Americas Bullshit Wars!!!!!

Washington "has no intentions" to end CIA drone strikes against militant targets in Pakistan, American media report citing unnamed US officials. The news comes hours after a Pakistani resolution called on the US to end its attacks.

­Officials noted that they would work in the near future to try and mend ties with Pakistan, but if suspected terrorist targets are detected by the CIA drone’s hellfire missiles lasers, they will shoot. There have been no official comments from the White House so far, and the officials providing the news commented only anonymously. 

This comes right after Pakistan’s parliament, following more than two weeks of deliberation, unanimously approved a four-page resolution on Thursday with the support of opposition parties.

The resolution calls on the US to end CIA drone attacks immediately, and demands that the Obama administration apologize for the November airstrikes that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. There have been reports of the White House considering to make an official apology over the Salala checkpost attack.

This is not the first official Pakistani demand that Washington end the strikes – demands the White House has a habit of ignoring. That fact cast doubts that the US is likely to change its policy now, especially as Washington believes the strikes are key to defeating al-Qaeda.

As for the issue of NATO supply routes, which lay through Pakistan, the resolution demands that no arms and ammunition be transported through the country. Pakistan also wants more payments from NATO and the US for the right to ship supplies across its soil. 

If these conditions are met by the US, Afghanistan may get the food and fuel supplies it so badly needs since November, when delivery was suspended after the air strike that killed the Pakistani soldiers. 

About 30 per cent of the supplies used by NATO and US troops in Afghanistan are transported through Pakistan. For the US, the route through Pakistan allows significant savings on shipments. The Pentagon says it costs about $17,000 per container to go through the "north" – that being through Central Asia – compared with about $7,000 per container to go through Pakistan.

Among other measures, the resolution also prohibits covert operations inside Pakistan, and says that no private security contractors or intelligence operatives are to be allowed into the country.

It also calls for  and end to unauthorized American military ingress onto Pakistani soil, even for “hot pursuit.”

The resolution is essentially nonbinding, but Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that his government will ensure that its conditions are fully implemented.

“The resolution will enrich your [parliament members] respect and dignity; I assure you that we will get these enforced in letter and spirit,” Gilani said. “We are a responsible nation,” he said. “We know our obligations as well as the importance of the United States.” 

­Washington’s response: treating the resolution with ‘respect’

The US State Department met the Pakistani parliament's decision with respect. 

"We respect the seriousness with which parliament's review of US-Pakistan relations has been conducted," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. "We seek a relationship with Pakistan that is enduring, strategic, and more clearly defined. We look forward to discussing these policy recommendations with the Government of Pakistan and continuing to engage with it on our shared interests."

Washington is also interested in discussions, as it needs Islamabad's cooperation to negotiate an end to the Afghan war, many of the insurgent leaders of which are based in Pakistan.

The resolution establishes a framework for talks between senior American and Pakistani officials in the coming weeks.

Thousands of US soldiers are going into battle fueled by all sorts of prescription medications, be they amphetamines, antidepressants, sedatives or others. Largely unmonitored consumption of drugs can lead to aberrant behavior and mental disorders.

Over 110,000 American service personnel took prescribed medications in 2011 to battle through everyday military routine. 

The Times recently disclosed that nearly 8 per cent of active-duty American servicemen and women take sedatives and over 6 per cent are on antidepressants, a tremendous eightfold increase since 2005, when two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were in full swing.

Routine military service, combat stress, and sometimes lack of sleep force American troops to go to work medicated. It mirrors the general situation in American society that uses prescription drugs on a daily basis at levels unseen before. 

In the Army, though, those who opt to modulate their lives with drugs are facing challenges of a non-civil nature that supposes an absolutely different level of responsibility. These men and women are well-armed, after all.

As a rule, troops are sent to deployment with 180-day medication supply. But soldiers can always trade favorite pills with their friends. The habit of ending a hard day with a handful of various tablets is apparently nothing extraordinary.

"We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now…. And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress, informed The Los Angeles Times.

Painkillers of narcotic nature pose a threat of addiction to those injured who have to take them, too.

One could only guess whether the suicide rate surge in the US Army in the recent decade has any connections with army psychologists prescribing pills to personnel left, right and center. An appalling 80 per cent increase in suicides among US service personnel has been registered between 2004 and 2008.

On the other hand, when every 10th US serviceman deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there must be a calculated risk in prescribing these medications to keep soldiers in service.

But the main problem among deployed troops remains mental fatigue of those who have been deployed several times in a row. As many as 80 per cent of on-duty personnel have gone through three or more deployments. Worn-out personnel have problems with sleep and accurate assessment of ongoing events.

The recent notorious case of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 civilians in a bloody rampage in Afghanistan, again raised the question of drug-related incidents in the US military. 

After it was announced the defendant does not remember what he did, his attorneys requested a list of the medication the soldier was taking during his deployment in Afghanistan.

The Amnesty International “infographic” titled, “Shocking Facts About Who’s Arming Human Rights Abusers,” portraying Russia’s arming of Syria as “fueling the most bloodshed” is not “shocking” at all when one realizes the disingenuous human rights advocacy organization is run by US State Department officials and is funded by convicted criminal George Soros‘ Open Society Institute (annual report page 8) as well as the UK Department for International Development (page 8), the European Commission, and other corporate-funded foundations. The “infographic,” in this context, clearly becomes a case of shameless, politically motivated propaganda using the Amnesty International “brand” to give it the legitimacy its increasingly distrusted sponsors lack.

Image: Amnesty International’s “infographic” aimed at the lowest possible intellectual denominator in their target audience. While Syria might be the biggest enemy of the US currently, it is by no means the greatest human rights violator – Ugandan “president-for-life” Museveni displaces entire populations of tens of thousands of people in single US-British land grabs and has led regional military campaigns that have killed millions – yet he receives millions in military aid and arms from the West. Such hypocrisy reveals Amnesty International as the politically-motivated front it ultimately is. (click here to enlarge)

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The graphic is so inaccurate, so full of such overt, easily refuted lies, it must be aimed at the most ignorant, impressionable members of Western society. It also contains glaring inexplicable hypocrisy. For instance, while Russia defends its arming of Syria’s government by citingdocumented evidence that the unrest is being fomented by foreign-funded, well armed terrorists committing a multitude of atrocities, even according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International’s sister organization, what imaginable excuse could France, Germany, the US, or the UK have for arming Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, or Libya past or present – especially when these same nations have justified the total summation of their foreign meddling and military interventionism with acting upon “humanitarian concerns?”

The next glaring deception comes from Amnesty International’s “Human Cost” tally. Amnesty cites themselves as the source for the tallies, admitting that they have no accurate information regarding Libya or whether or not the tally includes the thousands upon thousands killed in NATO’s onslaught or during the genocidal orgy carried out by NATO-armed and backed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) terrorists. It should be noted that NATO’s Libyan legion of terror is still to this day carrying out systematic atrocities (also covered here).

One assumes that Amnesty International’s tally for Syria comes either from the UN’s already discredited tally, or Amnesty International’s own tally taken from London-based foreign-funded NGO’s working out of the British Foreign Ministry’s office who are basing their tallies on hearsay and overt fabrications.

The UN number was likewise based on hearsay, taken from opposition members in Geneva and compiled by Fortune 500 think-tank director, Karen Koning AbuZayd. AbuZayd sits on theWashington D.C. based Middle East Policy Council, along side current and former associates of Exxon, the US military, the CIA, the Saudi Binladin Group, the US-Qatari Business Council and both former and current members of the US government. Clearly, by representing the very interests who have been trying to reorder the Arab World for their own convenience for decades, AbuZayd’s involvement compromises the entire UN report as well as the credibility of the UN itself.

Image: Amnesty International using the same “activism 2.0″ gags employed by their junior partners at Invisible Children, the perpetrators of the Kony 2012 scam. Note the “Donate Now: Fight bad guys with every dollar,” and how like Invisible Children, Amnesty addresses its audience as if they are children – a tried and true method employed by propagandists. Ironically, Amnesty and Invisible Children also both so happen to cultivate a myriad of connections with the US State Department and corporate interests.

But perhaps what is most offensive of all, is not the intelligence-insulting lies told by Amnesty International, but rather the information they failed to include in their “infographic.” This includes information like the 60-billion dollar arms deal the US signed with notorious human rights abuser Saudi Arabia - the largest arms deal in US history – and the billions upon endless billions of dollars sent to the Israeli government to maintain its belligerent regional posture as well as maintain their nation-sized concentration camp, sometimes called “Palestine.”

At best, the only difference between Russia’s arming the legitimate government of Syria, and the US arming Libyan terrorists, Saudi despots, and Israeli megalomaniacs is clever Western propaganda used to mischaracterize each instance, justifying it when it suits the West, and demonizing it when arms dealing works against them. At worst, the difference is in fact that Russia is arming standing governments while the US and its NATO-Arab League partners are veritably arming notorious terrorist organizations, many listed on both British and US government lists of “foreign terrorist organizations.” This includes the Iraqi-IranianMujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), the aforementioned LIFG, and Baluchi terrorists on the Iranian-Pakistani border.

The purpose of this arming of terrorists is to do exactly what Amnesty International accuses Russia of doing, fueling bloodshed. In fact, as the West demanded Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to withdraw troops from Syrian cities according to a UN brokered “peace plan,” the West’s proxy rebels openly denounced the deal and promised to fight on. Instead of berating the rebels, the West along with their Arab League partners pledged cash and weapons to the rebels encouraging them to flaunt the “peace deal” and indeed perpetuate the bloodshed.

And this is only the latest in a long series of politically-motivated stunts pulled by Amnesty International specifically targeting both Russia and Syria. Whatever credibility Amnesty International might have had left after its participation in the destruction of Libya and indeed its own “fueling of bloodshed” in North Africa, it has completely buried under the battlefields of Syria.

The American government “is using its power to intimidate, prosecute and prevent government employees from sharing information about state officials’ misconduct”, insists Stephen Kohn, attorney and author of The Whistleblower’s Handbook.

This attack on whistleblowers in America is an attack on fundamental freedom of speech,“preventing the American people from learning about the abuses of their government,” warned the attorney.

“The doctrine of the state secret privilege in the US puts a censorship veil over everything you want to blow a whistle on.”

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou, who was the first official to confirm the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, has been indicted for repeatedly disclosing sensitive information to journalists.

The same law was also used against whistleblower Bradley Manning, the army private who handed secret documents to Wikileaks.

Both cases go against the very basics of the US constitution, says Stephen Kohn.

“The First Amendment was enacted to prevent precisely what we’re seen unfolding today. People in the government witness abuses and they have a right to blow the whistle on them,” Kohn points out. “We are challenging the legal predicates that they have used to prosecute and suppress throughout this country. We are challenging them because they are illegal and unconstitutional,” he said.

“It is government misconduct that the government wants to suppress the public ever learning about. It is the heart of the First Amendment,” Kohn continued, explaining that“the core of the First Amendment is the protection of the people who want to expose the misconduct of government.”

In 2008, when campaigning for president, Barack Obama told voters in Fairfax, Virginia, that he is preparing a federal law to protect those who disclose suspect practice.

“I wrote a brief for a federal whistleblowers law, to make sure that it applied in more situations all the way to the Supreme Court… making sure that those whistleblowers get protection,” Obama said.

But under the Obama administration, whistleblowers have received treatment much more harsh than in the times of George W. Bush.

Stephen Kohn says it’s vital to be more aggressive with those in government who intend to gag dissenters.

“We need an adult in the room. We need someone to stand up and say, ethics in government is important. Those in the government who want to suppress dissent have to be either pushed back, or they have to be fired,” argued Kohn, noting that Obama appears to have ditched his concern for whistleblowers.

“We have to demand that our constitutional rights are protected, we have to take those claims to court, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, and we have to go to the Congress for the American people to fight for their rights,” the attorney called on Americans.

“These rights are not passive. If you wait for someone to give them to you – they will retaliate and you will be waiting a long time,” Kohn warned.