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Cheney at the Air Force Academy: Perpetuating Murderous Illusions
By Kurt Nimmo
06/03/05 - - Dick “Bunker” Cheney visited the Air Force Academy in
Colorado Springs yesterday. In essence, he told the next
generation of bullet-stoppers for empire they can expect to get
their hindmost quarters shot off. “You will be among those who
lead us to victory against freedom’s enemies,” he
said. “And you will play an historic role in the great
victories to come.” In other words, if they are not flown into
Dover AFB in a flag-draped coffins in the middle of the night,
they will return with mental problems associated with killing
“terrorists,” i.e., people who live in foreign lands where
there is oil and other precious natural resources in need of
stealing by carpet-bagging multinational corporations.
“America chose to lead and had the courage to act,”
Bush’s brain told the academy’s misguided graduates. “And so
the murderous regimes of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein are
history, more than 50 million people have been liberated from
tyranny, and democracy is coming to the broader Middle East.”
It makes you wonder if they teach history at the Air Force
Academy—or undiluted history. The “murderous” (indeed they
were) Taliban were a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA.
“Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani
government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and
the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and
military training,” writes Phil
Gasper.
The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban’s
reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in
the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was “actively
encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison,
an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States
encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban,
certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected
journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State
Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing
objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic
law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new
regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the
factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in
Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the
Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil
companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no
parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said
another U.S. diplomat in 1997.
As for Saddam Hussein: he was supported by the U.S. government
(and killing a lot of Iranians) right up to the moment April
Glaspie, U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, told Saddam she had
“direct instruction from the President to seek better relations
with Iraq” and “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,
like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” thus sending a green
light to Saddam to go into Kuwait, considered for centuries a
southern province of Iraq (until British colonialists carved it
out). Saddam was chumped, invaded Kuwait, and the cost was more
than a million dead Iraqis (between war dead and those killed,
mostly children, by medieval sanctions).
“We are committed to the advance of freedom in that region
not just because it serves our ideals, but also because it serves
our interests,” said Cheney. “Our country is safer today
because Afghanistan and Iraq have governments that fight
terrorists instead of harboring them.”
Never mind that the United States spent over a billion in
Afghanistan precisely to organize and train these said terrorists,
a concerted effort (considered the CIA’s most successful
operation) that “serves our interests” in perpetuating an
open-ended (several generations, at minimum) and manufactured war
on equally manufactured terror. In fact, regardless of what the
liar Cheney tells an audience of gullible and star-spangle-struck
cadets, Afghanistan and Iraq never posed a threat to the United
States. As for Osama, the stated excuse for killing thousands of
Afghanis, Mullah Mohammad Omar told the United States twice he
would turn over Bin Laden (in
1998, well before nine eleven and for his presumed role in the
Kenya and Tanzania embassy attacks) but as is human nature,
Mohammad Omar became a bit intransigent after the United States
carried out air strikes on Afghanistan. “The Taliban leader,
Mullah Mohammed Omar agreed three years ago to hand over Osama bin
Laden, but changed his mind after US cruise missile attacks,”
the Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal told the Jeddah-based Arab News
and Saudi-owned MBC television, an admission subsequently reported
by Brian
Whitaker of the Guardian on November 5, 2001.
Killing off its former client is also good for the CIA’s
heroin business. “Immediately following the installation of the
US puppet government under Prime Minister Hamid Kharzai, opium
production soared, regaining its historic levels,” writes Michel
Chossudovsky. “Part of the drug related revenues accrues to
the CIA, which continues to protect both the Asian and Latin
American drug trade.” In July 2000, writes Robyn
Dixon, “more than a year before the United States knocked it
out of power, the Taliban banned the crop and introduced the death
penalty for opium crimes, leading to a sharp decline in
production.” (For more on the CIA’s flourishing drug business,
see Robert Parry’s CIA’s
Drug Confession.)
“The attacks on our country underscore the seriousness of the
profession you had entered and the oath you had taken only a few
months earlier,” continued Cheney. “And many of you shared the
same wish that you could graduate on September 12 and take your
place in the first war of the 21st century.”
Notice how Cheney said the “first war of the 21st century.”
As we know, if we pay attention, the invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq are but the first two “wars” of the 21st century—the
Bushcons have more, far more, mass murder and mayhem on tap: next
up, bombing runs on Syria and Iran (the former may simply wither
and die on the vine due to the increasingly violent situation in
Lebanon, another target on the Strausscon-Likduite roster). Scott
Ritter has predicted the Bushcons will do something against
Iran this month, but this is less than certain, although, as
Cheney has underscored with his latest bit of disgusting
grandiloquence, the master plan to “reshape” the Muslim Middle
East is on schedule.
Copyright: Kurt Nimmo.
Visit his website http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog/
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