Posts by stephen walker
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
that's part of the reason why i never get involved in threads about muslims. they are so many negative and really harsh voices, yes even on pa, and i feel like a lone battler who can't possibly take them all on.
There were some discussions a few months ago in which rampant Islamophobia was left pretty much unchallenged except by me and Simon Grigg. After a while you just start to think, "Why aren't other people pulling them up on this stuff?" Eventually you just start to think, "Why am I wasting my time when no one gives a shit?"
And to those offended by the "white boys' playgound" quip: You are easily offended by...the truth...it is a male caucasian-dominated arena for social intercourse. get over it!
-
"Do you believe it's a civil war, sir?" Raddatz pressed.
"It's hard for me, you know, living in this beautiful White House, to give you a firsthand assessment," he punted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/14/AR2007021401593.html
-
India hasn't had a famine since independence. It has had real hunger, but not famine, because under a democracy governments are held to account.
...and the similarities between post-independence democracy in India and the "democracy" currently on parade in Iraq are?
-
From the LA Times via commondreams.org:
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Our Mercenaries in Iraq
The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex.
by Jeremy Scahill
As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
-
"Cash from Chaos"--I like that.
It sounds like the Bush Crime Family's theme tune.OK, just perusing the contracor deaths listed on icasualties.org (incomplete list), we can see three NZers have died in Iraq:
16 Dec 2006, Steve Gilchrist, roadside bomb, Armourgroup
08 Aug 2006, Te Ina Marokura Ngamata, roadside bomb, Armourgroup
10 May 2004, John Robert Tyrrell, small arms attack, Iraqi construction companyWhat about Fiji then?
18 dead, 11 of them in 2006.Australia?
Three deaths listed.South Africa: 21 (half in 2004)
Nepal: 19 (all in 2004)
Canada: 5 (four of them in 2004)
Philippines: 9 (only one in 2006)
France: 3 (all in 2004)
Britian: 38 (12 in 2006)
USA: 152 (36 in 2006/07)In total, 386 contractors dead in just under four years.
My guess is that Fiji has the highest per capita contractor death rate in Iraq (no. dead/population).But with hundreds of Iraqis dying every day, it seems like most of the press and the bloggers have just lost interest. Even the Americans losing 30-odd in one weekend was just a blip on google news.
Aren't you glad that there were no 24/7 news cycles to dull everyone's brain back in the days when the US was bombing Indochina back to the stone age?
-
of course! that's right!
Pakistan's ISI never received any arms, funds or training from the US and ISI never had anything to do with bin Laden at all. how silly of me not to realize these facts when so many US intelligence sources tell us this irrefutable truth. end of story.and also true, radical Isalm doesn't exist, it's just that Islam is pretty radical. and the old testament is not violent at all, either.
so I'll just have to take your word for it that Islam has a monopoly on violence. and war. and that trillion dollar "defence" budgets and oil are irrelevant.
over and out.
-
and btw, it is hardly likely that bin Laden would front up to a British journalist and say, "Yes, we knew there was money and weapons coming from the Americans."
it might dent his street cred.
so saying he was "aware" is pretty much a full admission of what had gone on in the 80s:
CIA procures funding and weapons; passes it on to ISI; who then dollops it out to all their client mujahadeen groups and helps out with training, etc.by the time Fisk did his interview, bin Laden had seen off the Soviets and was now keen to kick the US military out of Saudi Arabia. Why would he want to go into details of his past connections?
(and someone called me naive earlier on in the thread?
LOL!) -
Weston,
Stephen prefers to believe that the whole radical Islam thing is a CIA conspiracy undertaken on behalf of that whole military industrial complex thingy.
No, nothing is ever that black and white.
Clearly, radical Islam is mainly a product of western interference (Russian, European, American) in the Islamic world, and particulary the Middle East, stretching back to the First World War.The US and its close allies, particularly Pakistan, have been very keen over the past 30 years to harness that sentiment for their own ends.
Even Israel got into the act by helping create Hamas in the 1980s as a counterwight to the growing power of Fatah/PLO. It's called divide and rule.
The "War on Terror" meme also conveniently keeps the military-industrial-congressional complex "thingy" in beer money for the forseeable future. Oh, and it also seems to help Exxon Mobil pry open previously closed sources of oil. Oh, and it also seems to involve invading countries that have absolutely no connection with radical Islamic terrorist groups. Who would have thought, eh?
-
Danyl,
You wrote:
If you can't figure out why the US likes to stay on the good side of the Saudi Royal family then you really are in trouble.
Please show me where I said I "can't figure out why the US likes to stay on the good side of the Saudi Royal family".
Quite the contrary, I stated back at the beginning exactly the reasons the US supports corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East (clue: same reasons as the fake "war on terror"):
1. geopolitical power
2. money, esp. from weapons manufacture and security infrastructure
3. economic imperialism
4. resource controlAnd you had blamed the rise of radical Islam on, that's right, "corrupt dictatorships". The ones supported by the US:
The rise of radical Islam has a number of causes - I argue that it's largely a result of the inability of muslim states to develop into successful modern nations - almost all of them are economically stagnant corrupt dictatorships.
So please feel free to continue arguing with yourself. This circular "debate" seems to be going nowhere fast.
-
Danyl,
It's pretty unlikely that bin Laden recieved funding from the US or the CIA while he was in Pakistan or Afghanistan
From this statement, I see that you fall into the "wilfully ignorant" category. At this stage in the game, to deny that Bin Laden received many years of CIA and ISI backing is somewhat disingenuous. To put it mildly.
I argue that it's largely a result of the inability of muslim states to develop into successful modern nations - almost all of them are economically stagnant corrupt dictatorships.
...backed by who? Oh, that's right, our good friends the US of A.
Apart from Iran, which was a US-backed dictatorship under the Shah, and Iraq, a US-backed distatorship under Saddam until 1990, Syria and Lybia, virtually all Arab states are US clients. Care to explain?