Thursday, February 25, 2021

 The Guardian UK:

"Almost 56 years since the day Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City, lawyers and family members of the late civil rights and Black nationalist leader released new evidence they claim shows the NYPD and FBI conspired in his murder.


It comes in the form of a deathbed letter attributed to a former undercover NYPD officer who claimed he was pressured by supervisors to lure two of Malcolm X’s security men into committing crimes, a few days before the assassination on 21 February 1965.


The arrests kept the two men from managing door security at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights on the day of the shooting, according to the letter."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/21/malcolm-x-death-family-letter-nypd-fbi


-->The NYT will have to print this eventually. It is too big a story. Why is it that readers have to go to a foreign press for this story about FBI's involvement in Malcolm X's murder? 


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The Guardian UK:

"A special peace tribunal in Colombia has found that at least 6,402 people were murdered by the country’s army and falsely declared combat kills in order to boost statistics in the civil war with leftist rebel groups. That number is nearly three times higher than the figure previously admitted by the attorney general’s office.


The killings, referred to in Colombia as the 'false positives scandal', took place between 2002 and 2008, when the government was waging war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc), a leftist guerrilla insurgency, which ultimately made peace with the government in 2016. Soldiers were rewarded for the manipulated kill statistics with perks, including time off and promotions.


Included in the 2016 deal was the creation of a special peace tribunal – known by its Spanish initials, JEP – to investigate and try crimes committed by all sides in the conflict. On Thursday, the JEP made public the preliminary results of its investigation into the 'false positives' scandal, following the exhumation of mass graves across the country over the past two years."

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/19/colombia-farc-tribunal-false-positives


-->Why wouldn't the NYT report this story about state murders in Colombia? Well because Columbia is the closest ally the US has in Latin America. Columbia is like Israel in the New World, ready to do the empire's bidding without too much complaining. Columbia is even a member of NATO, and sends troops on all the empire's military adventures.  


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NPR Weekend Edition (Feb 20):

Ron Elving (Senior Editor on the Washington Desk) joined Scott Simon for an analysis of US options for Iran and the Middle East. The NPR experts readily agreed that Biden was going to pursue a different option than Trump's "America First" approach to US foreign relations. To Simon and Elving, America has two options, that of Trump's "isolationism" or a resumption of what they called US "world leadership." 


You would think that two bright and very well paid NPR senior staffers could have thought beyond these two options. Must we go back to Obama's endless wars in the Middle East, his drone assassinations around the world, and his flagrant disregard for human rights when it comes to America's partners in crime: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.  


No, Elving and Simon couldn't come up with a third option: withdraw US troops from our unwinnable wars in the Middle East, and from the 800 or more American military bases in the rest of the world. The third option might include using the hundreds of billions saved in military expenses and applying these funds to rebuilding the failed state that our empire has become at home. Nope, that option is always off the table in the land of NPT, as well as in the rest of corporate media.