AMERICA'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH DARK SIDE / DRONE ATTACKS

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America is still exploring Dick Cheney's dark side path of fear through Drone attacks and that path has led to anger, hate and immense suffering as well as significant blowback. As a result, we have obviously not only lost track of who we are but also our moral bearings. Like a Black Hole in space, unless we begin to explore the path of light and our evolutionary innate need to love as well as social cooperation and altruism ~ we will eventually be consumed and destroyed by the dark side: Allen L Roland, Ph.D

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” ~ Yoda

President Obama has killed more people with drones than died on 9/11. On January 06, 2015 as reported in "ICH"  Washington's Blog  ~ Law school teacher Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild wrote  "Obama has killed more people with drones than died on 9/11. Many of those killed were civilians, and only a tiny percentage of the dead were al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders."

Guess what, She is correct .…

Excerpt:

"The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that U.S. drone strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed 3,674 people. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that up to 4,404 people have been killed ~ just in Pakistan and Yemen alone ~ between 2004 and 2014. While it’s hard to estimate how many additional people have been killed by drone in Iraq and Afghanistan, a December 2012 report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that US and UK forces had carried out over 1,000 drone strikes in Afghanistan over the previous five years.  Given that numerous people are often killed by  each drone strike, it is reasonable to assume that several thousand people have been killed by drones in that country. And many Iraqis have also been killed by drones … long before ISIS even appeared on the scene.    So ~ altogether ~ the number of people killed by drones is probably well above five thousand…..In contrast,  under 3,000 people were killed on 9/11….  The West is intentionally targeting farmers, small-time drug dealers and very low-level Taliban members with drone assassination. And the process for deciding who to put on the “kill list” is flawed. People are often targeted by the metadata on their phones, a process which a former top NSA official called the drone assassination program “undisciplined slaughter.”

See article ~ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40635.htm#.VKyvUclNdn4.email

 

Make no mistake it ~ Obama's targeted Drone assassinations are a trip on Cheney's infamous dark side and we are still on that path with our current ongoing Drone attacks and obvious blowback. The White House let the CIA run wild, under Cheney's directions ~ but more importantly Obama and the Democrats are letting them get away with it.
Marcy Wheeler, ICH, spells it all out ~  This Was Dick Cheney's Coup:
Why America's Torture "Reform" Is A Total Sham

Excerpt: " Until you note that the summary language makes it clear the White House itself decided to keep the torture program hidden from Powell. Or you read the fine print that describes how White House counsel Alberto Gonzales first eliminated any mention of waterboarding from talking points that would be used to brief the president. Then someone (Cheney) ~ the report doesn’t say who ~ informed “‘Dr. Rice … that there would be no briefing of the President on this matter,’ but that [CIA Director George Tenet] had policy approval to employ the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.”… After 9/11, CIA worked together with the White House to craft a programmatic “Finding” authorizing a range of counterterrorism policies that would give CIA significant flexibility in implementing those policies, while giving the White House enhanced deniability about their conduct …The White House used that “finding” not just to authorize torture, but also to authorize CIA’s drone-killing of top al-Qaida officials, a policy Obama expanded…But aren’t drone strikes targeted attacks on terrorists … unlike 9/11, which was an attack on civilians?  Unfortunately, no …The West is intentionally targeting farmers, small-time drug dealers and very low-level Taliban members with drone assassination. And the process for deciding who to put on the “kill list” is flawed.  People are often targeted by the metadata on their phones, a process which a former top NSA official called the drone assassination program “undisciplined slaughter.” And people are targeted for insanely loose reasons.  As the New York Times reported in 2012 See article ~ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40657.htm

"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.”  ~ Yoda

Mamana Bibi was a 67-year-old Pakistani grandmother and midwife, killed by a U.S. drone strike on October 24, 2012. One year ago, the family of Mamana Bibi came to Washington, D.C., to share their sad story with Members of Congress.  Only five Members of Congress came to hear this family's testimony. Only five listened to the real impact of one of America's most ruthless, extrajudicial, error-laden and enemy-producing war policies. The briefing was organized by both Rep. Alan Grayson, and Director Robert Greenwald. It was part of their effort to change discourse about drone warfare. It also led the release of a new drone documentary, Unmanned: America's Drone Wars. The film told these and other drone victims' stories, focused on the government's shadowy "signature strike" policy which allowed spy agencies to target and kill hundreds based on suspicion alone, and posed difficult questions that far too many lawmakers and national security officials still want to evade or duck.

America's Drones Are Still Killing Scores of Innocents ~ Three minute video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OvhAFyeGk4&feature=player_embedded

Drone warfare is thinly disguised mental and emotional torture ~ an act of intimidation and control meant to terrorize and subjugate its victims. It has slid us deeper into Dick Cheney's dark side of fear and we are losing our soul in the process ~ a risk many Americans are willing to take but not all Americans.

“When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back.” ~ Yoda

“A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don’t talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don’t know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can’t see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you’ll be injured if you’re there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It’s the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot.”  ~  Noam Chomsky

Allen L Roland, Ph.D

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/americas-love-affair-with-dark-side.html

 

Heart centered spiritual consultant and advisor Allen L Roland can be contacted at  allen@allenroland.com . Allen is also a lecturer and writer who shares a weekly political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com. He is also a featured columnist on Veterans Today and  guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

 

ISIS IS NOW OBAMA'S (ORWELL'S) PERMANENT WAR

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Barack Obama is now the leader of George Orwell's contemporary Oceania. In two 2009 speeches the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and diffuse enemies". He called this "global security". To the people of Afghanistan, which America had invaded and occupied, he said: "We have no interest in occupying your country" So get used to it, in Obama's Oceania the truth and lies are indivisible and war is a deadly and permanent reality. The Islamic State (ISIS), much like Al Qaeda, is a made-in-the-USA product, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East as well as counter Iran’s growing influence in the region: Allen L Roland, Ph.D

 

"Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." - H.L. Mencken 

 

I predict ISIS will become Obama's Vietnam and history will repeat itself but as Marx once correctly wrote ~ when history repeats itself, the first mistake is seen as a tragedy (Vietnam), and the repeat becomes a farce (ISIS).

 

As Peter Van Buren explains on Tom Dispatch.com ~ " We've been here before, as the failures of American policy and strategy in Vietnam metastasized into war in Cambodia and Laos to deny sanctuary to North Vietnamese forces. As with ISIS, we were told that they were barbarians who sought to impose an evil philosophy across an entire region. They, too, famously needed to be fought “over there” to prevent them from attacking us here. We didn't say “the Homeland” back then, but you get the picture….. When the reality of America's failure in Vietnam finally became so clear that there was no one left to lie to, America's war there ended and the troops came home. They never went back. America is now fighting the Iraq War for the third time, somehow madly expecting different results, while guaranteeing only failure." See article ~  http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175898/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren%2C_back_to_the_future_in_iraq/#more

 

And a farce it indeed is while the American public remain blissfully unaware of Obama's folly in the Middle East. David Stockman seems to have caught the gist of Obama's quixotic “war” on ISIS ~

" So what we have now in the middle east is a replay of the bloody religious wars that once traumatized the West when Protestants accused Catholics of being idolatrous heretics and the latter returned the favor by putting Protestants to the stakes and the racks.  In the present instance, the real war being waged by ISIS is not against the liberties which pertain on the streets of New York City, but in Leupp’s words, “against the Shiites, Christians, Yezidis, secularists, and others it sees as unbelievers and as stooges of the west. But its primary target is the Shiites”. See article ~

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39731.htm#.VCHMlKgYZyM.email

 

In other words, ISIS is the noxious by-product of a fear driven U.S. foreign policy gone terribly wrong if not out of control ~ whereas the backdraft of America's war of terror  becomes a fearsome Frankenstein (ISIS) which we ourselves have created.

 

Arundhati Roy suggests that the “most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times” is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing “thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate” in meaningless conflict. One wonders what eventually lies beneath the shifting sands of Iraq and Afghanistan ~ the victims of our ongoing fear driven foreign policy and "war of terror".

 

As consistently pointed out in countless worldwide polls ~ No other regime in today's world is responsible for such premeditated and repeated acts of mass murder against entire modern societies. The US with its military allies, most notably Israel, is presently by far the greatest threat to peace and the greatest purveyor of terror on the planet.

 

As WSWS clearly points out this week ~ " With even the pretense of democratic control and popular support dispensed with, it is increasingly clear that all the real decisions are being taken by the most powerful branch of the state, the vast military-intelligence apparatus. Significantly, the first public announcement of the Syrian war came not from the White House, but the Pentagon….Obama serves merely as a mouthpiece for this murderous machine, and his repeated promises not to deploy ground troops will soon be waved aside as the generals implement their strategy." http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/09/24/pers-s24.html

"America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might ~ that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future …We fight for our ideals, and are willing to criticize ourselves when we fall short. Because we hold our leaders accountable, and insist on a free press and independent judiciary"~ these hypocritical words of President Obama, offered as kool-Aid for the world at the UN this week, are the words of a man who will eventually be seen as an ambitious community organizer and corporate shill who paid his dues to Wall Street and the Global elite but lost his soul in the process. See the broken promises and lies of Obama  http://thetruthwins.com/archives/a-list-of-23-famous-obama-quotes-that-turned-out-to-be-broken-promises-or-cold-hearted-lies

 

Obama finally has his war and it will most definitely be part of his enduring legacy, much like his predecessor G.W. Bush's Iraq disaster ~ and both were based on assertions that had nothing to do with reality. In other words, Bush's axis of evil has now become Obama's network of death and both are a well packaged web of lies meant to deceive the American public and the world ~ but, make no mistake about it,  the ultimate aim is regime change in Syria.

 

“The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.”  ~ Penn Jillette

 

Allen L Roland, Ph.D
http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-is-now-obamas-orwells-permanent-war.html

 

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and heart centered spiritual counselor Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations at allen@allenroland.com

  Allen L Roland is also a lecturer and shares a weekly political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net

 

PROPHET FOR A DYING EMPIRE / CHALMERS JOHNSON

Every dying Empire has its truth telling prophet and America had its own with Chalmers Johnson. Johnson correctly compared the decay of the American empire, with its well over 600 overseas military bases, with the fall of the Roman Empire whereas the Senate becomes a wealthy corporate club and irrelevant compared to the ruling Military Industrial Congressional Complex: Allen L Roland

Chalmers Johnson was a truth teller and prophet in a political environment where few would stand up to the interests and secrecy of the Pentagon and the intelligence community ~ and since his passing in November of 2010, many of his prophetic fears have been realized in the Obama administration.

Johnson, author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis,The Last Days of the American Republic, talks in this video interview about the similarities in the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the signs that the U.S. empire is exhibiting the very same symptoms ~ overextension, corruption and the inability to reform. ( Watch at least the first 25 minutes ) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35065.htm#.UaBERy7LQmc.email

Johnson' s main points were;The United States is treading the same three steps as the former Soviet Union;

·   Inability to deal with corporate corruption. 

·        Imperial over-stretch is leading to fiscal insolvency ( 600 plus bases throughout the world ) 

·        Inability to reform, thus accelerating the inevitable fall.

Chalmers offered the solution but suspected that it was already too late for America; ( with my inserts )

1. Reform Congress ( Good luck )

2. Reform corrupt election laws ( good luck )

3. Re-division of electoral college  ( good luck )

4. Cutback funding of intelligence agencies and department of the defense and take steps to break up the Military Industrial Congressional Complex. ( more good luck )

Chalmers expected considerable resistance but also said that only the truth could avoid the inevitable fall of the American empire ~ as it did in bringing down the Soviet Union.

Thus, only the role of the alternative media in exposing the truth can rescue a crumbling Republic that has rapidly become a corrupt plutocracy.

It is my opinion, that there is one central truth that can bring down America's Berlin wall of denial along with the deceit of the War on Terror ~ it's the big, big lie and America's greatest act of treason, it's the rationale for the cloak of secrecy, torture, Guantanamo and illegal spying that now erodes our Republic ~ it's the monstrous lie of 9/11 along with its  unchallenged official story.

America's present day prophet for our dying empire is Chris Hedges (America In the Time of Empire) who wrote in 2007 that all great empires or nations decay from within ~  "By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible…. and it all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation … It signals the twilight of our empire."

Tom Engelhardt (tomdispatch.com) who knew Chalmers well and featured almost all of Johnson's essays offered a fitting eulogy to Chalmers shortly after he died; "In the introduction to his final book, Dismantling the Empire, America’s Last Best Hope (just out in paperback), he took up a recurring topic of interest to him: “the choice between republic and empire,” and the way “our imperial dreams stretch our means to the breaking point and threaten our future.”  Among “the alternatives available to us as a nation,” he wrote, “we are choosing what I call the suicide option.”  He added that " it might not have to be this way ~ that we could still move in a different direction." Those were, in a sense, his last words.  How true they remain three and a half months after his death."

But that was two years ago and it is obvious that we are still choosing the suicide option ~  especially now  as we escalate our proxy war to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and put the world on the brink of a major international war.

It is also obvious that in an Empire the people are not only considered  'Barbarians' and not to be trusted with the truth ~ but they are also expendable and secondary to the aims of the Empire.

Chalmers's wife, Sheila Johnson, eulogized this true rebel and his work in early 2011 ~ "In going through my husband’s files, books, and papers after his death, I’ve been forcibly struck by two things.  First, contrary to what many of his obituaries said, his writings and thoughts were remarkably consistent throughout his life. In other words, he was not a right-winger who became more liberal and outspoken as he got older. More than most people suspected, he was a radical all along, whose intellectual impulses were tempered only by his birth in the Depression year of 1931 and his determination to make a decent living without "joining the establishment"  See article ~

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175377/tomgram%3A_sheila_johnson%2C_%22chal%22/

Chalmers Johnson summarized the true intent of his The Sorrows of Empire in the final chapter of Nemesis;

"The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."

In other words, Chalmers Johnson was one of those crazy truth tellers who thought they could change the world ~ and guess what, I'm also one of them and quite often they do change the world and maybe even save a dying Empire. 3 Minute video ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o1WgMzkkhE

 

"It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming."  Garrison Keillor

Allen L Roland

http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/prophet-for-dying-empire-chalmers.html

Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private Skype consultations (allen@allenroland.com )

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net