Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[xilman]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Did someone mention the US regime change manual?

Leaked Wikileaks Doc Reveals US Military Use of IMF, World Bank as “Unconventional” Weapons | Mint Press

Let's have a look at the most recent efforts along these lines in Latin America, including one appalling tactic that appears to have been sponsored by global infant-formula profiteer Nestle:

To paraphrase and slightly update ('debt' in place of 'currency') the famous dictum by one of the Messrs. Rothschild, "Give me control of a nation's debt and I care not who makes its laws."

Rember the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Twas ever thus, long before the Americas were settled by Europeans.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Contemporary news accounts have John Bolton carrying a legal pad with the notation 5,000 troops to Colombia. Gee, what could he possibly be thinking?

Hey! What's happening??? I feel the years rolling back! My aches are subsiding! My weight is going down! Hair is reappearing on top of my head! The gray is disappearing!

<wavy lines>

Oh, my God, it's January 1985! I'm young again!

Gen. Paul Gorman, the outspoken architect of major U.S. military exercises that kept American forces in Honduras for a year, plans to resign despite appeals from President Reagan, the Pentagon said Thursday.

WASHINGTON -- Gen. Paul Gorman, the outspoken architect of major U.S. military exercises that kept American forces in Honduras for a year, plans to resign despite appeals from President Reagan, the Pentagon said Thursday.

The surprise statement by Pentagon spokesman Michael Burch came as Gorman announced plans for another major exercise this spring between Honduran and U.S. forces involving up to 5,000 American troops, and as Navy officials said the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is headed toward the Caribbean coast of Central America.
<snip>
A successor operation, 'Big Pine III,' will begin in early spring and 'last only a few days,' Burch said. But the deployment and site preparations will be carried out over several months, other Pentagon spokesmen said.

The maneuvers will include engineer activities, a counterinsurgency field training exercise and an anti-armor field exercise 'involving a small contingent of armored and mechanized vehicles from the Army National Guard,' a Pentagon background paper said.
<snip>

[kladner]

https://stephenlendman.org/2019/02/r...lliott-abrams/
It is delightful, in a horrible way, to see Ms Omar calmly and persistently review some of the atrocities which Abrams arranged, and has hailed in the past. I keep hoping for his head to explode.

On Wednesday, Abrams testified before House Foreign Relations Committee members, grilled for the first time since appointed Trump regime’s envoy to crush democracy in Venezuela.
Dem Rep. Ilhan Omar challenged him, saying:
“In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George HW Bush,” adding:

“I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”

She pressed him on earlier calling the December 1981 El Mozote massacre of up to 1,200 Salvador civilians “a fabulous achievement,” adding: “Do you still think so?”

He ducked the issue calling Omar’s question “ridiculous,” adding “I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question.”

“Yes or no,” Omar countered, adding: “Would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide if you believed they were serving US interests as you did in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua?”

[Fusion_power]

Two wrongs do not a right make.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Two wrongs do not a right make.

Would you explain which wrongs you are referring to?

[kladner]

Veni, Vidi, Tweeti (I Came, I Saw, I Tweeted)
An Obituary for the Republic
By Tom Engelhardt

Imagine that moment so many years later and consider the crew of neoconservatives who, under the aegis of George W. Bush, the son of the man who had “won” the Cold War, came to power in January 2001. Not surprisingly, on viewing the planet, they could see nothing -- not a single damn thing -- in their way. There was a desperately weakened and impoverished Russia (still with its nuclear arsenal more or less intact) that, as far as they were concerned, had been mollycoddled by President Bill Clinton’s administration. There was a Communist-gone-capitalist China focused on its own growth and little else. And there were a set of other potential enemies, “rogue powers” as they were dubbed, so pathetic that not one of them could, under any circumstances, be called “great.”

In 2002, in fact, three of them -- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea -- had to be cobbled together into an “axis of evil” to create a faintly adequate enemy, a minimalist excuse for the Bush administration to act preemptively. It couldn’t have been more obvious then that all three of them would go down before the unprecedented military and economic power of us (even if, as it happened, two of them didn’t).

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Two wrongs do not a right make.

But three lefts do.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://stephenlendman.org/2019/02/r...lliott-abrams/
It is delightful, in a horrible way, to see Ms Omar calmly and persistently review some of the atrocities which Abrams arranged, and has hailed in the past. I keep hoping for his head to explode.

I note that Ms. Omar began by addressing Elliot Abrams as "Mr. Adams," and said

In 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran Cortra [sic] affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush. I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful."

and refused to let him respond, smirking while saying "That was not a question" and "Thank you for your participation."

She pressed him on earlier calling the December 1981 El Mozote massacre of up to 1,200 Salvador civilians “a fabulous achievement,” adding: “Do you still think so?”

He ducked the issue calling Omar’s question “ridiculous,” adding “I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question.”

Not according the video you posted the link to.

In the video, she first asks if the US policy in El Salvador was a fabulous achievement. Abrams responded, "Since the day Duarte was freely elected, to this day <putting his finger on the table for emphasis>, El Salvador has been a democracy, and that is a fabulous achievement."

The subsequent exchange went as follows:

OMAR: Yes or no, do you think that massacre was a fabulous achievement that happened under our watch?

ABRAMS: That is a ridiculous question.

OMAR: Yes or no?

ABRAMS: No!

OMAR: I will take that as a yes.

I have never seen a member of Congress substitute their own answer for that of a witness. No means yes? Jesus X. God.

[kladner]

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/14/...brams-hearing/

OMAR: On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda reports about the massacre at El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as 2 years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl, girls, before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” Yes or no, do you still think so?

ABRAMS: From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.

Abrams’s words were “not only factually, demonstrably untrue, but grossly so,” according to Alejandro Velasco, a professor of modern Latin American history at New York University. His testimony, said Velasco, “continues a pattern he has shown since the 1980s of hubristically rejecting out of hand any suggestion that defeating social justice struggles in the 1980s, through the most brutal means, should in any way be seen as anything other than a resounding victory for the U.S.”

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I have never seen a member of Congress substitute their own answer for that of a witness. No means yes? Jesus X. God.

You sure have a high opinion of congress critters.
EDIT: You are also ignoring decades of context, as well as the record of the witness.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I have never seen a member of Congress substitute their own answer for that of a witness. No means yes? Jesus X. God.

"No means yes" makes perfect sense in the case of a serial liar-to-Congress like Abrams. Dude was complicit in multiple atrocities on behalf of the Exceptional Empire - why am I not surprised to see you leaping to his defense?

In other the-truth-has-no-place-on-Capitol-Hill news, the same Rep. Omar was in essence forced to grovel and the kiss the ring a few days ago, after having the temerity to publicly state obvious facts about the the disproportionate influence of the Israel lobby - arguably the most powerful in Washington, these guys make the NRA, Big Data and Big Pharma look like pikers - on US foreign policy. In related news, Clintonite apparatchik Neera Tanden has gone on the record to the effect that calling someone a “neocon” is an anti-semitic slur. So remember that next time you're about to say something unkind about e.g. the Bomb Walrus, John "Jewboy" Bolton.