What’s happening in the United States is a struggle between democracy and empire. Democracy is a wonderful invention by the people of history to protect themselves against the abuses of wealth. Michael Parenti
What they leave out are several other things. One is that Saddam Hussein was CIA. He was put in by the CIA. And CIA backed Saddam’s right-wing of the Ba’ath Party, and the Ba’ath Party went and murdered every democrat, every progressive, every communist that was in Iraq. And then went and murdered the left wing of their own party. So they killed, tortured these people. They did all that. It’s true what they say about him that he did do these terrible things. What they leave out is that when he was doing them he was Washington’s poster boy. And they couldn’t have more praise for him. But then he turned round and did something else. And that was he nationalised the oil reserves. Michael Parenti
It is the heart of US policy, Ladies & Gentlemen, to use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming to be saving democracy from communism. Michael Parenti
And as the weeks turned into months and into years, and one death became a dozen deaths and a hundred deaths and a thousand deaths then we began to realise, you know what, maybe we’re causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth. David Letterman
This war on terrorism is bogus: the 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination. Michael Meacher, Guardian online article 6th September 2003
I have a message for our Military: be ready. I have called the Armed Forces to Alert. And there is a reason. The hour is coming when America will act – and you will make us proud. George W Bush
Our War on Terror begins with Al Qaeda. But it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. Americans are asking, Why do they hate us? They hate what they see right here in this chamber. A democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms. Our freedom of religion. Our freedom of speech. Our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries. Such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa. These terrorists kill not merely to end lives but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world, and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way. We’re not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions. By abandoning every value except the will to power. They follow in the path of fascism. Nazism. And totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends, in History’s unmarked grave of discarded lives. We will direct every resource at our command. Every means of diplomacy. Every tool of intelligence. Every instrument of law enforcement. Every financial influence. And every necessary weapon of war. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. George W Bush, Congressional address 20 September 2001
America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling; our goal instead is to help others to find their own voice. George W Bush
Dangerous missions. Covert operations. And deadly assassinations. Ordered by the president of the United States. America’s Book of Secrets s2e7: Presidential Cover-Ups s2e7, History 2014
Presidential Documents Executive Order 13491 of January 22, 2009 Ensuring Lawful Interrogations ... ‘to promote the safe, lawful, and humane treatment of individuals in United States’ custody and of United States’ personnel who are detained in armed conflicts.’ ibid. Obama
Arms for hostages ... Why was the Reagan administration so willing to sell arms to a country so openly hostile to America? ibid.
Nicaragua: Reagan believed strongly that the Contras deserved American funding and support. Any such funding had been banned by Congress. ibid.
In the end several high ranking members of the Reagan administration were either indicted, convicted, or had their careers for ever tarnished by the affair and the cover-up ... directed by George H W Bush. ibid.
Obama 2011: A drone strike in Yemen in 2011. A strike that targeted and killed an America citizen. ibid.
Have presidential cover-ups become so sophisticated that the general public will never really know what goes on behind the doors of the Oval Office? ibid.
With new territory came old confrontations. Ultimate Guide to the Presidents e3: A House Divided: 1849-1865, History 2013
At the end of the Second World War in 1945 America emerged as a global superpower. But the ensuing Cold War then presented the US with a very new crisis. Ultimate Guide to the Presidents e7: Hail to the Chief 1945-1964
Eisenhower ... preferred covert action in proxy wars. ibid.
By the end of his [Johnson’s] presidency more than half a million [troops] were stationed across the Pacific. Ultimate Guide to the Presidents e8: Mantle of Power 1965-2013
No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people, indirectly, into war. Wendell Willkie
America was heading for a new confrontation with its allies yesterday after it emerged that the Bush Administration will refuse to accept an arms control deal to enforce a ban on biological weapons. The Times, 2001
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Robert Fisk, The Independent article 24th October 2010, The Shaming of America
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America’s shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the 81 bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations? ibid.
We were standing in the old US Marine base not far from the newly rebuilt railway station – there are, of course, no trains – and the pale stencil of ‘USMC’ was still on the wall. But there was dust blowing around the yard and some of the sandbags had broken open.
All the way back to Baghdad, the old American bases looked scruffy, some of the concrete blast walls had collapsed. There was a feeling of an empire departed – Britain after the Romans had left. Robert Fisk, The Independent article 23rd April 2012, ‘Iraq’s Road Back From Oblivion’
Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’. These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (‘retaliation’, ‘protective reaction’ etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that US power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence – wholesale as opposed to retail terror – during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not ‘terror’ ... ‘security forces’ only retaliate and engage in ‘police action’.
These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as ‘reactive’ and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of ‘terrorism’ ... Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror. Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection & Third World Fascism
By 1978 it [East Timor] was approaching genocidal levels. The Church and other sources estimated about two hundred thousand people killed. The US backed it all the way: the US provided 90% of the arms. Right after the invasion arms shipments were stepped up. When the Indonesians actually began to run out of arms in 1978, the Carter administration moved in and increased arms sales. And other western countries did the same. Noam Chomsky
Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the US steps in and blocks it. Noam Chomsky
In February 2004 the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The US denies him permission to return to the entire region. Noam Chomsky