Drones Over Nigeria as McCain Wails for Boots on the Ground

The American war machine never needs much of an excuse for sending in the drones and imperial stormtroopers in the global crusade for financial plunder and corporate profits but nothing sells with the low-information types like a good old humanitarian intervention. Team America world police has just had exactly that drop into their laps with the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by Muslim group Boko Haram, a perfect scenario for one of those good movie style commando raids to win hearts and minds in The Homeland. President Barack Obama got all choked up and vowed that there would be US help to find the missing girls and his spouse Michelle shamelessly milked their plight by using her weekly address to pander to female voters: "... what happened in Nigeria was not an isolated incident. It's a story we see every day as girls around the world risk their lives to pursue their ambitions" and promise US intervention "I want you to know that Barack has directed our government to do everything possible to support the Nigerian government's efforts to find these girls and bring them home," the first lady said. "In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams, and we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now". No mention of course of the untold thousands of dead children who have been the victims in America's ongoing phony war on terror - collateral damage.

Whenever it comes to American military incursions in foreign places there is no more prominent a pitchman for our exceptional acts of aggression than Arizona Senator John McCain and he is once again in rare form. Taking a break from palling around with his neo-Nazi pals in Ukraine, America’s preeminent warmonger and lunatic is calling for a full scale military intervention in Nigeria. McCain is a deranged old man who should long ago have been put out to pasture in any decent society continues to exert undue and enormous influence on US foreign policy and is braying for blood. The Pentagon pimp and media darling has called for sending US special forces into Nigeria without that country's permission and has taken to such childish (or senile) tactics as making fun of the Nigerian president's name - no wonder why Americans are hated throughout the world with guys like this as our public face. The surveillance drones are already flying over Nigeria - which they probably were even before the kidnappings took place - and you can bet that plans have already been concocted and only have to be given the green light by currently sitting Emperor Obama. McCain may be a mockery to anyone with any common sense and decency but the neocon megaphone Washington Post has his back as could be expected because there is never a military option that the editorial board won't shill for nor a country that they wouldn't have invaded by the USA, USA, USA.

Being that this is an election year and the feckless Democrats are terrified of being called out as chicken it is only a matter of time until Obama gives the order and the television lobotomized flock of star-spangled sheep will get a satisfying sniff of that intoxicating American whup-ass. There is never any money to rebuild infrastructure, bail out anyone who is not operating out of a Wall Street ivory tower or provide assistance to the ever besieged small business owners but there is always money for more militarist masturbation. For another viewpoint that you will find nowhere in the putrid excuse for a national media I would recommend this piece by Glen Ford over at the Black Agenda Report entitled "Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa" from which I excerpt the following:

A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the “international community” and the Nigerian military “Do something!” about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged “news” products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been “doing” to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried “not a single television news story about Boko Haram” in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn’t mean the Nigerian army hasn’t been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country’s mostly Muslim north.

 The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood, but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans who read – which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who took her husband’s place on radio last weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls – would have learned in the New York Times of the army’s savage offensive near the Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb “Without Asking Who They Are,” according to the NYT headline. “They don’t ask any questions,” said a witness who later fled for his life, like thousands of others. “When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot,” said a student. “They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don’t hear from them again.”

 “When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot.”

 The Times’ Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army’s “all-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency.” He reported:

 “All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram — a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents — for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it.”

 In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.

Of course the indiscriminate murdering of Muslims is completely acceptable in America because the phony war on terror is indeed a war on Muslims and while the bewildered herd may be down with that and in many cases are inclined to invoke Jesus while throwing in with the slaughter those who are being targeted get it as do their loved ones who understandably will desire vengeance against the Great Satan. The war on terror is a masterful con job in that the September 11. 2001 attacks have been used for nearly thirteen years now to justify murder, torture, domestic surveillance and repression and most of all murdering Muslims. The hypocrisy over the weeping and gnashing of teeth over 300 kidnapped girls in Africa is as commonplace in 2014 as it is nauseating for anyone still possessing a soul.

Mendacious Meddler Obama Warns Putin Not to Meddle in Ukraine

Those groaning, creaking and popping noises that were barely audible during  Barack Obama’s hastily announced  Friday afternoon White House statement was the sound of an empire of lies on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own bullshit. The President of the most exceptional, god-kissed, special nation in the history of the planet warned the reviled Russian leader Vladimir Putin not to dare to intervene in Ukraine after a joint US-EU instigated coup d’etat that effectively ousted democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. While Obama’s lies are dutifully and unquestionably communicated by a corrupt, careerist state media for domestic consumption one has to wonder just how much longer that the American war machine will have any credibility whatsoever abroad. The propaganda blitzkrieg touting the ‘freedom fighters’ whose mob violence led to the chasing of Yanukovicych from power only to be replaced by some of the most vile thugs and neo-Nazis in Eastern Europe has been as withering as it is dishonest. Months of shrill and egregious demonizing of Putin after he dared to offer asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and then swept to the rescue to keep the American political class and their expensive toy the military from another Middle Eastern war in Syria had Barry and the boys itching for payback.

It was revenge of the dish served cold nature that they extracted from Putin during his national showcase of the Sochi Winter Olympic games by pulling off the coup in Kiev, an embarrassment for the Russian boss of which the timing was critical to the deal going down. The neocons could barely control their glee, boasting about 'democracy' that was nothing more than mob rule. But America has long been based on a passel of lies, hypocrisy and imperial meddling all sold by being (to quote Sinclair Lewis) “wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” at least since the end of World War II and the creation of the CIA. With the German Nazis and Japanese defeated, Europe in ruins and America essentially taking control of the old British Empire this country has done nothing but meddle in the affairs of others,  planning and staging coups, backing murderous torturing despots to protect western business interests, assassinations, proxy wars, economic sabotage, full blown wars under our own flag and now with the advent of communications technology spying on the private communications of foreign leaders and engaging in economic espionage.

While Obama may have been a Constitutional law professor – although given his ongoing assistance in nullifying it while in office it has to be considered that maybe that is the reason he got the gig in the first place – he doesn’t bother much with history, unless of course it is the state sanctioned version of a moral and triumphant nation and champion of human rights that promotes John Wayne whup-ass diplomacy. Not that a petulant narcissist like Obama actually gives a rat’s ass about anything remotely resembling the truth but here is a short list of places where his great government of ours has meddled in over the past several decades including official military involvement as well as CIA operations (listed in alphabetic not chronological order and not all inclusive):

Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Congo, Cuba, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Egypt, El Salvador, Georgia, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Laos, Liberia, Libya, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen…

..and of course Ukraine.

The state-corporate media is of course complicit but with the Clinton era wave of consolidations and a history of CIA/government meddling such as Operation Mockingbird, the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, the revolving door between the Pentagon and defense contractors and the ex-generals who are trotted out as “experts” without any mention of glaring conflicts of interest it is more like the media and the government have now merged with the former serving as nothing more than a propaganda arm, Pravda on the Potomac. Having a dumbed-down, steeped in superstition, brainwashed and quite frankly stupid populace that is more concerned with the exploits of the Kardashians and Justin Bieber than what it is that truly affects their lives on a larger level doesn’t hurt the efforts of the rogue government to impose their big lie of democracy at gunpoint on the majority of the world. The level of willful ignorance in what is at least theoretically an advanced society is stunning and we are well on our way to the land that was prophesied in the biting social satire “Idiocracy”. The absence of any questioning of exactly why it is that this impetuous ass of a president and the neocon embeds within the system are so hellbent on risking a serious conflict with a powerful, nuclear armed nation such as Russia over a situation that is spinning out of control in one of the countries that sits on its border. Does anyone ever bother to think of what Obama or any US president would do if meddlers from another country would foment a civil war in Mexico or Canada? But we already know the answer to that for it is we who are the exceptional and the reverence of all things military in this land of fear and woe borders on the fanaticism of a cult.

Since the end of the ‘good war’ the bulk of the meddling was justified by having to fight the hyped and blown out of proportion menace of global communism emanating from the Soviet Union, when that long needed Manichean devil justify a permanent state of war. The manufacture and sale of bullets, bombs, aircraft, tanks etcetera was just too big of a moneymaker to ever beat those swords back into plowshares and set about building a just society and President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address way back in 1961. So we had well in excess of sixty years of meddling in foreign lands to defeat a trumped up menace that justified the whole bloody business of death and destruction. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and crackup of the USSR the gravy train risked derailment but thanks to Poppy Bush with his meddling in Iraq and Bubba Clinton with his bombing the shit out of Belgrade and other misadventures the warfare state managed to lurch along until September 11, 2001. The war machine hit the jackpot that day with their War on Terror (translation: Muslims) that thanks to that “New Pearl Harbor” that the neocons  so desired allowed for the fleecing of a terrified nation therefore a new series of wars/meddling and an unprecedented redistribution of wealth to finance the full blown cancer of a massive and bloated surveillance machine that thanks to Snowden’s revelations we now can see that it is not about “terrorism” at all.  So with the phony War on Terror now belatedly being exposed as a fraud what would be better to justify increased looting of the Treasury, beggaring Americans and finishing the job of destroying the middle class once and for all but a resurgent Red Menace?

(Image: AP/Charles Dharapak)