Monday, September 29, 2014

Welcome Back to Sunny Iraq

President Obama finally got his wish: he dragged the US back into war in Iraq. Of course that isn’t what the president who promised “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it” says. The Associated Press quotes the president, “‘As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,’ Obama said.”
But that’s exactly what he did. Every news report goes out of its way to pretend Obama is reluctant to go back to war in Iraq. This is another Big Lie that’s become the common narrative. CNN provides an example, “President Barack Obama's decision to authorize airstrikes escalated American military involvement in Iraq, a country he tried to get out of more than two years ago.”
But Obama didn’t try to get us out of Iraq. In 2011, while he crowed about getting us out of Iraq, he was quietly negotiating to extend the war. Stars and Stripes reported, “Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday that Iraq has agreed to negotiate an extension of noncombat U.S. forces there beyond 2011.” While the press characterized the forces the US wanted to leave behind as non-combat trainers, Stars and Stripes highlighted Panetta’s frustration was over not leaving combat troops, “‘We will fulfill the commitment that we are going to take all of the combat forces out of Iraq.’” Iraqis forced US combat troops out of Iraq on the deadline negotiated by Bush the Younger against Obama’s wishes.
The AP story explains Obama has to lie because Americans don’t want this war. “Mindful of the public's aversion to another lengthy war, Obama acknowledged that the prospect of a new round of U.S. military action would be a cause for concern among many Americans,” it continued.
Obama’s lies about his aspirations for extending the war in Iraq don’t stop there. In January, The The Chicago Tribune reported, “Pointedly, Secretary of State John Kerry, currently occupied in the Middle East fanning the embers of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, says there will be no American ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq. ‘This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis,’ he said Sunday. ‘We are not contemplating returning. We will help them in the fight, but this fight, in the end, they will have to win, and I am confident they can.’” The help Kerry alluded to was weapons and equipment including drones, but not fighter jets.
But now Obama has sent both fighter jets and boots on the ground. Besides the well publicized air strikes, Antiwar.com documented, “It hasn’t been so long since President Obama announced his intention to send ‘up to 300’ US troops to Iraq as ‘advisers,’ and the Pentagon now says there are 500 on the ground, with more coming. Only about 180 of the 500 are actually the ‘advisers,’ with other troops part of anti-terrorism security team, and still others manning the new Joint Operations Center in Baghdad.” As we learned in Vietnam, ‘advisers’ is code for combat troops. Obama is marching the US back into war in Iraq one step at a time.
And what goes unmentioned in every mainstream media story is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants ravaging Iraq were funded, equipped and armed by the US when they were Syrian rebels. At first the CIA did this secretly, smuggling weapons from Libya through Turkey into Syria. That’s why the US ambassador was killed in Benghazi. Then Obama made arming them public. Now ISIS is using weapons given to them by the US in Syria to attack Iraqi and US forces in Iraq. Some say nothing is made in the USA any more, but this disastrous war was wholly made in Washington, D.C.
As bad as this sounds, it gets worse. The CIA and US special forces trained the Syrian rebels, some of whom joined ISIS in their invasion of Iraq. Last year The Daily Mail reported, “It is not known how many of the rebels have passed through the US base [in Jordan], but it is understood 20 to 45 at a time have been attending two-week courses since December – and are being trained with Russian-designed 14.5mm anti-tank rifles and 23mm anti-aircraft weapons.” Those are the weapons ISIS is now using against Americans.
Talk about blowback. Obama had US troops train and arm jihadists, and now he’s ordered US troops to fight them.
Worse yet, a leaked memo from private US intelligence company Stratfor claims that NATO special forces are secretly fighting alongside rebels in Syria. This creates the potential for US forces in Iraq to attack NATO forces fighting on the side of ISIS.
This insanity is a consequence of never-ending US wars. It’s a war profiteer’s dream. The US is arming and training both sides, so the war profiteers enjoy double the profit. It’s a formula for perpetual war and war profiteering. As with every government aggression, our rulers win and everybody else loses.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The US Disease Factory

Americans have been fooled into believing government and the health care system it controls prevents and cures diseases. Heck, the CDC’s full name is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so it must be true. But the Health Wyze Report makes an important point: “While some practicing doctors may be honorable people who seek to help others, their schools, organizations, and governmental agencies are all controlled by pharmaceutical companies which have less noble intentions. It is best for them if diseases are treated, but never cured. The trend is unmistakable. How many decades has it been since any honest effort was made at developing a cure for any disease? Was it polio? How long ago was that?”
This isn’t limited to pharmaceutical companies. All health care providers profit from having return customers instead of actually curing patients, and since government limits competition by controlling who can enter this market and what treatments they can prescribe, government ensures curing disease doesn’t happen. Anybody who breaks from the system and dares to try to cure disease is attacked by the health care police of the Food and Drug Administration exemplified by the FDA’s 15 year war against Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his treatment of cancer.
Government doesn’t prevent or cure disease. It uses disease as a tool, making it more likely Americans will develop disease and never cure it.  President Obama recently made this crystal clear. In an attempt to save lives from the outbreak of incurable Ebola in Africa, African nations are isolating the infection zone to prevent the disease from spreading. European and Asian countries are taking steps to prevent the disease from reaching their countries. This is the sensible and compassionate thing to do.
But US rulers are neither sensible nor compassionate, so instead of trying to prevent Ebola from reaching the US, Obama is intentionally flying two infected American medical volunteers working with the organization Samaritan’s Purse from Liberia to Atlanta. For the first time, Ebola is coming to the US, increasing the risk of infection to us all, and we can thank government for that.
The experts tell us there’s nothing to worry about. The Los Angeles Times coos, “Emory University Hospital said it will house its two Ebola patients in a state-of-the-art isolation unit on the hospital campus. The facility, only one of four of its kind in the country, was built in collaboration with the CDC, and is separate from other patient areas. The unit is outfitted with equipment that provides ‘an extraordinarily high level’ of isolation and ensures that its doctors and staff are highly trained in treating Ebola patients, according to a statement from the hospital.”
To paraphrase, we should just trust the CDC. They’re the experts of experts.
But Bloomberg tells a different story. “And just hours before [the rescue plane] took off from Georgia, Tom Frieden, the CDC director, was talking with journalists and gave no hint of the impending action. To the contrary, Frieden stated that such an intervention might be unwise,” Bloomberg wrote. “‘There is the potential that the actual movement of the patient could do more harm than the benefit from more advanced supportive care outside of the country,’ he said. At the same time, he said the CDC would work with Samaritan’s Purse ‘to facilitate whatever option they wish to pursue.’”
Sensible and compassionate, even the CDC didn’t want to bring Ebola into the US. Too bad. You might think there’s little risk because the CDC knows all the techniques to contain the virus, but over 100 health care workers who use the same techniques have contracted the virus so far including the two Americans bringing it back.
You might think those doctors made mistakes, and the CDC, because they’re the experts of experts, won’t make mistakes. Recently history suggests otherwise. Dr. Mercola reports, “At some point between June 6 and June 13, an estimated 75-84 scientists and staff members at a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) biolab were exposed to live anthrax.
The live pathogen had been sent from another, higher-security facility, which failed to follow biosafety protocols.”
The supposed experts can’t protect their own employees, let alone the American people. And the mistakes don’t stop there. Mercola follows up, “Several weeks ago, scientists were shocked to discover a number of old, unapproved vials of the deadly smallpox virus in a ‘forgotten storage room’ on the National Institutes for Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Now, they've reportedly uncovered a total of one dozen boxes containing nearly 330 vials of an array of pathogens, including dengue and spotted fever. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the responsibility of overseeing the lab.”
The key to understanding this seeming insanity is recognizing the CDC is first and foremost a biological weapons factory. It doesn’t control or prevent disease. It weaponizes disease. Smallpox has long been eradicated in the wild, but US biological weapons scientists keep the deadly virus around as a weapon. No doubt the government is bringing Ebola to the CDC for military and political purposes, not compassion.