Brian Willson: THE PRETEND SOCIETY

I was once a young man, very much like the young men and women who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan as US military soldiers. I grew up believing in the red, white and blue. I believed that the United States had a sacred mission to spread democracy around the world. Viet Nam was my generation’s war. I did not volunteer, but when I was drafted, I answered the call. It was in Viet Nam that my journey toward a different kind of knowledge began. One hot sunny morning in April 1969 I found myself in a small Mekong Vietnamese fishing village that had just been bombed, burned bodies lying everywhere. My job in that moment was to assess the success of bombing missions of so-called military targets. In my naivete, it never occurred to me that the countless targets, systematically being bombed, were undefended, inhabited rice farming and fishing villages. In effect, all that mattered was the creation of “enemy” body counts – lots of them – Washington’s demonic criteria for defining “success.”

Why Putin is Driving Washington Nuts

Forget the past (Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi) and the present (Assad, Ahmadinejad). A bet can be made over a bottle of Petrus 1989 (the problem is waiting the next six years to collect); for the foreseeable…

Silencing The Critics

In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI–the lead orchestrator of fake “terrorist plots”–called an investigation of “activities concerning the material support…

ANOTHER PRETEXT TO WAGE WAR? Fingerprints of False Flags Against Iran: Thailand, India, Georgia Terror Blasts

Have American and Israeli efforts to pin international terrorism on Iran just gone global? A series of bomb attacks apparently on Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia are now being linked with blasts in the Thai capital, Bangkok, for which it is reported that three Iranian men have been arrested. Israel is claiming that the explosive devices recovered in Thailand are the same “sticky bombs” that were used in the attacks in New Delhi and Tbilisi, and that is proof that an Iranian terror network is conducting an assassination campaign against its foreign diplomats. “The attempted terrorist attack in Bangkok proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to perpetrate terror,” said Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister. Thai police have named one of the men injured in the blasts on Tuesday in Bangkok as an Iranian national. It is reported that two other men arrested, one in the Thai capital and another detained after he flew to Malaysia, are also Iranian. The Thai authorities