War is peace. Ignorance is strength
By John Pilger
Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his
impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers
and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks
the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the
Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.
Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than
a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran, which his secretary of state, Hillary
Clinton, said she was prepared to obliterate, Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up
a secret nuclear facility, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic
Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed
the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against
humanity in its assault on Gaza ?crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment
Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.
At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since
the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression.
During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked
peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before
on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas
and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of crowd-control
munitions supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon. In Obama’s Pentagon-con-
trolled National security state the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he prom-
ised to close, remains open, and rendition, secret assassinations and torture continue.
The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised
a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. The idea, reported the
Associated Press, is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations… nearly
half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling, which
helps achieve the regional engagement strategy.
Translated, this means Obama is planning a rollback of the independence and democracy
that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds,
along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US sphere of influence.
The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights
record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military
training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela
with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chaez, which George
W Bush failed to do in 2002.
Read the rest at: http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=551
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