by
Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org

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During the
Vietnam War, Sweden was an independent country with a moral conscience,
and Sweden gave sanctuary to US war protestors who refused the draft.
Washington realized the cost to itself and purchased the Swedish
government in order to prevent a reoccurrence of moral conscience
on the part of any Western government.

In the aftermath
of World War II and during the subsequent decades of the Cold War
with the Soviet Union, the Western nations presented themselves
as the moral conscience of the world. It turns out that this was
largely a hoax. The “Western nations” are merely pawns
complicit in Washington’s crimes as Washington attempts to shut
down all information in its pursuit of world hegemony.

Mark Weisbrot
writing
in Aljazeera has this to say about Washington’s use of its puppet
government in Sweden to pursue Julian Assange for publishing leaked
documents that reveal Washington’s mendacity and deception of other
countries:

“There
is a wealth
of evidence that the US is very much interested in punishing
Assange, and it keeps growing: on August 18, the Sydney Morning
Herald reported
that Australia’s foreign service was aware that US authorities
had been pursuing Assange for at least 18 months. And on August
24, Craig Murray, a former UK ambassador and 20-year career diplomat
there, reported
that his colleagues at the UK foreign office knew better than
to make the unprecedented threat of invading Ecuador’s embassy,
but did so under pressure from Washington.

“Like
many European countries, including of course the UK, Sweden’s
foreign policy is closely allied with that of the US government.
This is not the first time that Sweden has collaborated with its
Washington allies to violate human rights and international law.
In 2001, the Swedish government turned over two Egyptians to the
CIA so that they could be sent to Egypt, where they were tortured.

“Sweden’s
action brought condemnation from the UN and the government was
forced to pay damages to the victims; both were later cleared
of any wrongdoing. Polls showed that Swedes considered
this crime the worst political scandal in their country in 20
years.

“Sweden
is a highly developed social democracy that has many guarantees
of civil rights and liberties to its citizens. The people of Sweden
should not allow their government to continue to disgrace itself
in another international governmental crime – this one a pernicious
attack on freedom of expression – simply because Washington wants
them to do so.”

All Western
countries do Washington’s bidding and are complicit in Washington’s
crimes. Washington or Israel – essentially the same thing – has
caused the puppet government in Canada to end Canada’s diplomatic
relations with Iran for no reason whatsoever. The Canadian Foreign
Minister John Baird in an unusual show of ignorance, even for him,
condemned Iran as a “threat to global security.” No intelligent
person could possibly believe that Iran comprises a threat to global
security.

Look
at John Baird. He even looks like a madcap idiot. What has become
of Canadians, who once were an intelligent tolerant people, that
they put in office madmen? Baird, after being informed by his staff
that Iran lacked the oomph to be a global security threat, changed
his reason and insisted that he broke off diplomatic relations with
Iran because of Iran’s hostility toward Israel. This brought Canada’s
moronic foreign minister even louder laughter. It is Israel that
has been threatening Iran with military attack and demanding that
the US join in, not Iran threatening Israel with attack.

Western nations
have become a caricature of hypocrisy. If Western countries weren’t
armed with nuclear weapons, the larger world would be rolling in
laughter.

September
11, 2012

Paul
Craig Roberts, a
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases
of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book,

The
Tyranny of Good Intentions,
co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how
americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random
House. Visit his website.

Copyright
© 2012 Paul
Craig Roberts

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