Cold War with vengeance: U.S. Dem-Repubs pledge allegiance to cont'd violence across Asia, Africa

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice,” I’ve had this quote on my desk for years. No matter how you slice it or angle it, what you heard last night is not demonstrative of choice. 

Choice is not given; you must make it. Re-reporting and comment by Carolyn Bennett 

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f you stand long enough with these entrenched men, you will turn this country back to yesteryear, lose any ground achieved as a civilized people in a civilized world where every human being is protected under the rule of law and in adherence to declarations of human rights. 

If we continue sending the same ilk to Washington ─ if we refuse to imagine above this fray, outside this box, beyond this ideology ─ then America (this America) will do no more than regress and regress and regress into an abyss of worsening mendacity and barbarity. 

Hoodwinked

An RT story observes, and rightly so, that the Democratic-Republican Party “monopoly is failing the American people.” The hoodwinking perpetrated by these parties is indeed “a joke” played on the American electorate. Aided and abetted by mass media, these heavies block choice as an Israeli blockade on peoples of the Gaza Strip; and only ordinary Americans can break the hold.

It is true, as this article puts it, that the political process in the United States is a “corporate-owned sweepstakes with less credibility than a beauty pageant.” And to raise the standard, the American people must engage, uproot this rotten entrenchment, and demand a substantively changed ethos, desperately needed new voices and new ideas. Clean house in Washington.

 

Foreign policy is domestic policy.

 

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ormer Senator Mike Gravel responded to last night’s televised event of a couple of cosmetic characters’ wink-and-nod performance on foreign policy. This is some of what Gravel told Press TV about the Obama-Romney (Dem-Repub.) callous, cowardly, pernicious and careless model of U.S. foreign relations and how it inevitably intertwines with U.S. domestic conditions.

Former Senator
Mike Gravel

Cold War with a vengeance

“I think their foreign policies are very close,” Gravel said.

Barack Obama: admits the United States has been “indirectly” supplying insurgents in Syria.

Mitt Romney: says we should give them more “supplies.”

Gravel says, “This is waging war through an agency, which is how we started the war in Libya. Now we are doing this [in] Syria and look at all the deaths that have occurred.

“There is as much blood on our hands as there is on [President Bashar al-] Assad’s government.” Sustained by his allies Iran and Russia, Gravel said, President Assad “is trying to maintain himself in power. And we (the United States of America) are trying to bring about a new person in power.”

 

Based on what the Republican and Democratic candidates said last night, Mike Gravel concluded that there is “no change in policy … toward Iran and toward Israel’s control of American foreign policy.” 

We are, he said, “almost back at the Cold War where the United States is waging proxy wars [and] other people are dying.”

Aided and abetted by mass media

The head of the international affairs committee of the Russian Federation legislature (the State Duma), Alexei Pushkov, also commented recently on the carelessly violent pattern in U.S. foreign relations and the press’s collusion with it.  

Iraq to Libya to Syria ─ When the United States “was attempting to justify the war in Iraq, ‘the entire U.S. media claimed the country had nuclear weapons,’ a claim that turned out to be blatantly false [and] today a similar situation is unraveling with regard to Syria:

‘The Americans are taking an absolutely one-sided position and

[t]heir media act as if they were the ideological arm of U.S. foreign policy.’

Reporting on Libya, the U.S. media alleged President Muammar al Qaddafi “was guilty of murdering 6,000 Libyan citizens, ‘but the bodies were never found and the theme was forgotten,’” Pushkov said.

The singular “‘voice of U.S. media is startling’” and demonstrative of a blind allegiance to “‘the policy of national authorities.’”

U.S. war left in
Iraq

Hit and run U.S. hostilities: 

Iraq to Libya

Anti- U.S.
Libya

International dispatches in recent days from Libya have been reporting post-U.S.-invasion atrocities against “innocent civilians” ─ this latest conflict reportedly provoked by the death of Omran Shaaban, a “rebel from Misrata credited with capturing” President Qaddafi. Shaaban reportedly died on September 25 after “two months’ detention in Bani Walid.” Reports from the  town have indicated that innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire of increasing “fighting between pro-government forces and Qaddafi loyalists.”

So today the Russian Federation offered at the United Nations a statement expressing concern about the significant escalation of violence in and around Bani Walid and calling on Libyan authorities “to take urgent steps to resolve the conflict by peaceful means and to preserve the rights of all Libyan citizens.”

United Nations
 Bushwhacked by
USA

The United States then blocked the draft statement, which the Russian envoy found strange indeed. Vitaly Churkin said:

Blocking a draft statement that called to solve the country’s political problems without violence is very strange.

This is a case when it is difficult to explain the U.S. delegation’s actions in rational terms.

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hat can change U.S. foreign relations of war, its violence against sovereign peoples? Gravel continued.

I know of no change “that could come about in the United States to change our whole attitude of imperialism,” he said, other than bankruptcy ─ where, of course, “the country it is slowly going.”

During the Republican-Democratic Party candidates’ foreign policy performance, Gravel said, “There was some truth in what Obama said:

[w]e cannot be strong in the world if we’re not strong at home economically; and we are not strong economically.

“We waste our economic capability on foreign wars and foreign policies” that do nothing other than kill a lot of people; and we stand above them [and tell them] we can dictate the kind of government they will have.”

Egypt-Libya-Syria

“We are trying to dictate that in Syria, in Libya, and in other countries,” Gravel said.

“We dictated that in Egypt: through our military and through the billions of dollars the United States gives annually to Egypt’s military, we forced [President Hosni] Mubarak out.” It is a pattern employed by the United States government “around the world” including “indirectly” in Syria.

Rights due to Human beings as 

Human beings

Speaking recently on the sidelines of a parliamentary hearing on human rights in America, Alexei Pushkov pointedly observed that the United States itself must “honor human rights before trying to lecture other countries on these principles.”

Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
1947

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’d say that targeted assassinations, wars of aggression, provocation and destabilization of countries and factions, displacement of peoples, torture and detention without charge, trial or counsel, violations of the peace ─ all of these known to have been committed and are still being ordered and committed by U.S. government officials and agents ─ all of these fall within the category of lawlessness and abuse of human rights. 

Those who order and or commit these acts must be brought to account before an impartial court of justice and those who promise to commit or suggest that they intend or might commit such acts must be barred from or voted out of public office ─ especially the entrenched, no matter who they are or what their pedigree or lineage.

Sources and notes

“Romney vs. Obama: Where’s the Choice?”  October 4, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/columns/bridge-too/us-presidential-debates-romney-obama/

“Cold war climate pursued by U.S. in Syria at cost of their own economy,” October 23, 2012, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/10/23/268353/obama-romney-debate-promoted-waging-war/

“U.S. media: Ideological arm of American foreign policy – Russia,” October 22, 2012, http://rt.com/politics/us-russia-media-human-rights-violations-956/

“U.S. blocks Russia’s draft statement in UN on peaceful resolution of Bani Walid violence.” October 23, 2012, http://rt.com/news/us-russia-libya-statement-068/

Mike Gravel

A former U.S. presidential candidate (2008) and a former U.S. Senator (1969-1981), Maurice Robert (Mike) Gravel (b. May 13, 1930) is prominently known for his release of the Pentagon Papers, the secret official study that revealed the lies and manipulations of successive U.S. administrations that misled the country into the Vietnam War. After the New York Times published portions of the leaked study, the Nixon administration moved to block any further publication of information and to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Gravel (a junior senator at the time) argued that his constituents had a right to know the truth behind the war and proceeded to read into the senate record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page document. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Senator Gravel did not have the right and responsibility to share official documents with his constituents. Gravel then published The Senator Gravel Edition, The Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press (1971). What followed was the court case Gravel v. U.S. and the handing down of a landmark Supreme Court decision (No. 71-1017-1026) pertaining to the Speech and Debate Clause (Article 1, Section 6) of the United States Constitution.

Mike Gravel has been characterized as “a passionate advocate of direct democracy and the National Initiative.” During the 2007-2008 presidential campaign, Gravel ran on these ideas.

The former lawmaker served in the Alaska House of Representatives (1963-66), and as Speaker (1965-66). He then represented Alaska in the U.S. Senate (1969-81) where he served on the Finance, Interior, and Environmental and Public Works committees, chairing the Energy, Water Resources, Buildings and Grounds, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees. In 1971, Gravel waged a successful solo filibuster for five months that forced the Nixon administration to cut a deal, effectively ending the draft in the United States. He was founder and president of The Democracy Foundation, Philadelphia II, and Direct Democracy, nonprofit corporations dedicated to the establishment of direct democracy in the United States, through the enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy by American voters.  Senator Gravel is author of Jobs and More Jobs, and Citizen Power. He lectures and writes about governance, foreign affairs, economics, Social Security, tax reform, energy, environmental issues and democracy.

Senator Gravel served in the U.S. Army (1951-54) and as special adjutant in the Communication Intelligence Services and as a Special Agent in the Counterintelligence Corps. His academic credentials are in economics (B.S., Columbia University) and in law and public affairs (four honorary degrees). Mike Gravel was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, of French Canadian immigrants. http://www.mikegravel.us/bio

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