A recent article in
Foreign Affairs gives an interesting insight into what the war on terror is really all about. Anyone reading this article who was fourteen or fifteen years old at the time of the September 11 atrocities will doubtless remember the idealistic sounding rhetoric that was espoused by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic once the world had had time to take in the scale of the horror, and we had all realised things would never be quite the same again.
For those who are unfamiliar with
Foreign Affairs, formerly quarterly now published six times a year, it is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a name that features in what might be called the intelligent conspiracy literate from the 1960s onwards. Dubbed the Invisible Government by former FBI agent Dan Smoot, it was subjected to intense scrutiny from the 1970s after the publication of the classic
None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Smoot's book on the CFR and the Gary Allen/Larry Abraham book have both been scanned and published on-line for you to download and educate yourself for free
here and
here.
The scrutiny of these so-called conspiracy theorists and cranks forced the CFR into the open, and like that other group of arch-conspirators the
Bilderbergers - with whom it has an overlapping membership - the CFR now has its own
website in addition to a separate
website for its theoretical journal.
Carol Rosenberg's article
Why Obama Can't Close Guantanamo reveals the reason he has not kept his pre-election promise to close this now notorious concentration camp: “The responsibility lies not so much with the White House but with Congress, which has thwarted President Barack Obama's plans”.
This article is quite lengthy and needs to be digested by the reader, and will be little comfort when one considers all the other things the President doesn't take issue with, like
murdering American citizens, though at the moment he is limiting this to bad guys on foreign soil.
The author comments thus on two men who were released from the camp, sort of, a 48 year old who died from natural causes, apparently a heart attack, and a 37 year old who decided enough was enough, and ended it all.
These men were, it seems “[people] against whom the United States had no evidence to convict of a war crime but had concluded w[ere] too dangerous to let go.”
In other words, these men had committed no war crimes, nor any crimes, but some anonymous, faceless bureaucrat(s) in Washington or elsewhere had decided on gossip, hearsay or perhaps on a whim that they were dangerous (to whom?) and should be detained indefinitely.
This is far worse than a Presidential decree, it actually harps back to
lettre de cachet which was in the first instance a royal prerogative, but in the United States, foreign nationals and - if our masters get their way - American citizens can be detained indefinitely without due process. If this is indeed the case, or is to become the case, the question that must be asked is what did American soldiers die for in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. And what are they dying for still, in Afghanistan? The simple and terrible answer is, they died for nothing.
