I was in Israel on 4 November 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. A video shows Amir loitering by an exit to the square for 40 minutes before Rabin appears, when his killer takes out a pistol and...
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In one of the series of blatant lies the USA has told to justify the assassination of Soleimani, Mike Pompeo said that Soleimani was killed because he was planning “Imminent attacks” on US citizens. It is a careful choice of word. Pompeo is specifically referring to the Bethlehem Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self Defence. Developed by...
Read MoreAs a society degenerates, life cheapens. The rhetoric that follows death coarsens. Respect paid to fallen rivals is replaced by triumphalism. Historians observed this trend in ancient Rome. As republic turned to empire and domain expanded — and so also arrogance and hubris — vanquished chieftains who previously might have been allowed to keep their...
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Jonathan Freedland, a British-Jewish journalist infamous for hailing the demographic eclipse of the British people in their own homeland as “a kind of triumph,” has devoted the last twelve months of his miserable journalistic life to neurotic attacks on the Trump presidency. His hyperbolic writings at the Guardian, while making little original contribution to the...
Read MoreMW– Do you think that Hugo Chavez was murdered and, if so, who do you think might have been involved? Eva Golinger– I believe there is a very strong possibility that President Chavez was assassinated. There were notorious and documented assassination attempts against him throughout his presidency. Most notable was the April 11, 2002 coup...
Read MoreThe assassination of Mohammed Emwazi by a US drone is a symbolic success for the US and Britain in a war that is full of symbols. The ritual murders of journalists and aid workers carried out by Emwazi were themselves intended to symbolise the ruthlessness and determination of Islamic State (Isis) and create fear among...
Read MoreEndorsing a program of targeted killing opens the door for perilous reciprocation
The media are reporting a rare “success” in Washington’s ongoing war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. According to confidential, anonymous government sources, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been engaged in a secret program to assassinate designated “high-value targets,” which means terrorist leaders and other prominent figures, particularly those engaged in propaganda...
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Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015
As the war on terror nears its 14th anniversary -- a war we seem to be losing, given jihadist advances in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen -- the U.S. sticks stolidly to its strategy of “high-value targeting,” our preferred euphemism for assassination. Secretary of State John Kerry has proudly cited the elimination of “fifty percent” of...
Read MoreNo one can claim that plotting assassination is new to Washington or that, in the past, American leaders and the CIA didn’t aim high: the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. The difference was that, in those days, the idea of assassinating a foreign leader, or anyone abroad, had a...
Read MoreCan the president kill you? The short answer is: Yes, but not legally. Yet, President Obama has established a secret process that involves officials from the Departments of Justice and Defense, the CIA, and the White House senior staff whereby candidates are proposed for execution, and the collective wisdom of the officials then recommends execution...
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From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
"The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond...
Read MoreMy drone is yours, compadre! Or so Washington has now decided. The latest promise of good times in the arms trade comes from an administration that has pioneered a robotic assassination regime organized out of the White House (though credit for groundbreaking drone assassination work should go to Israel as well). Run largely by the...
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Who Will Conduct the Slaughter This Time Around?
The critical reader could be forgiven for feeling like he or she had stepped into a surreal universe while reading The New York Times on Tuesday? When he read, in a demure column on the left-hand side, that the U.S. was debating slaughtering another American by drone strike. And that this “debate” was occurring in...
Read MoreThe Man Who Usurped The Constitution Just as you think the Republicans have destroyed themselves with their government shutdown/default antics, along comes Obama and appoints a fascist murderer head of Homeland Security. RT reports that Jeh Johnson, a drone proponent and the Pentagon General Counsel who authorized the unconstitutional extrajudicial murder of American citizen Anwar...
Read MoreDo the president and CIA care more about body counts than accuracy or the law when unleashing aerial assassinations?
The New York Times has revealed that President Barack Obama hosts a “Terror Tuesday” secure PowerPoint-style teleconference attended weekly by his top 100 intelligence and security officials. After the meeting he goes through a “nominating process” by viewing the “baseball cards” showing suspected terrorists, before personally deciding who is to be assassinated by drones; he...
Read MoreThe successful assassination of alleged al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operative Anwar al-Awlaki was made possible by critical assistance from the Yemeni intelligence service. The U.S. had been targeting al-Awlaki for two years but had not been able to get a fix on him because he was constantly changing location, moving in different vehicles with...
Read MoreThe Obama Administration is clearly developing a taste for executing American citizens in an extrajudicial fashion and hardly a peep is coming out of the mainstream media. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, himself executed by drone on September 30th, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen on October 14th, reportedly while having...
Read MoreThe killing of Anwar al-Awlaki a U.S citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on September 30 has been publicized by the mass media, President Obama and the usual experts on al-Qaeda as “a major blow to the jihadist network founded by Osama bin Laden” US officials called Awlaki “the most dangerous figure in...
Read MoreI am astonished that some otherwise sane and reasonable people cannot see the incredible danger to all Americans resulting from President Obama’s without-due-process execution of a fellow citizen by drone. I recommend that any remaining agnostics out there read this excellent article by Paul Craig Roberts and more particularly view the four minute YouTube that...
Read MoreTHE ROVING EYE Let's start by invoking a Western cultural icon, Dante; "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" - because international law as we know it has just been delivered a stake through its heart. The "new" sociopolitical Darwinism entails humanitarian neo-colonialism, targeted assassinations - extrajudicial executions - and drone wars, all carried out...
Read MoreToday's NYT featured an article that explains why no one reads newspapers any more: Entitled "US Decision to Approve Killing of Cleric Causes Unease" the article discusses the National Security Council decision to permit the assassination of US citizen and Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, currently residing in Yemen. Al-Awlaki is described as someone "who the...
Read MoreI would have thought that yesterday's House Intelligence Committee comments by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair would have provided an "I can't believe it" moment, but apparently not. The ACLU might be preparing a position paper, but so far not a bleat out of anyone. Blair said that US citizens abroad might be killed...
Read MoreThe new CIA director, Leon Panetta, has just informed the US Congress he canceled a secret operation to assassinate al-Qaida leaders. Panetta said the campaign was authorized soon after 9/11 by the Bush White House, but had not yet become operational in 2009. I respect Panetta, but his claim is not credible. The US has...
Read MoreMy sources are telling me that the secret CIA program involving a Dick Cheney coverup that is currently in the news consisted of dispatching assassination teams to various countries to kill individuals who were known to be al-Qaeda supporters but who, for various reasons, had not been detained by the governments of the countries in...
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