Success.

Jailed Philip Morris Pakistan workers released!

       I have no doubt that solidarity won the day in this case, as it has done in countless thousands of cases around the world. The state apparatus, and its vile partner, large corporations, can pick off individuals and small groups with impunity, if we don't stand up and support those being abused, oppressed, and imprisoned, they win. We have the numbers to overcome all oppression, it just requires our coming together in solidarity, global solidarity.

This from IUF: 

On January 8, we informed you of the arrest and jailing of 35 workers who were peacefully protesting the brutal, illegal termination of 141 workers at the Philip Morris International factory in Mardan, Pakistan. Thousands of you responded to our appeal for messages, and we are very pleased to inform you now that the 35 workers with their union President were released from jail on January 10, and the union is determined to continue their struggle.  The union has warmly thanked the IUF and all those who responded to our appeal. We thank you for your solidarity and support.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Mass Terminations, Mass Arrests.

Time and time again we see the state apparatus step in to support large corporations against their employees, peaceful protest can be turned into a criminal offence at the whim of the authorities. All this proves is that there is a festering cancerous marriage between state and big business. Workers can never expect fair and just treatment from either. However, whenever this oppression happens, we should all stand up and support those workers being repressed and criminalised by the state in its efforts to protect the profits of big business. Workers jailed for protesting illegal mass terminations at Philip Morris Pakistan. An appeal from IUF:        Thirty-five workers were arrested in the city of Mardan on January 6 for peacefully protesting the brutal instant termination of 141 employees at the Pakistan subsidiary of tobacco giant Philip Morris International. Workers were informed of the mass terminations on November 21 when they arrived to work only to learn that dismissal letters would be sent to them by post.          With the support of the local union, whose President Abrar Ullah was among the arrested, workers launched a continuous round of protests at the factory gate after management refused to discuss the terminations and began pressuring workers to accept the illegal dismissals. To add to the pressure, police were called to the factory gate when the protest began.        On January 6, workers gathered with their union officers to present a Charter of Demands to management when police arrested 35 protestors under the Maintenance of Public Order law, which allows for up to 90 days detention without charges.        A solidarity delegation from the IUF-affiliated Pakistan Food Workers Federation (PFWF), which had hoped to meet with the workers demonstrated outside the police station following the mass arrests. The arrested workers were then shifted to Bannu Jail, some 250 kilometers from Mardan and notorious as a prison for incarcerating Taliban activists.        The PFWF and the IUF will continue to support and assist the workers, who have vowed to continue the fight. CLICK HERE TO SEND A MESSAGE TO THE GOVERNMENT authorities calling for the immediate release of the workers and their union President. Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Bring Freedom Through Death.

 

      Like I always say, our mainstream media is simply a babbling brook of bullshit. It spews out misinformation, distortions and down right lies. It is no more than a propaganda machine for the imperialists, and a money maker for its owners. Truth, real information and honest discussion, are alien to its basic structure. 

 Bringing freedom to the people of Baghdad.

      Below is an extract from a report made at the beginning of this year, The report is the result of studies by respected and highly qualified people in their field, it trashes the frequently circulated figures of deaths by the US/UK war on terror in the Middle East, vomited out by that babbling brook of bullshit, yet up until now they have ignored it. 

 Shock and awe, democracy Western style.

This from Middle East Eye:

A Muslim holocaust. 

       Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark study concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the "War on Terror" since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.
      The 97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors' group is the first to tally up the total number of civilian casualties from US-led counter-terrorism interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
        The PSR report is authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading public health experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health professional outreach and education at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
        Yet it has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language media, despite being the first effort by a world-leading public health organisation to produce a scientifically robust calculation of the number of people killed by the US-UK-led "war on terror".

Read the full article HERE

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Office Worker War.

        Something that we don't read a lot about in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is the war being waged by America in different parts of the world, by means of drones. This office worker war, where the perpetrators of the violence sit comfortable, miles away from the havoc and destruction that they dispatch on persons unknown, could be, and should be, categorised as war crimes. In war, the combatants are supposed to differentiate from legitimate combatant targets and civilians, drones fail miserably in this respect. 

      A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

       This type of warfare is the preferred option, as it can be sold to the public easier than boots on the ground, with such illusionary labels as “clean” “surgical” and “accurate”, all lies, as the above information makes clear. It is not going to go away as America has seen a forty fold increase in its drone capacity 

According to the GAO report, "From 2002 to 2010, the number of unmanned aerial systems in DOD's [Department of Defense] inventory has increased about forty fold, from about 170 to 7,500 aircraft." The CIA has over 80 Predator drones, while the Air Force has 468 Predators and the Army has 110, according to an October 2014 War Is Boring piece - based on General Atomics' (company that makes Predator drones) numbers - on drone fleet figures.

       Pakistan has suffered drone strikes on a vast scale which increased massively after Obama came to office. In that country since 2004, over 3,000 people have been killed by drones, with an estimated mere 2% being high ranking combatants and almost 200 were children. America is not at war with Pakistan, but attacks and kills the people of that country on a regular basis.
       What other country regularly bombs another “friendly” country, and gets away with it, with no questions asked by the international community? The same is happening in Yemen and Somalia, attacks on other nations without any declaration of war. This is the new American imperialism, brutal and indiscriminate attacks around the world, all done from the comfort of an office thousands of miles from the death and destruction.

        Of course the UK state is not innocent in this office worker warfare, as of 2013, the UK state has 500 drones.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The State's Soldierless War.

       War is the state's method of defending and expanding its corporate empire, but becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as public opinion starts to rebel against the continuing line of young dead and injured returning for foreign lands. Enter the drone, the ideal state weapon, war with no casualties to the perpetrator. You can carry out your carnage from a comfortable office, the young people involved can lead a normal office life. No need to get dirty, no need to be fit, no need to risk your life as you kill the others. There is something sinister and immoral about young people sitting in an office, looking at a monitor and unleashing death and devastation on unsuspecting people in another country.

       Over the last ten years or so the use of armed drones has seen an very dramatic increase and an ever increasing spread across more countries, the most recent count is that ten countries in the world have been hit by drone strikes. For a while it was Afghanistan and Pakistan that received the majority of these strikes, but in recent years they have spread to Africa. Yemen being the country that now receives daily strikes, that not only kill, but create terror among the local population of innocent people including children and elderly.

        The state will not give up on war, though we have not declared war since the end of the second world war, we have never been at peace. The US and the UK have been involved in combat in different countries across the globe almost unceasingly. Now with the advent of the drone, that job is becoming easier for the state. We make drone strikes in foreign countries, killing and maiming its citizens, without any declaration of war, we often refer to these countries as friendly nations.

       Countries with drones are on the increase, this is the shape of war to come, no declaration, no troops on the ground, no dead or injured coming home, just death and carnage in a far away place, that we don't know too much about. We are supposed to get on with watching tele and shopping, while the various states squabble as they carve up the the world's resources by means of death and destruction. We can surely do better than this.
This from Watchdog.net:

      Over half of Yemen's 24.8 million citizens hear it every day — the sound of a robot plane bringing death from the sky.
      Drone strikes don't require troops on the ground. They happen off-screen, and out of Americans' minds. But for the people of Yemen, the constant terror of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of playing or working near a suspect of some unspecified crime, is what's breeding terrorists in an area crippled by fear.
     Enough of children's scarred skeletons, of cars reduced to melted metal, of the massacre of a foreign people without reason or mercy.
      Please, join us in demanding President Obama stop murder by drone, and stop breeding a new culture of hate, terror and trauma!
PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: Drone strikes in Yemen do nothing to stop Al Qaeda and everything to terrify civilians, kill innocents and traumatize generations. Stop this brutal practice now.

Click here to sign -- it just takes a second.
Thanks,
-- The folks at Watchdog.net

P.S. If the other links aren't working for you, please go here to sign: http://act.watchdog.net/petitions/4528?n=66047434.-3y5PV

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

She Never Saw It Coming.

     It's true, she never saw it coming. The soldierless war kills civilians, but it's far away, so we don't have to bother too much about that. Uniformed office workers doing the killing is the new war, killers with clean hands, who needs boots on the ground when you have drones?

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Robotic Bombing Of Friendly Nations.

     The soldierless war is here and in full swing and the innocent deaths are piling up. I say war but the deaths are inflicted by a country that has not declared war against the country which is suffering the innocent casualties. America, that defender of peace and freedom, is currently sending  drones into Pakistan and Yemen, with very little reporting on the results which include the deaths ever increasing numbers of children.

     This is a list of those children who are known to have been killed by drone attacks, the number of children injured and adults killed and injured would obviously create a much longer list. If these sort of numbers of children being killed was in any Western country there would be an outcry, and rightly so, where is our outrage? All this in countries that are not at war with America. Where is the International Community on this flagrant violation of a country's sovereignty? This list was taken from Drone Watch:

List of children killed by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen

Compiled from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports
PAKISTAN
Name | Age | Gender
Noor Aziz | 8 | male
Abdul Wasit | 17 | male
Noor Syed | 8 | male
Wajid Noor | 9 | male
Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male
Ayeesha | 3 | female
Qari Alamzeb | 14| male
Shoaib | 8 | male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male
Tariq Aziz | 16 | male
Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male
Maezol Khan | 8 | female
Nasir Khan | male
Naeem Khan | male
Naeemullah | male
Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male
Azizul Wahab | 15 | male
Fazal Wahab | 16 | male
Ziauddin | 16 | male
Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male
Fazal Hakim | 19 | male
Ilyas | 13 | male
Sohail | 7 | male
Asadullah | 9 | male
khalilullah | 9 | male
Noor Mohammad | 8 | male
Khalid | 12 | male
Saifullah | 9 | male
Mashooq Jan | 15 | male
Nawab | 17 | male
Sultanat Khan | 16 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male
Noor Mohammad | 15 | male
Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male
Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male
Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male
Abdullah | 18 | male
Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male
Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male
Shahbuddin | 15 | male
Yahya Khan | 16 |male
Rahatullah |17 | male
Mohammad Salim | 11 | male
Shahjehan | 15 | male
Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male
Bakht Muneer | 14 | male
Numair | 14 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Taseel Khan | 18 | male
Zaheeruddin | 16 | male
Qari Ishaq | 19 | male
Jamshed Khan | 14 | male
Alam Nabi | 11 | male
Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male
Rahmatullah | 14 | male
Abdus Samad | 17 | male
Siraj | 16 | male
Saeedullah | 17 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Salman | 12 | male
Fazal Wahab | 18 | male
Baacha Rahman | 13 | male
Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male
Iftikhar | 17 | male
Inayatullah | 15 | male
Mashooq Khan | 16 | male
Ihsanullah | 16 | male
Luqman | 12 | male
Jannatullah | 13 | male
Ismail | 12 | male
Abdul Waris | 16 | male
Darvesh | 13 | male
Ameer Said | 15 | male
Shaukat | 14 | male
Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male
Adnan | 16 | male
Najibullah | 13 | male
Naeemullah | 17 | male
Hizbullah | 10 | male
Kitab Gul | 12 | male
Wilayat Khan | 11 | male
Zabihullah | 16 | male
Shehzad Gul | 11 | male
Shabir | 15 | male
Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male
Shafiullah | 16 | male
Nimatullah | 14 | male
Shakirullah | 16 | male
Talha | 8 | male
YEMEN
Afrah Ali Mohammed Nasser | 9 | female
Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 7 | female
Hoda Ali Mohammed Nasser | 5 | female
Sheikha Ali Mohammed Nasser | 4 | female
Ibrahim Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 13 | male
Asmaa Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 9 | male
Salma Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | female
Fatima Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye | 3 | female
Khadije Ali Mokbel Louqye | 1 | female
Hanaa Ali Mokbel Louqye | 6 | female
Mohammed Ali Mokbel Salem Louqye | 4 | male
Jawass Mokbel Salem Louqye | 15 | female
Maryam Hussein Abdullah Awad | 2 | female
Shafiq Hussein Abdullah Awad | 1 | female
Sheikha Nasser Mahdi Ahmad Bouh | 3 | female
Maha Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 12 | male
Soumaya Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 9 | female
Shafika Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 4 | female
Shafiq Mohammed Saleh Mohammed | 2 | male
Mabrook Mouqbal Al Qadari | 13 | male
Daolah Nasser 10 years | 10 | female
AbedalGhani Mohammed Mabkhout | 12 | male
Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki | 16 | male
Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki | 17 | male
Nasser Salim | 19

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Imperialist Office Warriors.

      President Obama's inaugural speech last month was the voice of hypocrisy, The Prince of Peace stated, and stated without a hint of embarrassment, that “A decade of war is now ending,” --”We, the people, still believe that enduring and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.” What that translates into is, “We will not be sending so many of you overseas to kill and maim, you will be able to do this from a comfortable office in Nevada and Saudi Arabia.

     We are now seeing foreign invading troops preparing to leave Afghanistan without having achieved their object, since nobody seems to be able to say what was the object. That doesn't mean the end of the military campaign, the war will continue from computer screens in the form of drones. According to a report from the area of North Waziristan, from 2008 to 1012, there have been around 147 drone strikes, killing 894 people with 211 injured. This year has seen an escalation in the number of drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen.

      The face of imperialist wars is changing, weapon laden armour plated boots will still be called on to do some of the dirty work, but this will be their cleaning up operations. The real slaughter will be done by young smooth faced office workers, sitting at their desks marking up scores on hits, just like any other computer game. Only this time it is for real, real bodies being blown to bits, real children dying, real homes being demolished. No need to be a battle hardened trained killer, you can make you way up the military ladder by having the highest score of hits in the office.

       Just to encourage those 9 to 5 office work killers and make them feel part of the “hero” brigade, they are considering creating a medal for the cyber-killers. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced that the Pentagon is creating a medal that can be awarded to troops who have a direct impact on combat operations, but do it well away from any combat zone.

     To those on the receiving end of drone warfare, the result is just as bloody, destructive and terrifying as any other type of warfare. There is no such thing as clean humane warfare. Drones of course sanitise it for the perpetrators of that destructive violence. You can kill from 9 to 5 and then go home to your family and have a night out. This is the new imperialist warfare. In an interview Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta. Asked by journalist Martha Raddatz whether the 2014 pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would mean an increased reliance on drones, Panetta said: “ I think that's reality. We've done that in Pakistan. We're doing it in Yemen and elsewhere. And I think the reality is it's going to be a continuing tool of national defense in the future.”

     There is a ready trained army of computer literate kids, experts at computer games all well able to spend a few hours a day playing their game and getting paid and walking away as if it were “just a game”. It is a frightening thought, but it is our future, unless we do something to change the system.

 

 

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DRONES AND MASS KILLINGS.

   
  A relevant comment from "An Elegant Feast":

  

      The media has another sensationalist story about gun violence to push, and they are going to push it, hard.  And of course, anytime a child dies, it’s a tragedy.  When it occurs with violent, brutal force, it is especially repulsive.  But there is something even more disgusting than this.  When we only concentrate on the deaths of american children that are murdered by a mentally disturbed individual, we offer silent complicity to the scores of children that the US government murders in cold, rational, calculation.  According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the US government has killed 176 children with drone strikes in Pakistan.  Where is the outrage for those deaths?  I guess when it occurs at the hand of Obama and Clinton, it becomes convenient for the media and the so-called american left to look the other way.  The consummate celebrity, Obama had a press conference to show his tears to anyone who could stomach them.  If the sight of a crass, unrelenting killer is so upsetting for the president, someone needs to quickly remove every mirror from the white house.

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BOMBING THEM IN TO DEMOCRACY.

      One feature of Western foreign policy is that other countries can't create democracy without the might of the Western military and Western government intervention. The powers that be preach this idiotic message that for democracy to spread anywhere in the world, it needs the fire power of the West, of course ignoring the fact that we don't have democracy here. People across the world can't do that for themselves, the ordinary people of Pakistan and Yemen can't have democracy unless we go in with our drones and special forces. The West's big lie is that by its war on terror, it is spreading democracy, when in fact they are creating chaos in an attempt at permanent domination.

This from Freedom Socialist Party (US):

      Who knows how many die from these attacks, since they are carried out secretly by the CIA. And civilian casualties are falsely minimized by counting every male of military age an enemy combatant. I guess “Kill-them-all” is the policy at hand. Hundreds of non-combatants have died, including a good many little girls and boys.
Obviously, this didn’t just start with Obama. Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world and territorially home to several ancient cultures, was artificially created in 1947 by the British Empire. From the beginning, the country has been dominated by a right-wing military, backed first by Great Britain and then the United States.
Since the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, Pakistan’s state apparatus has been mixed up with the Islamic fundamentalists in both countries. In fact, the Taliban was nurtured and funded by the United States in Afghanistan. So much for the myth that the U.S. brings secular democracy and women’s equality to the Middle East.
      Only the people themselves can do that, and they are trying desperately. Before she was attacked, Malala said, “If the new generation is not given pens, they will be given guns by the terrorists. We must raise our voice.”
      Forty-four years ago (1968) Pakistanis, with women in the forefront, launched a stunning revolution. They forced a dictator to abdicate and ran society for 139 days. Workers occupied factories, peasants seized land, and students took over the schools and colleges. This can happen again and I have no doubt that Malala Yousafzai, and other determined young women and men like her, will be a part of that struggle.

Read the full article HERE:

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A HIGH SCORE AT THE OFFICE TODAY??

     The march of the robotic war continues at a rapid pace, mostly unobserved in the West but we are the harbingers of the peopleless army. Most people tend to see CCTV cameras as a benign watch on criminals, but they are all part and parcel of the surveillance and control by a central authority and that authority spreads across the globe. the latest stage is the surveillance drones and their big brother, the killer drones.

      America has used drones to strike at and kill citizens in other countries, and since Obama came to power the use of drones as robotic assassins has grown enormously.  In Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Obama administration is using drones to invade other nations sovereign territory and kill people by remote control in those countries, while no state of war exist with the U.S.. Some of those killed have been American citizens. No charges, no jury, no judge. Just a CIA hit list.

            Once one state finds an efficient killing method others soon follow, now 50 countries have drones. Of course drones are not just being used to invade others soveriegn territory but are used as means of surveillance in their own home land. They have been used in the UK for this purpose and in the US, no doubt other countries are fllowing suit. The implications are horrendous, as country after country builds up its peopleless army of spies and assassins. Soon war will become a 9 to 5 office job, you'll have kids sitting in front of what looks like a game consul in some government office, getting excited as they see there hits score go higher and higher. No doubt there will be bonuses for the highest scorers. They will probably boast to their friends and family about their high score, oblivious that each score is the death of a family or a village, or even worse as the drones get larger and carry a heavier payload of destruction and death.

       I wrote on this some time back and make no apologies for doing so again, it is a horror world we should not allow ourselves to sleepwalk into, it is a world that only suits the corporate state.

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THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS.

An appeal from IUF, for solidarity.

       On International Women's Day, women workers at Nestlé are fighting discrimination and unequal treatment and providing vital support to the fight for justice at Nestlé in Pakistan and in Indonesia.
Send a message to Nestlé management calling for Equality Now and No More Nespressure!

        Nestlé workers and supporters rally in Indonesia and Pakistan as global support builds - Stop Nespressure!Read here about how support at home and abroad continues to build for the struggle for trade union rights at Nestlé factories in Indonesia and Pakistan.
Visit Stop Nespressure! on the IUF website
Join Stop Nespressure! on Facebook

Click here to subscribe to the new IUF News Service

Ron Oswald
General Secretary, IUF

International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF)

8, rampe du Pont-Rouge
1213 Petit Lancy, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 793 22 33
Fax: +41 22 793 22 38
web-site: www.iuf.org

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NESTLE, SERIAL ABUSER.

         

          Another appeal from LabourStart for solidarity in an attempt  to get Nestle to stop abusing workers as they try to organise into a trade union. One thing the corporate world does not like is organised workers, it is more difficult to exploit them, organised workers can stand up to the corporate greed merchants, individuals can be eliminated. 

      

            Nestlé is the world's largest food company. It is also a serial abuser of workers' rights.

This afternoon, the IUF - the global union federation for food workers - launched a major campaign calling on Nestlé to respect workers' rights.

         The campaign call comes in the wake of Nestlé sacking workers in both Indonesia and Pakistan for daring to organize themselves into trade unions.

          Last week, I asked you to help striking Suzuki workers in India. 96 hours after we launched the campaign, the company had reached agreement with the union and the strike was over.

This is going to be a longer and harder fight.

That's why it's so important that you not only send off your protest to Nestlé, but that you forward on this email.

Thank you!

Eric Lee

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MODERN IMPERIALISM - CORPORATE FASCISM!!

            We can go through the wars that the UK, as a Western imperialist power, has been involved in since the beginning of the 20^th century, World War 1, 1914-18, World war 2, 1939-45, Korea, 1950-53, Suez, 1956-56, and the short but bloody Falklands 1982-82. All these wars have one thing in common, the all have an end date. However in 2001 Western imperialism entered a new phase, we entered the era of the war without end, the war on terrorism. Not long after the 9/11 attacks in America, president George W. Bush announced a new doctrine, a new national security strategy of pre-emptive war, to strike at terrorist groups and states that allegedly pose a threat, or are developing a credible threat, to the United States, Britain and most of the Western nations actively supported this stand. Obama continued this doctrine, and what it is, is basically a licence for the West to wage aggressive war whereever they think fit. Ironically, Obama endorsed the doctrine of pre-emptive war, when giving a speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. What he endorsed was the type of action that the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War 2, had outlawed and condemned.

        There is absolutely no doubt that our cynical political class have been using the war on terror to keep the population in a permanent state of fear and to push through military and surveillance contracts, handing the corporate world trillions in tax payers money. In America since the 9/11 event, the US ruling political elite has spent US$8 trillion on homeland security. The war on terror is also intended to give their imperialist wars across the globe, a stamp of legitimacy. Of course we can ask, is the world any safer because of the illegal war on terror and its accompanying financial cost and human death and suffering? Has the obliteration of Iraq as a functioning country and the 10 year slaughter in Afghanistan made the world a safer place to live?

         I think it is safe to say that the war on terror has failed miserably to stop attacks on Western countries. We are told that it has foiled numerous attacks on Western cities, but we never get the information to verify these stories. What we can be sure of is that the actual manifestation of the war on terror, extraordinary renditions, unmanned drones with their death and destruction, barbaric torture and inhumane treatment at Guantanamo and Bagram prison, Western forces killing thousands of Muslim civilians across large swaths of the planet, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, to mention a few, is and will continue to build up an unstoppable anger and hatred of the West. You can't make friends with people while you destroy their homes and kill their family and friends. The war on terror is one method of securing natural resources for the West and feeding trillions of tax payers money to the massive corporate military industrial complex that controls our subservient and complicit political class. In the West, imperialism is alive and well.

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PAKISTAN AND SCOTLAND A REPUBLIC, DISCUSION.

Listen to internet radio with polizeros on Blog Talk Radio

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A DAY'S KILLING AT THE OFFICE!!

     

      The day is fast approaching when states will be able to wage war against other states without their military having to leave their own country. War with two distinct portions, the perpetrators sitting comfortably in what could pass for an electronic games room with keyboards, hand sets and monitors and those on the receiving end being blasted into oblivion by guided missiles, drones and other new hi-tec weaponry. You don't even need to be fit, you just sit comfortably in your seat at an office not far from your home, handset suitably placed, gaze at your monitor and at the right moment move your finger and BOOM, mission accomplished. After your 8 hour shift you can go home to your family. Warriors of the future. It is not as if this is far fetched, at the moment the US is creating havoc in the region of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border with a just such a scenario. The drones that are killing thousands in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region are controlled from somewhere in America.

        The drone attacks were relatively few back in 2004 as a matter of fact the total number of drone attacks for 2004/2007 was just 9 strikes with estimated deaths ranging from 89 to 112. In 2008 the numbers increased quite dramatically with 34 drone strikes that year alone and deaths between 273 and 313. When the man of peace, Obama took office in 2009, the number of drone strikes increased again with the estimated deaths rising to between 368 and 724. 2010 saw the deaths from drone strikes almost double to somewhere between 607 and 993.

       The New America Foundation states that since 2004 the total killed in drone strikes in that region number somewhere between 1,435 and 2,283, that's is a lot of death and misery without leaving your office. Of course their will be those who say they were all Taliban or Al Qaeda but again The New America Foundation state that about 32% of those deaths were civilian. Killed dispassionately from the comfort of an office chair, it is really quite frightening.

       As long as we continue with the state system and its bed companion, corporate capitalism, we will have wars and those wars will become more and more hi-tec with the military being more and more like office staff who never get their hands dirty and never see the blood they shed, making it easier and easier for the state to recruit killers for their cause of power and profit above all.

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