Drowning in Hypocrisy

Drowning in Hypocrisy

By Paul Craig Roberts
Information Clearing House
January 25, 2012

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has
become a caricature of hypocrisy.

Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA
director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on
the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining
a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against
Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal
with us through diplomacy.”

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will
Panetta need to project power against Russia and China? But to
get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us
through diplomacy.”

The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of
military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that
Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo.

Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by
Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International
Atomic Energy Agency.

Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy? Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Washington sends the FBI to raid the homes of peace activists and
puts a grand jury to work to create a case against them for aiding
a nebulous enemy by protesting Washington’s wars.

The Department of Homeland Security unleashes goon cop thugs
to brutalize peaceful Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

Washington fabricates cases against Bradley Manning, Julian
Assange, and Tarek Mehanna that negate the First Amendment
by equating free speech with terrorism and spying.

Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief-of-staff, Rahm
Israel Emanuel, pushes an ordinance that outlaws public protests in
the City of Chicago.

The list goes on. And in the midst of it all Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Washington hypocrites accuse Russia and China of stifling dissent.

Washington’s grotesque hypocrisy goes unremarked by the
American “media” and in the debates for the Republican
presidential nomination.

The corrupt Obama “Justice” Department turns a blind eye while
goon cop thugs commit gratuitous violence against the citizens
who pay the goon cop thugs’ undeserved salaries.

But it is in the War Crimes Arena where Washington shows the greatest hypocrisy.

The self-righteous bigots in Washington are forever rounding up
heads of weak states whose countries were afflicted by civil wars
and sending them off to be tried as war criminals.

All the while Washington indiscriminately kills large numbers of
civilians in six or more countries, dismissing its own war crimes
as “collateral damage.”

Washington violates its own law and international law by torturing people.

On January 13, 2012, Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers
reported that Spanish judge Pablo Rafael Ruz Gutierrez re-launched
an investigation into Washington’s torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Prison.

The previous day British authorities opened an investigation into
CIA renditions of kidnapped persons to Libya for torture.

Rosenberg reports that although the Obama regime has refused to
investigate the obvious crimes of the Bush regime, and one might
add its own obvious crimes, “other countries are still interested in
determining whether Bush-era anti-terror practices violated international law.”

There is no question that Bush/Cheney/Obama have trashed the
US Constitution, US statutory law, and international law.

But Washington, having overthrown justice, has established that
might is right. No foreign government is going to send its forces
into the US to drag the war criminals out and place them on trial.

The War Criminal Court at the Hague is reserved for Washington’s show trials.

No foreign government is going to pay Washington several hundred
millions of dollars to turn Bush, Cheney, Obama and their minions
over to them in the way the US bought Milosevic from Serbia in
order to create the necessary spectacle at the War Crimes Tribunal
to justify Washington’s naked aggression against Serbia.

No government can be perfect, because all governments are
composed of humans, especially those humans most attracted
by power and profit.

Nevertheless, in my lifetime I have witnessed an extraordinary
deterioration in the integrity of government in the United States.

We have reached the point where nothing that our government says
is believable.

Not even the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the GDP growth
rate, much less Washington’s reasons for its wars, its police state,
and its foreign and domestic policies.

Washington has kept America at war for ten years while millions of Americans lost their jobs and their homes.

War and a faltering economy have exploded the national debt, and a looming bankruptcy is being blamed on Social Security and Medicare.

The pursuit of war continues.

On January 23 Washington’s servile puppets--the EU member states--did Washington’s bidding and imposed an oil embargo on Iran, despite the pleas of Greece, a member of the EU.

Greece’s final ruin will come from the higher oil prices from the embargo, as the Greek government realizes.

The embargo is a reckless act.

If the US navy tries to intercept oil tankers carrying Iranian oil, large scale war could break out. This, many believe, is Washington’s aim.

It is easy for an embargo to become a blockade, which is an act of war.

Remember how easily the UN Security Council’s “no-fly zone” over
Libya was turned by the US and its NATO puppets into a military
attack on Libya’s armed forces and population centers supportive
of Gaddafi.

As the western “democracies” become increasingly lawless, the
mask of law that imperialism wears is stripped away and with it the
sheen of morality that has been used to cloak hegemonic ambitions.

With Iran surrounded and with two of Washington’s fleets in the Persian Gulf, another war of aggression seems inevitable.

Experts say that an attack on Iran by the US and NATO will disrupt the flow of oil that the world needs.

The crazed drive for hegemony is so compelling that Washington and its EU puppets show no hesitation in putting their own struggling economies at risk of sharply rising energy costs.

War abroad and austerity at home is the policy that is being imposed
on the western “democracies.”


Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30349.htm