We Have Spent $32 Million Per Hour on War Since 2001

This March marked the 16th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction — weapons that have never been found. Nevertheless, all these years later, Bush’s “Global War on Terror” continues — in Iraq and in many other countries.

It’s a good time to reflect on what this war — the longest in U.S. history — has cost Americans and others around the world.

First, the economic costs: According to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war on terror has cost Americans a staggering $5.6 trillion since 2001, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

$5.6 trillion. This figure includes not just the Pentagon’s war fund, but also future obligations such as social services for an ever-growing number of post-9/11 veterans.

It’s hard for most of us to even begin to grasp such an enormous number.

It means Americans spend $32 million per hour, according to a counter by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Put another way: Since 2001, every American taxpayer has spent almost $24,000 on the wars — equal to the average down payment on a house, a new Honda Accord, or a year at a public university.

(Cartoon: Khalil Bendib / OtherWords.org)

As stupefying as those numbers are, the budgetary costs pale in comparison with the human toll.

As of 2015, when the Costs of War project made its latest tallies, up to 165,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a direct consequence of U.S. war, plus around 8,000 U.S. soldiers and military contractors in Iraq.

Those numbers have only continued to rise. Up to 6,000 civilians were killed by U.S.-led strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2017 –– more civilians than in any previous year, according to the watchdog group AirWars.

In addition to those direct deaths, at least four times as many people in Iraq have died from the side effects of war, such as malnutrition, environmental degradation, and deteriorated infrastructure.

Since the 2003 invasion, for instance, Iraqi health care has plummeted — with hospitals and clinics bombed, supplies of medicine and electricity jeopardized, and thousands of physicians and healthcare workers fleeing the country.

Meanwhile, the war continues to spread, no longer limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, as many Americans think. Indeed, the U.S. military is escalating a shadowy network of anti-terror operations all across the world — in at least 76 nations, or 40 percent of countries on the planet.

Last October, news about four Green Berets killed by an Islamic State affiliate in the West African nation of Niger gave Americans a glimpse of just how broad this network is. And along with it comes all the devastating consequences of militarism for the people of these countries.

We must ask: Are these astounding costs worth it? Is the U.S. accomplishing anything close to its goal of diminishing the global terrorist threat?

The answer is, resoundingly, no.

U.S. activity in Iraq and the Middle East has only spurred greater political upheaval and unrest. The U.S.-led coalition is seen not as a liberating force, but as an aggressor. This has fomented insurgent recruitment, and there are now more terrorist groups in the Middle East than ever before.

Until a broad swath of the American public gets engaged to call for an end to the war on terror, these mushrooming costs — economic, human, social, and political — will just continue to grow.

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/03/we-have-spent-32-million-per-hour-on-war-since-2001.html

PEPE ESCOBAR: Empire of Chaos in Hybrid War Overdrive

Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?

As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.

Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.

But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.

Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”

Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.

Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.

Show Me The Big Picture

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/03/24/empire-of-chaos-in-hybrid-war-overdrive/

“The Great Fraud Of National Zionism”

The Defining Event for the USA

There is no doubt that the 9/11 false flag (now even admitted (by direct implication) by NIST!) was a watershed, a seminal event in our history. While millions (or even billions) watched in horror as the twin towers burned, a small group of Mossad agents stood nearby and danced in overwhelming joy. Why exactly were these Israelis dancing? Surely there was more than just Schadenfreude in this spontaneous expression of euphoria? Considering that these three dancing Israelis were just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, we can rest assured that there were many more folks dancing in joy that day, especially in Israel.

Why were these Mossad agents so blissful? The answer is obvious: 9/11 put the following notions front and center of the concerns of most people in the USA:

We are under attack and in grave, imminent, danger

Islam wants to destroy our way of life

Those who did 9/11 also want to destroy Israel

We need to ask the Israelis to share their “expertise” in dealing with Islamic terrorism

Draconian laws and new police powers need to be passed to protect us from mass murder

If you are not with us, then you are with the terrorists

Almost a decade before 9/11, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama had explained to us that history itself was coming to an end while Samuel P. Huntington explained to us in 1996 that we were witnessing a “clash of civilizations.” This kind of “scholarly” research created the perfect political background to an already rather disquieting perception of the upcoming Year 2000. In 2001, when all hell broke loose, the general public was already well prepared for it (just like the AngloZionist elites who had already prepared the huge “Patriot Act” long before the Twin Towers came down).

9/11 was as much the culmination of a significant preparatory effort as it was the trigger for a decade or more of wars.

Still, all this immense effort into shaping the West’s perceptions was not good enough to hammer the sufficiently hysterical mindset into most people, in spite of the best efforts of the legacy Ziomedia to explain to us that Bin Laden decided that “we” were next in line for some kind of horrible (possibly nuclear) terrorist attack. Inside the USA the constant fear-mongering of the legacy Ziomedia did induce the suitable hysterical panic, while in the rest of the world things were not going quite as well. Especially not in Europe (which was vitally needed as a fig-leaf to pretend like the GWOT was not a US-Israeli thingie, but that there was a large “coalition of the willing” formed of the best and brightest countries out there). Something else, bigger and better, was needed and, sure enough, it was found: a mass exodus of poorly educated immigrants, the vast majority of them from Muslim countries.

While the (totally fictional and therefore totally unsuccessful) GWOT was petering out, the AngloZionists directed their stare at Libya and its leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had warned that unless Europe was willing to pay Libya to contain the many millions of African refugees, a major catastrophe would happen. He explained that “Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in“, “we don’t know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans” and “we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

https://southfront.org/the-saker-the-great-fraud-of-national-zionism/

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>>5885270

What matters is that the people in the West felt attacked by a vicious and most dangerous enemy: Islam.

There were other, no less significant “attacks” on the very core of Western identity. For example, I don’t believe that the term “cultural Marxism” makes any sense at all, but it does describe a real phenomenon. Ditto for the profusion of pushy and even aggressive “minorities” of all kinds who demanded not only equal rights but even special privileges. In the legacy Ziomedia, we saw an apparently never-ending hunting season against Whites, against men, against heterosexuals, against Anglos, and against Christians. Needless to say, the attack on White Anglo-Saxon Christian heterosexual males was (and still is) relentless. A majority of people in the West were told that they are guilty of this or that historical injustice or crime, that their traditions and beliefs were evil and that they out to be ashamed of their identity on all levels. Of course, there have been many horrible and outright disgusting chapters in the history of the western civilization, but unless you believe in collective and/or inherited guilt, that hardly justifies the kind of hatred and contempt which the (pseudo-) “liberal” elites constantly express against anything traditional.

If the election of Trump was a huge slap in the face of the Neocons, the reaction of the Neocons to this event was a massive slap in the face of the American people. What began with Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” soon turned into a long list of ridiculous accusations (including, my personal favorites: Ron Paul is a “Putin’s best friend,” Rand Paul a “Russian stooge” and Tulsi Gabbard a “Putin puppet“).

Frankly, this kind of constant bashing of everything traditional is nothing else but a type of mental rape of the western cultural identity. A reaction to this kind of onslaught was inevitable. The only question was which form it would take.

Understanding National Zionism – a primer

It took the form of what the French philosopher Alain Soral called “National Zionism.” Here is how Soral explains this ideology:

There is a huge surge of what is called national-Zionism, that is, to bring nationalists to Zionism. For me, this is a fundamental contradiction in this amalgam of Muslims equal to Daesh, basically in France in Muslim equal to scum equal to Daesh equal to Palestinians and therefore the good Frenchman if he wants to get out of the shit in which these people have put him, must support Israel and not take offense and accept the disproportionate power that the Jewish community embodied by the CRIF has over France and that is the supreme scam. This is politically unacceptable, morally unacceptable, strategically stupid. This is what I call national-Zionism and this is the fundamental struggle today. We must refuse this scam, refuse the nationalism in Kippa. And that’s not for that, all of a sudden, we would become pro-Muslim to come back to your question.

Cont. from images:

safe. First, create a Jewish homeland and, second, secure enough Jewish power in literally all the countries on the planet to be ready should the goyim (literally “nations” but in the Talmudic context it carries exactly the same meaning as the German Untermensch: subhuman) come down with unpredictable (by definition) and unexplainable (by definition) cases of “anti-Semitism”. In contrast, Jewish lives and, especially, Jewish blood acquire a profound soteriological meaning: Jewish life is infinitely precious because 1) Jews will “repair” the world (tikkun olam) and 2) because the Moshiach will be born from a Jew and become a world leader accepted by all nations. A (somewhat secularized) variation of this philosophy is that all Jews form a “collective Moshiach” and that all the “nations” will accept their power and rule with gratitude as this will usher the final and everlasting era of milk and honey. Finally, Talmudic/Pharisaic “Judaism” teaches that Jews “represent” mankind before God and God before mankind (yeah, modesty is not their forte). Next time you hear some Israeli politician going bonkers about spilled “Jewish blood” just remember this info, and it will all make sense. Ditto for when some other (or even the same) Israeli politician demands some gruesome revenge, terrible retribution or promises to kill some huge number of enemies. This kind of “Purim talk” only makes sense once you realize how deep and fundamental Talmudic/Zionist racism really is.

National Zionism is a fraud and an extremely toxic and dangerous one.

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8 Historic Cases That Show the FBI and CIA Were Out of Control Long Before Russiagate

Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.

These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US intelligence agencies.

Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.

These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.

1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro

It’s no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.

The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine “pretexts” the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign (“real or simulated”) and blaming it on Cuban refugees.

“We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” the Operation Mongoose document says.

The terror campaign could be pointed at Cubans refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States… Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.

https://www.activistpost.com/2019/03/8-historic-cases-that-show-the-fbi-and-cia-were-out-of-control-long-before-russiagate.html

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>>5885401

2/2

>>5885521

Satanists must keep a steady flow of death to maintain their power

>>5885564

Israel firster too

>>5885573

don't be retarded