America promoting democracy round the world? Don't make me laugh

Obama's hypocrisy and denial. Link to short video on Drone killings.

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The war on democracy
John Pilger
Published 19 January 2012

From the Chagos Islands to Pakistan, innocent civilians are pawns to America, backed by Britain. In our compliant political culture, this deadly game seldom speaks its name.

Barack Obama, "the Hopey Changey of western violence". Photograph: Getty Images.
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos Islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in phenomenal natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, "Keep smiling, girls!"

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said: "I didn't have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That's why they couldn't legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving, [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs."

With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war

As technology allows machines to make their own decisions, warfare will be become bloodier – and less accountable

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 January 2012 21.00 GMT
Article history

The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgment, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge.

Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest.

Barack Obama began last week's state of the union address by claiming that the troops who had fought the Iraq war had "made the United States safer and more respected around the world". Like Bush, like the gods, he has begun to create the world he wants to inhabit.

These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.

Iran is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon,
says US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta

Asked about Iran’s nuclear programme on Face the Nation on CBS on 8 January 2012, US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, replied: “Are they [the Iranians] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.” [1]

Viewers whose opinions on Iran’s nuclear activities have been formed by mainstream media in
the West must have been amazed by this statement. There, the impression is constantly given
Iran definitely has an active programme to develop nuclear weapons, which will yield results
in a year or two. And that has been the impression for the last six or eight years.

One would never guess that it has been the considered view of the US intelligence services
since November 2007 that Iran hasn’t got an active nuclear weapons programme. This
assessment was contained in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) entitled Iran: Nuclear
Intentions and Capabilities, key judgments of which were made public. These stated, inter alia:
“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons
program … We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear
weapons program as of mid-2007 …” [2]

An IAEA statement on 4 December 2007 in response to the NIE said: