We pay the enemy and America’s corporations profit

Virtually any US firm doing business in Saudi Arabia or with Iran is helping the enemy. Every American should read ex-CIA officer Robert Baer’s book, ‘Sleeping With the Devil.’ America and its corporations are so corrupt and venal, that they put corporate greed above the lives of our men and women in uniform, above the international community’s attempts to stop a new race for nuclear weapons.

Money is fungible. A percentage of all multi-million-dollar projects end up as graft in the pockets of Saudi royals. When we’re talking about tens of thousands of members of the royal family that have to be kept in the style of living to which they’re accustomed, what are the odds that some of it is going to al Qaeda coffers through “charities?” Then there are the madrassas the Saudi Wahhabis are building all over the world, including the US.

Saudi Arabia, which gave us 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11, is also supplying the vast majority of foreign fighters to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have a huge unemployment problem of young men under 30. Most university degrees in Saudi colleges are “Islamic Studies.” Yeah, that’s usable in the real world.

We will not rid ourselves of this problem until America ends its dependency on foreign oil. (See www.setamericafree.org) Imagine a world in which oil plummets to $15 bucks a barrel. Imagine what the Middle East would look like deprived of the money to finance Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and all the other terrorist groups. Imagine what would happen if resentment and hatred of the US which props up these repressive regimes were redirected to the regimes themselves.

General Electric has admitted that it has contracts in Syria and Iran for electric power plants, oil and gas, lighting, and medical equipment (that latter is humanitarian stuff not subject to sanctions and no one is citing them). GE claims that none of it is being used for military purposes by “Iranian forces” or “Syrian forces.” Here is an excerpt from GE’s response to a 2006 inquiry by the SEC, Office of Global Security Risk:

“In addition to diagnostic, monitoring and life science medical products, our products and services that are sold or otherwise distributed include power generation systems and parts, oil & gas equipment, power control/supply and lighting products in Iran, each of which is sold or distributed pursuant to legal obligations entered into prior to February 2005. We sell our products and services directly and through distributors located in Iran and elsewhere. Our customers include private companies, government-owned electrical utilities and refineries, the Ministry of Oil, public/private hospitals and universities. To the best of our knowledge, none of the products or services we provide has been, or could be, employee in any military application or used by the armed forces of Iran for strategic, tactical or training purposes.”

How about the foreign insurgents financed by Iran, flying into Damascus, being trained in Syrian camps and crossing through the Syrian-Iraq border, what our troops call the “rat line?”

Apparently, General Electric either does not get or care that Iran has been violating international law for 30 years with impunity. Iran has engaged in proxy wars through its terrorist arm Hezbollah and through its Revolutionary Guards. It has kidnapped and killed American citizens and the citizens of its neighbors. It has provided foreign fighters, arms, and money to fight the US and Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It defies the international community in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It declared war on the US — its enemy — and advocates its destruction, along with Israel.

The purpose of economic sanctions against Iran is to provide the world community with some leverage, to let the ayatollahs know that their murderous, outlaw conduct comes with a price, that there will be consequences. When companies like GE, an iconic American company founded by Thomas Edison, find legal loopholes to do business with the people who call America and its allies their sworn enemies, that not only gives comfort and life support to the ayatollahs, that sends a signal that America and its allies do not even have the support of their own people.

Some time ago, GE changed its corporate slogan from “We bring good things to life,” to “Imagination at work.” The latter is a good description of the mendacity of GE’s lawyers, who told the SEC Office of Global Security that GE’s old contracts were okay. Yet President Bill Clinton put US sanctions against Iran in place in 1995, more than twelve years ago.

When we see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling for “death to America” and watch Iranian fast boats charging US Navy ships, we see the enemy. General Electric sees a customer in good standing.

New York Times smears our troops across America, again

Our troops may not make our newspapers or TV shows for all they have done in this War on Terror yet they are making history and us proud.

Yet the New York Times hates America’s troops, has used the names of our honored dead, tossed the heroism of both the living and the dead aside for six years, and smeared their character at every opportunity. Sunday, they did it again.

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Not once in their 6,300 word article Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles did they place into context the 121 murders, alleged murders, and suicides they sited. Instead, the Times insinuated our troops are nothing but a bunch of crazed killers.

John Hinderacker at Power Line exposed the Times’ sorry excuse for journalism yesterday when he wrote:

Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan–a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a “cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.” Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military’s inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I’m pretty sure your first question will be: “How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?” Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it.

As of 2005, the homicide rate for Americans aged 18-24, the cohort into which most soldiers fall, was around 27 per 100,000. (The rate for men in that age range would be much higher, of course, since men commit around 88% of homicides. But since most soldiers are also men, I gave civilians the benefit of the doubt and considered gender a wash.)

Next we need to know how many servicemen have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. A definitive number is no doubt available, but the only hard figure I’ve seen is that as of last October, moe than 500,000 U.S. Army personnel had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Other sources peg the total number of personnel from all branches of the military who have served in the two theaters much higher, e.g. 750,000, 650,000 as of February 2007, or 1,280,000. For the sake of argument, let’s say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000–quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times’ 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times’ research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters put it this way, this morning in the New York Post:

Aren’t editors supposed to ask tough questions on feature stories? Are the Times’ editors so determined to undermine the public’s support for our troops that they’ll violate the most-basic rules of journalism, such as putting numbers in context? Answer that one for yourself.

Of course, all of this is part of the disgraceful left-wing campaign to pretend sympathy with soldiers — the Times column gushes crocodile tears — while portraying our troops as clichéd maniacs from the Oliver Stone fantasies that got lefties so self-righteously excited 20 years ago (See? We were right to dodge the draft …). And it’s not going to stop. Given the stakes in an election year, the duplicity will only intensify.

That’s correct. The New York Times does not give a tinker’s damn about America’s soldiers. All it cares about is using them to influence the outcome of elections.

Support our troops!