any US citizen was harmed as a consequence of an Al Qaeda action, the US would hold the Taliban responsible and target Mullah Omar and the Taliban leaders.
In the summer of 2000, on one of his regular trips to Afghanistan, Mohabbat had a summit session with the Taliban high command in Kandahar. They asked him to arrange a meeting with appropriate officials in the European Union, to broker a way in which they could hand over Osama bin Laden . Mohabbat recommended they send bin Laden to the World Criminal Court in the Hague.
Continues…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/11/01/how-bush-was-offered-bin-laden-and-blew-it/
Link to marquee photo story: https://californianewstimes.com/oakland-grand-lake-theater-marquee-says-afghanistan-iraq-is-bush-cheney-war-criminals-legacy-oakland-news-now/491220/
Bottom line: Afghans offered to turn over bin Laden and Bush-n-Cheney declined.
It's how conspiracy works.
Nothing gets written down, yet a lot of evil happens.
Martin Lomasney, an old West End political boss from Boston, is best remembered for his warning to young politicians everywhere — “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”.
https://pioneerinstitute.org/news/dont-nod-if-you-can-wink/
Like a rug.
Totally.
What he told Fox:
"They should go crush the Taliban who are surrounding Kabul, we can do it with American airpower," Pompeo said during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday." "We should put pressure on them, we should inflict cost and pain on them."
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/pompeo-biden-should-crush-the-taliban-using-american-air-power-2021-8
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