CIGARS, DRONES, & ATTACK ON IRAN

• Years ago while living in Florida I organized several trips to Cuba so activists and church people could taste the forbidden fruit. On one of the trips we visited a Cuban cigar factory and learned the remarkable story about how the workers would read to one another while they worked. Newspapers, novels, and the like were read all day long as the cigars were wrapped and when the Cuban revolution happened the workers in the cigar factory were some of the most active because they also were some of the most educated workers in the country. Last night I was speaking with a worker from Bath Iron Works and he told me how he regularly tacks articles (and sometimes my blog posts) on a bulletin board where a couple hundred workers daily stop to read the things he places there. Sometimes they are articles about the Jeju Island Navy base fight, reports on the Occupy movement and the growing economic divide in the country, stories about the growing suicides among active duty GI's, or the recent reports about the government throwing hundreds of dead soldiers body parts into garbage dumps. My friend said he is trying to help his fellow workers recover from watching Fox News.


• While the U.S. war in Iraq is supposedly over new reports indicate that Secretary of War Leon Panetta plans to continue flying Predator surveillance drones over the war ravaged nation. The unmanned airplanes will operate out of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Panetta also told Fox News that 40,000 U.S. troops will remain based throughout the Gulf region just in case they are needed. Panetta stated that the CIA drone flights over Iran will also continue. You might wonder if it is illegal and provocative for the U.S. to be sending military flights over Iranian air space? It's obvious that the U.S. and British military are doing economic sabotage missions inside Iran. This is how the U.S. got into the Vietnam war - first sending the CIA into Vietnam to blow up public transport and other infrastructure targets. Step by step it led to a full blown escalation and ultimately a very long and disastrous war.