Afghanistan: Between Pipelines and ISIS-K, the Americans Are Still in Play

US trained and armed Afghan security forces are joining ISIS-K, which makes the US ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan look more like an American ‘repositioning’ to keep chaos humming

By Pepe Escobar

Global Research,

November 11, 2021

The Cradle 10 November 2021

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Something quite extraordinary happened in early November in Kabul.

Taliban interim-Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov got together to discuss a range of political and economic issues. Most importantly, they resurrected the legendary soap opera which in the early 2000s I dubbed Pipelineistan: the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

Call it yet another remarkable, historical twist in the post-jihad Afghan saga, going back as far as the mid-1990s when the Taliban first took power in Kabul.

In 1997, the Taliban even visited Houston to discuss the pipeline, then known as TAP, as reported in Part 1 of my e-book Forever Wars.

During the second Clinton administration, a consortium led by Unocal – now part of Chevron – was about to embark on what would have been an extremely costly proposition (nearly $8 billion) to undercut Russia in the intersection of Central and South Asia; as well as to smash the competition: the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline.

The Taliban were duly courted – in Houston and in Kabul. A key go-between was the ubiquitous Zalmay Khalilzad, aka ‘Bush’s Afghan,’ in one of his earlier incarnations as Unocal lobbyist-cum-Taliban interlocutor. But then, low oil prices and non-stop haggling over transit fees stalled the project. That was the situation in the run-up to 9/11.

In early 2002, shortly after the Taliban were expelled from power by the American “bombing to democracy” ethos, an agreement to build what was then still billed as TAP (without India), was signed by Ashgabat, Kabul and Islamabad.

The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route

As years went by, it was clear that TAPI, which runs for roughly 800 km across Afghan lands and could yield as much as $400 million annually in transit revenue for Kabul’s coffers, would never be built while hostage to a guerrilla environment.

Still, five years ago, Kabul decided to revive TAPI and work started in 2018 – under massive security in Herat, Farah, Nimruz and Helmand provinces, already largely under Taliban control.

At the time, the Taliban said they would not attack TAPI and would even provide their own security. The gas pipeline was to be paired with fiber optic cables – as with the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan – and a railway line from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.

History never stops playing tricks in the graveyard of empires. Believe it or not, we’re now back to the same situation on the ground as in 1996.

The spanner in the works

If we pay attention to the plot twists in this never-ending Pipelineistan saga, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that TAPI will finally be built. It’s certainly a quadruple win for all involved – including India – and a massive step towards Eurasia’s integration in its Central-South Asian node.Afghanistan Takes Center Stage in the New Great Game

Enter the spanner in the works: ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the subsidiary of Daesh in Afghanistan.

Russian intel has known for over a year that the usual suspects have been providing help to ISIS-K, at least indirectly.

Yet now there’s a new element, confirmed by Taliban sources, that quite a few US-trained soldiers of the previous Afghan National Army are incorporating themselves into ISIS-K to fight against the Taliban.

ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.

It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.

So the new ISIS-K spin is monomaniac: basically, a strategy of chaos to discredit the Taliban, with an emphasis on the latter being unable to provide security for average Afghans. That is what underlies the recent horrific attacks on Shia mosques and government infrastructure, including hospitals.

In parallel, US President Joe Biden’s “over the horizon” spin, meant to define the alleged American strategy to fight ISIS-K, has not convinced anyone, apart from NATO vassals.

Since its creation in 2015, ISIS-K continues to be financed by the same dodgy sources that fueled chaos in Syria and Iraq. The moniker itself is an attempt to misdirect, a divisive ploy straight out of the CIA’s playbook.

Historic ‘Khorasan’ comes from successive Persian empires, a vast area ranging from Persia and the Caspian all the way to northwest Afghanistan – and has nothing whatsoever to do with Salafi-jihadism and the Wahhabi lunatics who make up the terrorist group’s ranks. Furthermore, these ISIS-K jihadis are based in south-eastern Afghanistan, away from Iran’s borders, so the ‘Khorasan’ label makes zero sense.

Russian, Chinese and Iranian intel operate on the basis that the US ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan, as in Syria and Iraq, was not a withdrawal but a repositioning. What’s left is the trademark, undiluted American strategy of chaos executed via both direct (troops stealing Syrian oil) and indirect (ISIS-K) actors.

The scenario is self-evident when one considers that Afghanistan was the precious missing link of China’s New Silk Roads. After the US exit, Afghanistan is not only primed to fully engage with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but also to become a key node of Eurasia integration as a future full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

To hedge against these positive developments, the routine practices of the Pentagon and its NATO subsidiary remain in wait in Afghanistan, ready to disrupt political, diplomatic, economic and security progress in the country. We may be now entering a new chapter in the US Hegemony playbook: Closet Forever Wars.

The closely connected SCO

Fifth columnists are tasked with carrying the new imperial message to the West. That’s the case of Rahmatullah Nabil, former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), “the Afghan intelligence service with close ties to the CIA,” as described by Foreign Policy magazine..

In an interview presented with a series of trademark imperial lies – “law and order is disintegrating,” “Afghanistan has no friends in the international community,” “the Taliban have no diplomatic partners” – Nabil, at least, does not make a complete fool of himself.

He confirms that ISIS-K keeps recruiting, and adds that former Afghan defense/security ops are joining ISIS-K because “they see the Islamic State as a better platform for themselves.”

He’s also correct that the Taliban leadership in Kabul is “afraid the extreme and young generation of their fighters” may join ISIS-K, “which has a regional agenda.”

Russia “playing a double game” is just silly. In presidential envoy Zamir Kabulov, Moscow maintains a first-class interlocutor in constant touch with the Taliban, and would never allow the “resistance,” as in CIA assets, to be based in Tajikistan with an Afghan destabilization agenda.

On Pakistan, it’s correct that Islamabad is “trying to convince the Taliban to include pro-Pakistan technocrats in their system.” But that’s not “in return for lobbying for international recognition.” It’s a matter of responding to the Taliban’s own management needs.

The SCO is very closely connected on what they collectively expect from the Taliban. That includes an inclusive government and no influx of refugees. Uzbekistan, for instance, as the main gateway to Central Asia for Afghanistan, has committed to participating in the reconstruction business.

For its part, Tajikistan announced that China will build a $10 million military base in the geologically spectacular Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region. Countering western hysteria, Dushanbe made sure that the base will essentially host a special rapid reaction unit of the Regional Department for Organized Crime Control, subordinated to Tajikistan’s Minister of Internal Affairs.

That will include around 500 servicemen, several light armored vehicles, and drones. The base is part of a deal between Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry and China’s Ministry of State Security.

The base is a necessary compromise. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has a serious problem with the Taliban: he refuses to recognize them, and insists on better Tajik representation in a new government in Kabul.

Beijing, for its part, never deviates from its number one priority: preventing Uighurs from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) by all means from crossing Tajik borders to wreak havoc in Xinjiang.

So all the major SCO players are acting in tandem towards a stable Afghanistan. As for US Think Tankland, predictably, they don’t have much of a strategy, apart from praying for chaos.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: American-trained Afghan forces are defecting to join ISIS-K, in what increasingly looks like a US plan to subvert the war-torn country’s recovery. (Source: The Cradle)The original source of this article is The CradleCopyright © Pepe Escobar, The Cradle, 2021

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Colin Powell’s Death: Liar of the Century

19 Oct 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

Hussam AbdelKareem

Colin Powell was part of the Quartet (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Powell) of American officials who were responsible for the illegal, unethical, and criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Colin Powell passed away at the age of 84. In his eulogy, writers in the American press will certainly talk about the “brave soldier” who ascended the US army ranks to the “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” position and who eventually became the first African-American Secretary of State (he’s born to Jamaican parents). But in fact, he will be remembered for his role in Iraq’s invasion more than anything else in his career. Colin Powell was part of the Quartet (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Powell) of American officials who were responsible for the illegal, unethical, and criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was Colin Powell who presented America’s case for the war on Iraq to the world in the famous UN Security Council session on Feb 5, 2003.

“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence”

– Colin Powell; Feb 5, 2003. 

During the UN Security Council session, Powell detailed the serious threats Iraq was posing to the world by its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) secret programs and its links with terrorism. He even went on to show a vial in his hand saying that it could be used to store Iraq’s Anthrax germs as part of biological warheads.  

Powell actually used that UN Security Council meeting as “show business”, using projectors and audio recordings to “prove” to the world that Iraq was an imminent threat and that the US has no other option but to go to war. Well, it was all lies, nothing but lies and fabrications. Powell was lying all-out when he talked about: 

– Iraq’s possession of mobile labs to produce WMD’s 

– Iraq’s links to Al-Qa’eda and Bin-Ladin.

– Iraq’s buying Uranium from Niger

– Iraq’s possession of long-range missiles (900 km)

All that was proven false. America failed to find any evidence to support those allegations even after years of extensive search operations all over Iraq after its invasion. 

Colin Powell was lying intentionally. He was not “mistaken”, he knew exactly what he was doing. His boss, Bush, tasked him with the dirty work of presenting a convincing “war case” to the world even if he needs to use lies, misleading information, and false evidence, and Powell accepted to do it. It’s as simple as that. It’s typical soldier behavior: obey the commander. He’s part of the crime and cannot distance himself from it as he tried to do at a later stage in his life. 

After he left office, Powell tried to blame others for what he said in the UN Security Council, portraying himself as “deceived” not as a liar. On Feb 16, 2011, The Guardian newspaper of the UK published an article titled “Former US secretary of state asks why CIA failed to warn him over Iraqi defector who has admitted fabricating WMD evidence”. Also in 2011, Powell told Al Jazeera News Channel that “I deeply regret some of the information I presented was wrong. It has blotted my record, but you know, there’s nothing I can do to change that blot”. And in 2017 Powell said in an interview on Bloomberg “I was more than embarrassed. I was mortified”.

Well, that can hardly be an apology. Talking about the CIA not informing him, his embarrassment, and the blot on his record is no more than an excuse and justification. 

Colin Powell died after he actively participated in destroying another country without any legal or moral basis. His name will remain in history’s list of invaders and barbarians.The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

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Colin Powell’s Own Staff Had Warned Him Against His War Lies

October 18th, 2021

By David Swanson

Source

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball’s videotaped confession, Colin Powell was demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball’s unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won’t happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

But the panel that had been assembled to lob softballs at Powell served its purpose well. It was moderated by Gwen Ifill. I asked Ifill (and Powell could watch it later on C-Span if he wanted to) whether Powell had any explanation for the way in which he had relied on the testimony of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. He had recited the claims about weapons of mass destruction but carefully left out the part where that same gentleman had testified that all of Iraq’s WMDs had been destroyed. Ifill thanked me, and said nothing. Hillary Clinton was not present and nobody beat me up.

I wonder what Powell would say if someone were to actually ask him that question, even today, or next year, or ten years from now. Someone tells you about a bunch of old weapons and at the same time tells you they’ve been destroyed, and you choose to repeat the part about the weapons and censor the part about their destruction. How would you explain that?

Well, it’s a sin of omission, so ultimately Powell could claim he forgot. “Oh yeah, I meant to say that, but it slipped my mind.”

But how would he explain this:

During his presentation at the United Nations, Powell provided this translation of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi army officers:

“They’re inspecting the ammunition you have, yes.

“Yes.

“For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

“For the possibility there is by chance forbidden ammo?

“Yes.

“And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there.”

The incriminating phrases “clean all of the areas” and “Make sure there is nothing there” do not appear in the official State Department translation of the exchange:

“Lt. Colonel: They are inspecting the ammunition you have.

“Colonel: Yes.

“Lt. Col: For the possibility there are forbidden ammo.

“Colonel: Yes?

“Lt. Colonel: For the possibility there is by chance, forbidden ammo.

“Colonel: Yes.

“Lt. Colonel: And we sent you a message to inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas.

“Colonel: Yes.”

Powell was writing fictional dialogue. He put those extra lines in there and pretended somebody had said them. Here’s what Bob Woodward said about this in his book “Plan of Attack.”

“[Powell] had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. Concerning the intercept about inspecting for the possibility of ‘forbidden ammo,’ Powell took the interpretation further: ‘Clean out all of the areas. . . . Make sure there is nothing there.’ None of this was in the intercept.”

For most of his presentation, Powell wasn’t inventing dialogue, but he was presenting as facts numerous claims that his own staff had warned him were weak and indefensible.

Powell told the UN and the world: “We know that Saddam’s son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam’s numerous palace complexes.” The January 31, 2003, evaluation of Powell’s draft remarks prepared for him by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (“INR”) flagged this claim as “WEAK”.

Regarding alleged Iraqi concealment of key files, Powell said: “key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.” The January 31, 2003 INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added “Plausibility open to question.” A Feb. 3, 2003, INR evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s remarks noted:

“Page 4, last bullet, re key files being driven around in cars to avoid inspectors. This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well.” That didn’t stop Colin from stating it as fact and apparently hoping that, even if UN inspectors thought he was a brazen liar, US media outlets wouldn’t tell anyone.

On the issue of biological weapons and dispersal equipment, Powell said: “we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK”:

“WEAK. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. This would be somewhat true in terms of short-range missiles with conventional warheads, but is questionable in terms of longer-range missiles or biological warheads.”
This claim was again flagged in the February 3, 2003, evaluation of a subsequent draft of Powell’s presentation: “Page 5. first para, claim re missile brigade dispersing rocket launchers and BW warheads. This claim too is highly questionable and might be subjected to criticism by UN inspection officials.”

That didn’t stop Colin. In fact, he brought out visual aids to help with his lying

Powell showed a slide of a satellite photograph of an Iraqi munitions bunker, and lied:

“The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . [t]he truck you […] see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong.”
The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and added: “We support much of this discussion, but we note that decontamination vehicles – cited several times in the text – are water trucks that can have legitimate uses… Iraq has given UNMOVIC what may be a plausible account for this activity – that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives; presence of a fire safety truck (water truck, which could also be used as a decontamination vehicle) is common in such an event.”

Powell’s own staff had told him the thing was a water truck, but he told the U.N. it was “a signature item…a decontamination vehicle.” The UN was going to need a decontamination vehicle itself by the time Powell finished spewing his lies and disgracing his country.

He just kept piling it on: “UAVs outfitted with spray tanks constitute an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons,” he said.

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this statement as “WEAK” and added: “the claim that experts agree UAVs fitted with spray tanks are ‘an ideal method for launching a terrorist attack using biological weapons’ is WEAK.”

In other words, experts did NOT agree with that claim.

Powell kept going, announcing “in mid-December weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “not credible” and “open to criticism, particularly by the UN inspectorates.”

His staff was warning him that what he planned to say would not be believed by his audience, which would include the people with actual knowledge of the matter.

To Powell that was no matter.

Powell, no doubt figuring he was in deep already, so what did he have to lose, went on to tell the UN: “On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and called it “Not implausible, but UN inspectors might question it. (Note: Draft states it as fact.)”

And Powell stated it as fact. Notice that his staff was not able to say there was any evidence for the claim, but rather that it was “not implausible.” That was the best they could come up with. In other words: “They might buy this one, Sir, but don’t count on it.”

Powell, however, wasn’t satisfied lying about one scientist. He had to have a dozen. He told the United Nations: “A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses.”

The January 31, 2003, INR evaluation flagged this claim as “WEAK” and “Highly questionable.” This one didn’t even merit a “Not implausible.”

Powell also said: “In the middle of January, experts at one facility that was related to weapons of mass destruction, those experts had been ordered to stay home from work to avoid the inspectors. Workers from other Iraqi military facilities not engaged in elicit weapons projects were to replace the workers who’d been sent home.”

Powell’s staff called this “WEAK,” with “Plausibility open to question.”

All of this stuff sounded plausible enough to viewers of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. And that, we can see now, was what interested Colin. But it must have sounded highly implausible to the U.N. inspectors. Here was a guy who had not been with them on any of their inspections coming in to tell them what had happened.

We know from Scott Ritter, who led many UNSCOM inspections in Iraq, that U.S. inspectors had used the access that the inspection process afforded them to spy for, and to set up means of data collection for, the CIA. So there was some plausibility to the idea that an American could come back to the UN and inform the UN what had really happened on its inspections.

Yet, repeatedly, Powell’s staff warned him that the specific claims he wanted to make were not going to even sound plausible. They will be recorded by history more simply as blatant lies.

The examples of Powell’s lying listed above are taken from an extensive report released by Congressman John Conyers: “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

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Nations Built on Lies – How the US Became Rich

October 16, 2021

Foreword, Prologue, Introduction:  This is Part 1 of 6 and will form a complete ebook that will be available for download with part six.

Foreword

From: James Bacque

Date: Saturday, Jan 5, 2019 9:13 PM

Dear Larry

Thanks for the information–as you guessed I have encountered much of it myself already. I wish you good luck . . . Be as moderate as you can in expressing your very important findings. Remember that hardly anyone knows as much as you do and some of your findings are very upsetting.

All the best

Jim

Prologue To Volume One

A Brief History of America That You Won’t Learn in a University

One of the more popular historical myths embedded in the American consciousness by the propaganda machine relates to the migration of settlers to the New World, the narrative detailing how hundreds of thousands of the virtuous oppressed flocked to the dockyards in a headlong rush for freedom and opportunity. There may indeed have been five or six such persons, but a much larger group was there to escape the hangman and jailer and an even larger selection were slave traders, hookers, and budding capitalist scam artists looking for greener pastures. When we add in the vast numbers hoping to escape justified persecution for their perverted witches-brew versions of Christianity, the first Americans were hardly role models for a new nation. The evidence is more clearly on the side of criminals, losers and misfits, religious whackos and opportunists than on the mythical oppressed. And, for the record, there is no evidence whatever of settlers emigrating to America in search of either “freedom” or “opportunity”, at least not within the current meaning of these words.

Good mental health was not a prerequisite for European settlers emigrating to the New World. We are fond of reminding ourselves that Australia was (and mostly still is) populated primarily with murderers, thieves and sexual perverts, but the immigrants to America were not noticeably better. Indeed, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty got the words more or less correct in referring to “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. While the Australians had their serial killers and muggers, the Europeans went one better with their Christian extremists who spent their weekdays burning witches and killing Indians, and their Sundays in church thanking God for the opportunity. The Australians have marginally improved their habits over the centuries while the Americans have not.

America is widely accepted, and indeed even prides itself, on being a deeply Christian country, with 65% or more of the population declaring religion important in their lives. This would be supported by history, since the major migrations to the New World consisted of a long list of flaky religious sects whose primary goal in emigration was the opportunity to build a society entirely based on those isolationist and extremist heresies. It is probably safe to say that Salem witchcraft was the seedbed in which the peculiarly American version of Christian theology sprouted and flourished, and which also served as a practical introduction to mass hysteria which would later be so usefully applied to the concepts of patriotism and democracy. The enduring echoes of this religious ancestry have been highly influential in all of subsequent American history.

The Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (“The most famous words in the English language”, if you’re American; just another Hello Kitty greeting card, if you’re not), states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all White Men were created superior and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, the most important of which is slavery”. In the recent history of the modern world, only two nations of people have so thoroughly embraced slavery as to have practiced it on an immense scale for hundreds of years: the Christians in America and the Dalai Lamas in Tibet. And only these two groups so cherished slavery in their hearts they fought a civil war over the right to maintain it. It is hardly a moral selling point that both sets of racist bigots lost the war and, while Mao cleaned up Tibet, the racism and bigotry persisted in America, often violently, for another 200 years and is still widely in evidence today. Christian virtue does not die easily.

Internationally, the American government and its leaders function with an absolute amorality, driven primarily by their commercial Darwinism, their law-of-the-jungle, might-makes-right philosophy. Yet individually most Americans accept all this as somehow being righteous and pleasing in the eyes of their god. The vast network of torture prisons, the numerous governments overthrown, the countless brutal dictatorships installed and supported, the commercial and military enslavement of so many populations, the 10 to 20 million civilians massacred, the constant meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the so-frequent destabilisation of governments, the plundering of the resources of so many nations. All of these are excused, justified, forgiven, often praised, then quickly forgotten by these moral Christians. Americans may be comfortable with all this cognitive dissonance, but as Jiddu Krishnamurti aptly wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.

Hypocrisy has always been a prominent, if not quite endearing, feature of Americans, and especially of their government. It is Americans who preach democracy and freedom at home while installing brutal puppet dictators all over the world, who preach free trade at home while practicing savage mercantilistic protectionism abroad. It is Americans who espouse human rights at home while building the largest network of torture prisons in the history of the world. And of course, preaching that human life is precious at home while murdering millions in other nations in trumped-up wars of liberation. It is only Americans who moan about “the appalling loss of 5,000 American lives” in Iraq while killing one million Iraqis, half of whom were children. It is only the Americans who use the CIA, NED, USAID and the VOA to pay and prod individuals in other countries to create internal political dissent, then condemn a government for cracking down on “innocent dissidents”. Maybe one day Americans will lose their stomach for all this creation of worldwide instability and have another American revolution. And not before time.

Most Americans are only dimly aware of their own sordid past, a situation abetted by all the blank pages in the history books. The portions of US history contained in these pages have mostly been excised from the historical memory of Americans because they don’t fit the mythical narrative. Most Americans fervently believe their country was founded on God and Christian virtue, liberty, democracy, human rights and free trade, but when we dig beneath the propaganda and jingoism we discover the United States of America was founded on religious extremism, racism, slavery, genocide, a brutal imperialism and a virulently predatory strain of capitalism.

These volumes contain a capsule history of the United States of America with selections that will not be found in any history book, but that nevertheless consists of facts which are not in dispute. From here, we will look at some specifics, beginning with how America became rich. From this point forward, ideology and reality will be in constant conflict, presenting stark challenges to our uninformed beliefs.

Quiz on American History

a. Which US Secretary of State holds the World Record for being the most prolific baby-killer in recorded history?

b. Which US General holds the World Record as the greatest pathological mass killer in modern history?

c. Fidel Castro listed in the Guinness Book of Records as surviving 638 murder attempts by the US government. For what was he being punished?

d. The father of which recent US President conspired with a group of Jewish bankers and industrialists in 1933, engaging a famous General to amass an army of 500,000 troops to overthrow the US government and install a fascist dictatorship in America?

e. How many times has the US invaded Canada?

f. The US has been a nation for about 245 years. For how many of those years has the US been at war?

g. How many democracies has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime? How many brutal dictatorships has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime?

h. Japan conducted abominable human experimentation in China during WWII – Shiro Ishii’s infamous Unit 731. Why was Japan spared war crimes trials?

i. How many Presidents, Prime Ministers and senior government officials of other countries has the US assassinated for disobedience or obstruction to hegemony?

j. Which country operates the only Torture University in the world?

k. For several hundred years, slave-trading was the highest-paying job in America. What was the second-highest-paying?

l. Which government for about 100 years paid a lifetime salary to any citizen who could steal patents and processes from other countries?

m. Which revered US Supreme Court justice recommended killing off all Americans of low IQ?

n. The government of which country for decades silenced political dissidents by performing frontal lobotomies and turning them into vegetables?

o. Which famous American institution recommended “mercy killings” of the economically unfit, these to be performed in local gas chambers?

p. Which American Defense Secretary gathered 500,000 young men with an average IQ of about 65 and sent them to Vietnam? How many returned? What was his punishment?

q. Which American Military physician appeared before Congress in what year, asking for $10 million to fund the creation of the HIV virus? Did he receive the money?

r. When and where was Coca-Cola was invented?

s. Which famous person invented the incandescent light bulb? Which the telephone? The most famous American inventor was Thomas Edison. How many things did Edison invent?

t. We are told Germany killed some 6,000,000 Jews during WWII. How many Germans were killed in Germany AFTER the end of WWII?

u. Which famous physicist wrote to Roosevelt, offering to fund the entire unknown cost of creating the atomic bomb, stating the funds were already confirmed available?

v. Which famous US President was the illegitimate son of a Jewish slave trader?

w. Abraham Lincoln’s wife was an inveterate opium addict. Who was her opium supplier?

x. In what year was slavery abolished in the US?

y. Which US President exposed tens of millions of US citizens to radiation from open-air atomic tests, then instructed medics to inform women experiencing leukemia, hair loss, miscarriages, that they were suffering from “housewife syndrome”?

z. Which famous shoe did Nike design that set Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman on the road to fame and glory?

Answers

a. Madeleine Albright; Iraq, 500,000

b. Cutis LeMay; about 20 million, give or take

c. Expelling the Jews from Cuba

d. George Bush

e. Five so far

f. 235

g. Zero. More than 50, and counting

h. Ishii and his entire unit were transported to the US to teach Americans the pleasures of live vivisections and other atrocities. Ishii was a Professor at the University of Maryland until his death decades later.

i. More than 150, and counting (including Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN)

j. The US of A; the “University of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia

k. Killing Indians

l. The US of A. Amounts of $20,000 to $50,000, in the 1800s

m. Oliver Wendell Holmes

n. The US of A. (FBI)

o. Carnegie

p. Robert McNamara. Not many, but the Defense Dept. refuses to release statistics. Made President of the World Bank.

q. Dr. Donald MacArthur, Deputy Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense. 1969. Yes.

r. The Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit, 40 years before Coke stole the patent.

s. Joseph Swan, USA, five years before Edison stole the patent. Antonio Meucci, Italy, five years before Bell stole the patent. None. All Edison’s patents were either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased.

t. Between 12 million and 14 million; some by execution, the bulk by starvation.

u. Albert Einstein, funds offered by Rothschild and other European Jewish bankers.

v. Abraham Lincoln; the son of A. A. Springs(tein) and Nancy Hanks. Adopted by the Lincoln family.

w. A Jewish drug dealer named John Wilkes Booth.

x. Slavery was never abolished in the US. It just changed form.

y. Eisenhower

z. The Japanese Onitsuka Tiger. Nike stole the design and began manufacturing in the US. American courts ruled Onitsuka and Nike could “share” the patent.

Introduction to the Series

David Edwards was quoted in the Third World Traveler as having written:

“Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”

This is the condition we face in dealing with America and Americans today: a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever marketing and nationalistic propaganda that is almost inevitably contradicted by the facts. In truth, there is little about the US today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what Americans ‘know’ about their nation, its history and its conduct in international affairs, is wrong, and often violently wrong. I am not so much concerned with what Americans believe about their own country, but it is a concern that this enormous compendium of historical fiction has been marketed to the rest of the world as truth, with peoples in many other nations believing the same fairytales as do the Americans and holding that nation in a level of regard that is to say the least undeserved, and often dangerous for the absence of truths.

These truths are the content of these books, the history of the US as it really was then and still is today, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast comforter of propaganda, jingoism, patriotism and misinformation that blankets the nation we know as the United States of America. Coincident with what is truly an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the US is an equal volume of black-tinted information about the world outside the US. To the same extent that Americans have been subjected to a century or more of positive and unforgivably false propaganda about their own nation, they have also been subjected to enormously false negative propaganda and misinformation about the world outside their borders.

This series of books was to a large extent an accident of circumstance which began with my extended stay in China and the almost immediate realisation that the voluminous negative flood about China persistently emanating from the Western Zionist media was entirely false; demonisation and propaganda at their worst, giving Americans wholly unrealistic and often vicious misinterpretations and misunderstandings about the realities of China. After viewing a decade or more of this onslaught, and after writing many series of articles in attempts to correct some of the more egregious falsehoods, it seemed a book might be a more appropriate format. But then during ten years or more of historical research, it became apparent that Americans had been subjected to an even greater campaign of misinformation about their own nation than about China and other foreign countries.

I then seemed faced with a two-fold task: to correct – in the eyes of Americans, and perhaps Westerners generally – some of the more glaring misinformation about China, but then to correct – in the eyes of Americans – the even more glaring misinformation about their own country. To further complicate the issues, it gradually became clear that the world outside the US had been so contaminated by American historical mythology, jingoism and propaganda that foreigners were largely living in the same fairyland, insofar as the realities of America were concerned, as were the Americans themselves. To add to the confusion, it eventually emerged that the US-based power of the media, of advertising, of propaganda and misinformation, had contaminated not only the American view of other nations but the views of the peoples within those nations – to the point where Russians or Chinese or Vietnamese had been excessively exposed (thanks in no small part to malignancies like the VOA and Radio Free Europe) to both the glorified but false images of the US and the comparatively derogatory but false images of their own nations that had been so heavily propagated by the American government and the Zionist media to their own people. One book thus became five.

These books are intended to provide only a summary of the related topics. Full volumes can, and have been, written on many of the topics in these chapters. We have seen many books on the CIA involvement in narcotics or in Tibet, volumes on the discrepancies in the official 9-11 narrative or the Bush regime torture prisons, others on the various failings of US democracy or the American educational system. But these individual offerings, useful as they are, treat the segments as essentially disparate and unrelated issues where in reality most of them are integral parts of a deeply-connected whole. My purpose in these volumes is to present a unified picture to enable readers to see the entire landscape as a single canvas and appreciate the inter-relationships of the parts. It is this unified image that will provide a comprehensive understanding of world events and the forces driving them.

Preface To Volume One

Almost every individual or family has what we call ‘skeletons in the closet’, a collection of perhaps embarrassing or even shameful events, regrettable actions, unsavory family members, sins we committed that we would rather not confess in public, things we do not dwell on and would prefer to forget, recognition not only of our imperfections but reflecting the reality that we not so much make mistakes as sometimes act with less than honorable motives.

Included in this category are lies that we tell. Many of these are what we call ‘white lies’, usually small avoidances of truth often done for convenience or even a good cause. No doubt all of us lie on occasion, but there are precious few of us for whom lies constitute the foundation of our lives, where we are in a real sense “living a lie”. We occasionally encounter people who lie about their educational credentials or work history, sometimes greatly exaggerating their accomplishments, and in these instances the lies may serve as an important part of the foundation of a person’s life, perhaps obtaining a highly-paid position based on entirely false credentials, a life that would in part disintegrate if all the truths were known. We find this sometimes with con artists, whose very existence seems built on a vast and intricate weaving of lies, with lives that would indeed disintegrate if the truths were made public. These latter people are, in some real sense, “living a lie”.

Moving from individuals to nations, there are a few countries in the world that fit this latter category, one being the United States of America – a nation and a people that are in every sense living a lie, with virtually the entire foundation of beliefs, of actions, of history, of national pride, of citizenship, based on things that are not only not true but constitute an all-encompassing network of fabricated historical myths. This is not an idle claim, and is not an accusation that can be made against many other countries. I know of no place regarding the US where we can look and not find the landscape littered with falsehoods and supported by an enormous scaffolding of myths, half-truths, buried facts, boldly revised history, nationalistic propaganda and magnificent outright lies. It is true that most nations sugar-coat some parts of their history, but the US is almost unique in the world in being a nation that is genuinely built – and almost entirely built – on a foundation of lies.

With most other nations, if all their historical and political lies were fully exposed with all truths openly documented, they would still survive. But for Americans, the existential threat would be unbearable and I do not believe the US could survive as a nation if all its historical truths were unveiled and confirmed, in a manner by which Americans were compelled to confront them as fact, where denial was not an option.

As two minor examples, we have the now well-documented fact that the US government abandoned several thousand prisoners of war in Vietnam, men held back by the Vietnamese pending the American payment of the agreed war reparations of several billions of dollars. The US government had no intention of paying the money and so walked away from the table, leaving the men behind. Many veterans attempted to bring this to public attention, even testifying before Congress; many had unshakable proof of their claims, but the government – and the media – ignored them until recently when all the factual details emerged in second-tier internet news sites and could no longer be avoided. A much greater existential threat lies in the truth of Pearl Harbor, where it is no longer a secret, except to Americans, that Roosevelt knew not only of the impending Japanese attack (which he had carefully and deliberately provoked), but that he knew precisely the location and course of the Japanese fleet and the date and time of the attack. Roosevelt and his aides held back this information from their own high-level military at Pearl Harbor, sacrificing those lives for the greater objective of a “justified” entry into both theaters of the Second World War.

I believe there are almost no Americans with the emotional capacity to face this brutal truth, either philosophically or emotionally, and yet similar evidence virtually floods the available information sources. I would repeat here David Edwards’ words that “we will become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’.” Yet these things have always been true about the American government. It wasn’t so long ago that declassified documents revealed Operation Northwoods, where the CIA proposed to shoot down a planeload of American college students and a US space shuttle launch, using those as justification to invade Cuba and remove Castro. The US government has both proposed and executed dozens of these atrocities over the years, all hidden from the American mind and heart with the compliance of the media. Pearl Harbor was by no means the worst of these, but few Americans will be able to deal with these truths of their nation.

Many other events are perhaps less brutal but no less breathtaking in their dishonesty. All the tales of how the US became rich, the jingoistic mantras of ingenuity and innovation, of wealth resulting from freedom and democracy, hard work and fair play, are entirely false, and repugnantly so. America became rich through a program of organised violence encompassing hundreds of years, through centuries of unpaid slave labor, military invasions, and the bullying and plundering of weaker nations. The propaganda of the benefits of American-style capitalism follows this same pattern, but Americans are fed this pulp from birth and no longer have the intelligence to see the truth. The US government statistics on items like inflation, unemployment, GDP and more, are the most misleading and dishonest of all nations today. The propaganda machine tells us otherwise, but one need only look at the facts. The US has for the last century been the largest perpetrator of espionage in the world, this activity provably including commercial espionage on a grand scale for more than a century, but the propaganda machine lays this accusation on other nations while claiming a desire to collect only information on terrorists. An enormous lie of a magnitude almost too large to comprehend or refute.

Thomas Edison, revered in American history books as one of the most prolific inventors of all time, never invented anything. The stories about him are fabricated historical myths, as are the cherished legends of the Wright Brothers making the first powered flight or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. Coca-Cola was a world-famous Spanish product stolen and patented by US pharmacist John Pemberton, with the US government refusing to recognise the prior patents. Tales of American inventiveness and IP are almost 180 degrees from the truth, with solidly documented proof that the US stole more IP from more countries than did any other nation, by orders of magnitude, paying $20,000 to $50,000 to anyone who could accomplish such a theft, at a time when even $20,000 was a lifetime salary for an average person. This pattern is consistent in every area and every field of endeavor in American society. The entire history of the US, as described in the history books and repeated incessantly by everyone from Hollywood to various Presidents, is almost all false, and the parts not false are almost always misrepresented. The nation of America and all of its people, are truly living a lie.

The entire thread of “Democracy” and “democratic values” is one of the greatest serial lies ever told. American history books, and American minds, are filled with tales of the US “making the world safe for democracy” by battling tyranny everywhere and installing democratic governments, but this has never happened even one time. While the propaganda machine was flooding the imaginary world with tales of democracies, the US was flooding the real world with brutal military dictators that would permit US multinationals and banks to pillage their countries. All the theory of the US’ fabled democracy, the government by the people, the checks and balances, is false, with the truth in the open but Americans so indoctrinated nobody seems able to see. Furthermore, the US government has made it illegal to teach many of these truths in America’s public schools.

All the propaganda of moral superiority, of concern for human rights, are, as we will see, lies in their entirety. The US is not only not morally superior, but has the worst human rights record of all nations excepting one, in recent centuries. Americans have many tales – almost all false – of other nations committing wartime atrocities while their own government and military were committing far worse and heavily censoring the media to prevent that knowledge from escaping custody. Almost no Americans know of the vast massacres committed by their military in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Iraq. Human rights atrocities began from the first days of the white settlers landing in North America, and have never ceased. Ever since the US outsourced to other countries its human rights atrocities, it has boasted to the world of its moral righteousness in human rights leadership, but all was based on lies, deception and marketing. The world’s only “torture university” – the infamous School of the Americas, the decades of cruel and even savage atrocities inflicted on so many of the world’s nations, have been lost in the American propaganda of goodness.

The US heavily promotes its fictitious position as the world’s policeman, but it has never once acted in such a capacity. No nation has ever been protected or defended from anything by the US, but many dozens have instead been ravaged and destroyed by this same imaginary angel of mercy. Everything about the US protecting any part of the world, is an outright lie. American heads are filled with tales of American goodness rescuing these populations from tyranny, but the hundreds of US military interventions have been undertaken to beat down indigenous populations who were rebelling against American imperialism, poverty and death. The US Congressional Record lists these interventions as “protecting American interests” without providing details on precisely what interests were being protected, by what means this “protection” was being inflicted and, most importantly, why America had any “interests” in those nations in the first place.

The US government has not only lied about every war and foreign military intervention, but has most often created false-flag events to accompany the lies and create fictitious justifications for belligerent action. The American entry to World War One was promoted by perhaps the greatest woven tapestry of lies ever created, thanks to Lippman and Bernays, a project that involved literally millions of lies told over a period of years, sufficient to brainwash an entire population into hating an innocent country. The promotion of World War Two was not better in any respect. The Americans have done this since the destruction of the warship Maine in Cuba’s harbor more than a century ago, and have never ceased these enormous self-inflicted injuries. Lies used to justify more lies.

It is now well-known and not in dispute that US officials told more than 900 separate lies to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq. The same is true with Libya, and with Syria today. The same is true of the destruction of Yugoslavia, another devastating military adventure based 100% on lies. All of the so-called “color revolutions” and other similar were not initiated to protect local populations from dictators but to punish unwilling nations for resisting the brutal American-style capitalism that was ravaging their shores. Ukraine, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and so many more nations have been under attack by the US government simply for resisting colonisation, but stillborn American minds believe they are God’s representatives pressuring “the bad guys”. Every part of American foreign policy and foreign involvement is covered with a carpet of lies, the media assisting in subversion and burying of the truths.

It would be useful to collect a catalogue of lies told by American presidents, Secretaries of State and other high officials, and publish these alongside the true facts. Consider this statement by George Bush made in 2003, just as his vast international kidnapping and torture regime was running at top speed: “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.” Name one president of any country that has told a greater lie than this one by George Bush.

The US government and its agencies boast to the world about their freedom of speech while condemning censorship in other nations, yet the US is probably the most heavily censored of all countries. The fact that the media are willing conspirators does not change the fact that all news and public content is heavily controlled and that 95% of what Americans “know” about their own nation and the world, is false. The US news media invariably present only one side of events that proselytise the current political agenda, leaving the American people hopelessly in the dark about the true facts. This is so true that one US columnist noted that only 4% of Americans have any awareness of the immense brutality perpetrated on the people of Palestine by the state of Israel for the past 70 years. American history books and other educational materials consist largely of historical myths, propaganda about the goodness of America, about the badness of other nations, lies about the foundation and entire history of America itself. Hollywood is one of the worst criminals in this regard, with virtually every movie containing historical content being little more than a twisted propaganda film, satisfying one ideology or another while totally misleading Americans on the truths of their own nation. Stephen Spielberg’s recent ‘Lincoln’ movie is one such example, but there are hundreds of others.

The US, the one nation in the world stridently claiming an absolute freedom from propaganda, brainwashing and censorship, is in fact and reality the nation most overwhelmed with precisely these attributes. We will see irrefutable evidence that American schoolchildren are exposed to extensive indoctrination virtually from birth in terms of politics, capitalism, consumerism, patriotism, moral superiority, American exceptionalism and so much more. We will see that this indoctrination and brainwashing are so extensive that the American view of itself and its place in the world bear almost no comparison to reality, to the extent that this vast gulf between beliefs and reality constitutes a national mental illness. Given the enormous cognitive dissonance in America today, one can conclude only that Americans are the most deluded people on earth.

And in the end, this is the reason the US Department of Homeland Security has built its 800 detention centers and purchased its three billion bullets, the same reason that many (Western) columnists are openly suggesting that the rampant abuse of power, the entrenched corruption and feeding from the public trough, the persistent plundering and terrorising of nations with civilian casualties in the millions, “has become so widespread, so deeply entrenched and so increasingly bold, that the only possible remedy is a revolution”. American and European columnists are becoming increasingly vocal in actually recommending another American revolution, convinced that only a popular uprising of the population acting in concert would have the power to reverse this tide. Until then, America, unlike almost every other nation in the world, will continue to be a nation built on lies.

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Part Two of Six will contain:  Colonisation, Labor and Slavery

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River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

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