America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (William Blum)

America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else
Author	William Blum
Publisher	Zed Books
First published	2012
Type	Book
Source	https://annas-archive.org/md5/bc26bc4bb845cc6190ef63e860b8bbf6
PDF	https://annas-archive.org/md5/e1a1eeec84ea9cc3f0c280560e1d8d82

Introduction

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world, for which end it is prepared to use any means necessary. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War II the United States has

• endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;1
• grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries;²
• attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders;³
• dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;⁴
• attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.⁵

The impact on world consciousness in recent decades of tragedies such as in Rwanda and Darfur has been more conspicuous than the American-caused tragedies because the first two each took place in one area and within a relatively short period of time. Despite the extensive documentation of the crimes of US foreign policy, because of the very breadth of American interventions and the time period of sixty-eight years it’s much more difficult for the world to fully grasp what the United States has done.

In total: since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world),6 in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair, and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands. US foreign policy has likely earned the hatred of most of the people in the world who are able to more or less follow current news events and are familiar with a bit of modern history.

Oderint dum metuant – ‘Let them hate so long as they fear’ – was attributed to one or another prominent leader of Ancient Rome.

Shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, career diplomat John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the US embassy in Athens, resigned over the Iraq policy. ‘Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?’ he asked in his letter of resignation, referring to the fact that more than one member of the Bush administration had used the expression.⁷

Following the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, former CIA director James Woolsey commented about worries that storming Baghdad would incite Islamic radicals and broaden support for them: ‘The silence of the Arab public in the wake of America’s victories in Afghanistan,’ he said, proves that ‘only fear will re-establish respect for the U.S. … We need to read a little bit of Machiavelli.’ (In the same talk, Woolsey further established himself as a foreign policy pundit by stating: ‘There is so much evidence with respect to [Saddam Hussein’s] development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles … that I consider this point beyond dispute.’⁸)

Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, in June 2002, President George W. Bush told America’s future warriors that they were ‘in a conflict between good and evil’ and that ‘We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries.’9 The United States institutional war machine was, and remains, on automatic pilot.

When the plans for a new office building for the military, which came to be known as The Pentagon, were brought before the Senate on August 14, 1941, Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. ‘Unless the war is to be permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of such size?’ he asked. ‘Or is the war to be permanent?’¹⁰

‘Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors,’ observed The Black Commentator in the fourth year of the war in Iraq. ‘American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others.’¹¹

It can be said that American history is the history of an empire in the making, since the first British settler killed the first native American.

All countries, it is often argued, certainly all powerful countries, have always acted belligerent and militaristic, so why condemn the United States so much? But that is like arguing that since one can find anti-Semitism in every country, why condemn Nazi Germany? Obviously, it’s a question of magnitude. And the magnitude of US aggression puts it historically into a league all by itself, just as the magnitude of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism did. Is the world supposed to uncritically accept terribly aggressive behavior because it’s traditional and expected? Somehow normal? Is that any way to build a better world?

Full spectrum dominance

A number of expressions and slogans associated with the Nazi regime in Germany have become commonly known in English.

Sieg Heil! – Hail Victory!

Arbeit macht frei – Work makes you free.

Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt – Today Germany, tomorrow the world.

Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht! – I was only following orders!

But none perhaps is better known than Deutschland über alles – Germany above all.

Thus I was taken aback, in June 2008, when I happened to come across the website of the United States Air Force (www.airforce.com) and saw on its first page a heading ‘Above all’. Lest you think that this referred simply and innocently to planes high up in the air, this page linked to another site (www.airforce.com/achangingworld) where ‘Above all’ was repeated even more prominently, with links to sites for ‘Air Dominance,’ ‘Space Dominance,’ and ‘Cyber Dominance,’ each of which in turn repeated ‘Above all’. These guys don’t kid around. They’re not your father’s imperialist warmongers. If they’re planning for a new ‘thousand-year Reich’, let’s hope that their fate is no better than the original, which lasted twelve years.

Here’s how the gentlemen of the Pentagon have sounded in the recent past on the subject of space.

We will engage terrestrial targets someday – ships, airplanes, land targets – from space. … We’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. (General Joseph Ashy, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Space Command¹²)

With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we’re going to keep it. (Keith R. Hall, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office13)

During the early portion of the 21st century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal medium of warfare. … The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance. … Development of ballistic missile defenses using space systems and planning for precision strikes from space offers a counter to the worldwide proliferation of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. … Space is a region with increasing commercial, civil, international, and military interests and investments. The threat to these vital systems is also increasing. … Control of Space is the ability to assure access to space, freedom of operations within the space medium, and an ability to deny others the use of space, if required. (‘United States Space Command: Vision for 2020’¹⁴)

Space represents a fundamentally new and better way to apply military force. (US Strategic Command¹⁵)

Washington’s ambition for world domination is driven not by the cause of a deeper democracy or freedom, a more just world, ending poverty or violence, or a more liveable planet, but rather by economics and ideology.

Michael Parenti has observed:

The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere – including the people of North America – the blessings of an untrammeled ‘free market’ corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.¹⁶

It can thus be appreciated that to the American power elite one of the longest lasting and most essential foreign policy goals has been preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model. This was the essence of the Cold War. Cuba and Chile were two examples of several such societies in the socialist camp which the United States did its best to crush.

Like most powerful leaders – past, present, and future – American officials would have the rest of us believe that the policies they pursue in their quest for domination are beneficial to their own people and to most of the world, even if the blessings are not always immediately recognizable. They would like nothing better than to remake the world in America’s image, with free enterprise, ‘individualism’, something called ‘Judeo-Christian values,’ and some other thing they call ‘democracy’ as core elements. Imagine, then, what a shock September 11, 2001 was to such men; not simply the kind of shock that you and I experienced on that fateful day, but the realization that someone had dared to ‘diss’ the empire, a traumatic shock to the political nervous system. American leaders assume that US moral authority is as absolute and unchallengeable as US military power. ‘The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing,’ a Russian parliamentary leader noted in 2006. ‘When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: “The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc.”’17

And here is Michael Ledeen, former official of the Reagan administration, later a fellow at one of the leading conservative think tanks, American Enterprise Institute, speaking shortly before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.¹⁸

It was difficult to resist. A year after the dreadful invasion and catastrophic occupation of Iraq I sent Mr Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: ‘I’d like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days.’ I did not expect a reply, and I was not disappointed.

Future president Theodore Roosevelt, who fought in Cuba at the turn of the last century with the greatest of gung-ho-ism, wrote: ‘It is for the good of the world that the English-speaking race in all its branches should hold as much of the world’s surface as possible.’19 One can find similar sentiments without end expressed by American leaders since the 1890s.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 many Americans acquired copies of the Quran in an attempt to understand why Muslims could do what they did. One can wonder, following the invasion of Iraq, whether Iraqis bought Christian bibles in search of an explanation of why the most powerful nation on the planet had laid such terrible waste to their ancient land, which had done no harm to the United States.

Wars of aggression

Has there ever been an empire that didn’t tell itself and the rest of the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The National Security Strategy, a paper issued by the White House in September 2002, states:

In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty.

However, later in the same report we read:

It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States. … To forestall or prevent … hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.

‘Preemptive war’ is what the post-World War II International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, called a war of aggression. ‘To initiate a war of aggression,’ the Tribunal declared, ‘therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’

Six months after issuing the National Security Strategy, the United States carried out an attack on Iraq which was less – that is, worse – than ‘preemptive’: there was no provocation or threat of any kind from Iraq. The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by imperial Japan was certainly more preemptive. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

Japanese leaders knew that B-17 Flying Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines and were surely familiar with the public discussions in the US explaining how they could be used to incinerate Japan’s wooden cities in a war of extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases – ‘to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bombing attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps,’ as retired Air Force General Chennault recommended in 1940, a proposal that ‘simply delighted’ President Roosevelt. Evidently, that is a far more powerful justification for bombing military bases in US colonies than anything conjured up by Bush–Blair and their associates in their execution of ‘preemptive war.’20

The Germans insisted that their invasion of Poland in 1939 was justified on the grounds of preemption. Poland, declared the Nazis, was planning to invade Germany. (Nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto Bismarck once asserted that ‘Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.’) In 2003, and for some years subsequent, it was the United States saying that Iraq was an ‘imminent threat’ to invade the US or Israel or whoever, even when no weapons of mass destruction had been located in Iraq and no plausible motive for Iraq invading the US or Israel could be given. The claim of an imminent Iraqi threat eventually fell of its own weight, as did many other prominent Bush administration assertions about the US invasion.

Intelligence of the political kind

American leaders have convinced a majority of the American people of the benevolence of their government’s foreign policy. To have persuaded Americans of this, as well as a multitude of other people throughout the world – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the lists of US international atrocities shown above – must surely rank as one of the most outstanding feats of propaganda and indoctrination in all of history.

I think there are all kinds of intelligence in this world: musical, scientific, mathematical, artistic, academic, literary, mechanical, and so on. Then there’s political intelligence, which I would define as the ability to see through the nonsense which the politicians – echoed by the media – of every society feed their citizens from birth on to win elections and assure continuance of the prevailing ideology. A lack in the American citizenry of any of the other types of intelligence, though perhaps personally detrimental, does not kill. A widespread deficiency of political intelligence, however, can and does allow the taking of the lives of large numbers of innocent people in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam. The American people alone have the power to influence the extremists who, in one election after another, in the form of Democrats or Republicans, come to power in the United States and proceed to create havoc and disaster in one new killing field after another. But the citizenry fall for US government propaganda justifying its military actions as regularly and as naively as Charlie Brown falling for Lucy’s football.

The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window.

Now why is that? Why are these people so easily indoctrinated? Are they just stupid? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, and if you don’t deal with these basic beliefs you’ll be talking to a stone wall. This book deals with many of these basic beliefs, or what can also be called ‘myths.’

It is not at all uncommon to grow to adulthood in the United States, even graduate from university, and not be seriously exposed to opinions significantly contrary to these prevailing myths, and know remarkably little about the exceptionally harmful foreign policy of the government. It’s one thing for historical myths to rise in the absence of a written history of a particular period, such as our beliefs concerning the Neanderthals; but much odder is the rise of such myths in the face of a plethora of historical documents, testimony, films, and books.

To describe this on a personal level: I remember the good warm feeling I used to have in my teens and twenties, and even into my thirties, whenever I heard good ol’ Bob Hope dishing out his good ol’ American humor to the good ol’ American GIs scattered all over the world. I never gave any thought to what the good ol’ American GIs were actually doing all over the world in the first place. But would good ol’ Bob Hope be entertaining good ol’ American GIs embarked on anything less than honorable missions? Could the nice, young, clean-cut American boys who laughed so heartily at the same jokes I laughed at be up to no good? Had our soldiers ever been up to no good? Nothing I had been exposed to in any school or mainstream media had left me with that impression in any firm or lasting way. The question had never even crossed my mind.

On the infrequent occasion that I encountered someone of dissident views they invariably did not have the facts at their fingertips, did not argue their case very well, did not understand – as I myself did not – my basic beliefs/myths. Their effect upon my thinking was thus negligible. It took the horror of Vietnam inescapably thrown into my face by protesters and their media coverage to initiate a whole new personal intellectual process. The process would likely have begun much sooner had I been able to read something like the present book.

Democracy is a beautiful thing, except that part about letting just any old jerk vote

The people can have anything they want.

The trouble is, they do not want anything.

At least they vote that way on election day.

(Eugene Debs, American socialist leader, early twentieth century)

Why was the 2008 presidential primary vote for Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich so small when anti-Iraq War sentiment in the United States was apparently so high – millions had marched against it on repeated occasions, with perhaps not a single demonstration of any size in support – and Kucinich was easily the leading anti-war candidate in the Democratic race, indeed the only genuine one after former senator Mike Gravel withdrew? Even allowing for his being cut out of several televized national debates, Kucinich’s showing was remarkably poor. In Michigan, on January 15, it was only Kucinich and Hillary Clinton running. Clinton got 56 percent of the vote, the ‘uncommitted’ vote (for candidates who had withdrawn but whose names were still on the ballot) was 39 percent, and Kucinich received but 4 percent. And Clinton had been the leading pro-war hawk of all the Democratic candidates.

I think much of the answer may lie in the fact that the majority of the American people – like the majority of people elsewhere in the world – aren’t very sophisticated politically or intellectually, and many of them weren’t against the war for very cerebral reasons. Their opposition often stemmed from things like the large number of American soldiers who’d been killed or wounded; the fact that the United States was not ‘winning’; that America’s reputation in the world was being soiled; that numerous other Americans had expressed their opposition to the war; that President Bush suffered from multiple verbal and character shortcomings with television comedians regularly making fun of him – or because of a number of other reasons we couldn’t even guess at. There is not much that is particularly perceptive or learned in this collection of reasons, no special insight into history, foreign relations, international law, warfare, economics, propaganda, or ideology – the basis of the ‘political intelligence’ referred to above; which makes it so much easier for a politician who actually supports a war to sell herself as an anti-war candidate when the occasion calls for it.

Activists like myself are often scoffed at for saying the same old things to the same old people; just spinning our wheels, we’re told, ‘preaching to the choir’ or ‘preaching to the converted.’ But long experience as speaker, writer and activist in the area of foreign policy tells me it just ain’t so. From the questions and comments I regularly get from my audiences, via email and in person, I can plainly see that there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir’s thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda trick; they’re unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present; or knowing the facts but unable to apply them at the appropriate moment; vulnerable to being led astray by the next person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. The choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.

As cynical as many Americans may think the members of the choir are, the choir is frequently not cynical enough about the power elite’s motivations. No matter how many times they’re lied to, they still often underestimate the government’s capacity for deceit, clinging to the belief that their leaders somehow mean well. As long as people believe that their elected leaders are well intentioned, the leaders can, and do, get away with murder. Literally. This belief is the most significant of the myths the present book deals with.

One reason for confusion among the electorate is that the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, while forever throwing charges and counter-charges at each other, actually hold indistinguishable views concerning foreign policy, a similarity that is one of the subjects of this book. What is the poor voter to make of all this?

Apropos of this we have the view of the American electoral system from a foreigner, Cuban leader Raúl Castro. He has noted that the United States pits two identical parties against one another, and joked that a choice between a Republican and Democrat is like choosing between himself and his brother Fidel. ‘We could say in Cuba we have two parties: one led by Fidel and one led by Raúl, what would be the difference?’ he asked. ‘That’s the same thing that happens in the United States … both are the same. Fidel is a little taller than me, he has a beard and I don’t.’21

In sum, even when the hearts of the choir may be in the right place, their heads still need working on, on a recurring basis. And, in any event, very few people are actually born into the choir; they achieve membership only after being preached to, multiple times.

The essays that make up the book are a combination of new and old; combined, updated, expanded, refined; many first appeared in one form or another in my monthly online Anti-Empire Report, or on my website, at various times during the past eight years or so; where a date is specified at the beginning of the piece it’s the date it was first written and should be read from that vantage point (although in some cases it may differ markedly from the original). This book is for current and, hopefully, future members of the choir.

US Foreign Policy vs the World

Mit der dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

(‘With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.’)

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

I’m often told by readers of their encounters with Americans who support the outrages of US foreign policy no matter what facts are presented to them, no matter what arguments are made, no matter how much the government’s statements are shown to be false. My advice is to forget such people. They would support the outrages even if the government came to their home, seized their firstborn, and hauled them away screaming, so long as the government assured them it was essential to fighting terrorism (or communism), and threw in a little paean to democracy, freedom, and God. My rough guess is that these people constitute no more than 15 percent of the American population. I suggest that we concentrate on the rest, who are reachable.

Inasmuch as I cannot see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than: educate yourself and as many others as you can, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass, at which point… I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger.

As to the education, I like to emphasize certain points that try to deal with the underlying intellectual misconceptions and emotional ‘hang-ups’ I think Americans have which stand in the way of their seeing through the propaganda. Briefly, here are some of the main points (explained in more detail in later chapters):

1. Far and away the most important lesson to impart to the American mind and soul: regardless of our lifetime of education to the contrary, US foreign policy does not ‘mean well.’ The facts presented in this book should leave no doubt of that thesis, but the progressive political activist must be conscious of it at all times. I like to ask the American True Believers: what would the United States have to do in its foreign policy to cause you to stop supporting it?
2. The United States is not concerned with this thing called ‘democracy’, no matter how many times every American president uses the word each time he opens his mouth. As noted in the Introduction, since 1945 the US has attempted to overthrow more than fifty governments, most of which were democratically elected, and grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries. The question is: what do American leaders mean by ‘democracy’? The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy – the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough. The first thing they have in mind is making sure the target country has the political, financial, and legal mechanisms in place to make it hospitable to corporate globalization.
3. Anti-American terrorists are not motivated by hatred or envy of freedom or democracy, or by American wealth, secular government, or culture, as we’ve been told many times. They are motivated by decades of awful things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. It works the same way all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of harmful American policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation, and torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in recent years have created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We’ll be hearing from them for a very long time.
4. The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is a lengthy and infamous history of Washington’s support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. He’s but one of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who’ve been given haven in the United States over the years. The United States has also provided close support to terrorists, or fought on the same side as Islamic jihadists, in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al-Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.
5. Iraq was not any kind of a threat to the United States. Of the never-ending lies concerning Iraq, this is the most insidious, the necessary foundation for all the other lies.
6. There was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government usually supported by the United States.

That oh-so-precious world where words have no meaning

In December 1989, two days after bombing and invading the defenseless population of Panama, killing as many as a few thousand totally innocent people, guilty of no harm to any American, President George H.W. Bush declared that his ‘heart goes out to the families of those who have died in Panama.’1 When a reporter asked him, ‘Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get [Panamanian leader Manuel] Noriega?’ Bush replied: ‘Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it.’²

A year later, preparing for his next worthwhile mass murder, the first US invasion of Iraq, Bush Sr. said: ‘People say to me: “How many lives? How many lives can you expend?” Each one is precious.’³

At the end of 2006, with Bush’s son now president, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel, commenting about American deaths reaching 3,000 in the second Iraq War, said that Bush ‘believes that every life is precious and grieves for each one that is lost.’⁴ In February 2008, with American deaths about to reach 4,000, and Iraqi deaths as many as a million or more, George W. Bush asserted:

When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious. … In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion. … When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man.⁵

Inspired by such noble – dare I say precious? – talk from its leaders, the American military machine likes to hire like-minded warriors. Here is Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater, whose employees in Iraq killed people like others flick away a mosquito, in testimony before Congress: ‘Every life, whether American or Iraqi, is precious.’⁶

While his killing of thousands of Iraqis was proceeding merrily along in 2003, the second President George Bush was moved to say: ‘We believe in the value and dignity of every human life.’7

Both father and son are on record expressing their deep concern for God and prayer both before and during their mass slaughters. ‘I trust God speaks through me,’ said Bush the younger in 2004. ‘Without that, I couldn’t do my job.’⁸

After his devastation of Iraq and its people, Bush the elder said: ‘I think that, like a lot of others who had positions of responsibility in sending someone else’s kids to war, we realize that in prayer what mattered is how it might have seemed to God.’⁹

God, one can surmise, might have asked George Bush, father and son, about the kids of Iraq. And the adults. And, in a testy, rather ungodlike manner, might have snapped: ‘So stop wasting all the precious lives already!’

In the now-famous exchange on television in 1996 between Madeleine Albright and reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking of US sanctions against Iraq, and asked the then-US ambassador to the UN, and Secretary of State-to-be: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And… and you know, is the price worth it?’

Albright replied: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price… we think the price is worth it.’¹⁰

Ten years later, Condoleezza Rice, continuing the fine tradition of female Secretaries of State and the equally noble heritage of the Bush family, declared that the current horror in Iraq was ‘worth the investment’ in American lives and dollars.¹¹

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011, in the midst of NATO/US bombing of his country, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Barack Obama in which he said:

We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened … Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair.12

Gaddafi’s hope that writing to Obama could move the American president to put an end to the bombing of Libya turned out, as we know, to be unrealistic.

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab–Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.¹³ Washington’s reply was its ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing.

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted President Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place very shortly thereafter.¹⁴

In 1994, it was reported that the spokesperson of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos, said that ‘he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians.’ ‘Finally,’ Marcos said, ‘they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes.’¹⁵ Yet for many years, before and after these remarks, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the tools and training needed to crush the Zapatistas.

Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, the Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.16 The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that ‘the four powers’ (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹⁷ Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some kind of communist.

The myth of the good war

The reason so many Americans support US war crimes is that they’re convinced that no matter how bad things may look, the government means well. And one of the foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second World War, a historical saga that all Americans are taught about from childhood on. We all know what its real name is: ‘The Good War.’

Which leads me to recommend a book, The Myth of the Good War, by Jacques Pauwels, published in 2002. It’s very well done, well argued and documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various Communist parties and other elements of the European left to share in (highly earned) political power after the war; the most dramatic example of this being the US taking the side of the Greek neo-fascists against the Greek left, who had fought the Nazis courageously. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to at least partially explain his postwar suspicious manner toward his ‘allies.’ In the West we called it ‘paranoia.’18

The enduring mystique of the Marshall Plan

Amidst all the political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 the name ‘Marshall Plan’ kept being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the supposed political advances. But caveat emptor; let the buyer beware.

During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I’ve often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and ignoring the many positive sides. When I ask the person to give me some examples of what s/he thinks show the virtuous face of America’s dealings with the world in modern times, one of the things mentioned – almost without exception – is the Marshall Plan. This is usually described along the lines of: ‘After World War II, the United States unselfishly built up Europe economically, including its wartime enemies, and allowed them to compete with the US.’ Even those today who are very cynical about US foreign policy, who are quick to question the White House’s motives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, have little problem in accepting this picture of an altruistic America of the period 1948–1952. But let us have a closer look at the Marshall Plan.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19

After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires:

1. Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism.
2. Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests.
3. Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat.
4. Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

The CIA also skimmed large amounts of Marshall Plan funds to covertly maintain cultural institutions, journalists, and publishers, at home and abroad, for the omnipresent and heated propaganda of the Cold War; the selling of the Marshall Plan to the American public and elsewhere was entwined with fighting ‘the red menace’. Moreover, in their covert operations, CIA personnel at times used the Marshall Plan as cover, and one of the Plan’s chief architects, Richard Bissell, then moved to the CIA, stopping off briefly at the Ford Foundation, a long-time conduit for CIA covert funds. ’Twas one big happy, scheming family.

The Marshall Plan imposed all kinds of restrictions on the recipient countries, all manner of economic and fiscal criteria which had to be met, designed for a wide-open return to free enterprise. The US had the right not only to control how Marshall Plan dollars were spent, but also to approve the expenditure of an equivalent amount of the local currency, giving Washington substantial power over the internal plans and programs of the European states; welfare programs for the needy survivors of the war were looked upon with disfavor by the United States; even rationing smelled too much like socialism and had to go or be scaled down; nationalization of industry was even more vehemently opposed by Washington.

The great bulk of Marshall Plan funds returned to the United States, or never left, being paid directly to American corporations to purchase American goods. The US Agency for International Development (AID) stated in 1999: ‘The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.’20

The program could be seen as more a joint business operation between governments than an American ‘handout’; often it was a business arrangement between American and European ruling classes, many of the latter fresh from their service to the Third Reich, some of the former as well; or it was an arrangement between congressmen and their favorite corporations to export certain commodities, including a lot of military goods. Thus did the Marshall Plan help lay the foundation for the military–industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life.

It is very difficult to find, or put together, a clear, credible description of how the Marshall Plan played a pivotal or indispensable role in the recovery in each of the sixteen recipient nations. The opposing view, at least as clear, is that the Europeans – highly educated, skilled and experienced – could have recovered from the war on their own without an extensive master plan and aid program from abroad, and indeed had already made significant strides in this direction before the Plan’s funds began flowing. Marshall Plan funds were not directed primarily toward the urgently needed feeding of individuals or rebuilding their homes, schools, or factories, but at strengthening the economic superstructure, particularly the iron, steel and power industries. The period was in fact marked by deflationary policies, unemployment, and recession. The one unambiguous outcome was the full restoration of the propertied classes.²¹

Why do they hate us? Part 1

Here is President Dwight Eisenhower in a March 1953 National Security Council Meeting: Why can’t we ‘get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us?’²²

The United States is still wondering, and is no closer to an understanding than Good Ol’ Ike was sixty years ago. The American people and their leaders appear to still believe what Frances Fitzgerald observed in her study of American history textbooks:

According to these books, the United States had been a kind of Salvation Army to the rest of the world: throughout history, it had done little but dispense benefits to poor, ignorant, and diseased countries. … the United States always acted in a disinterested fashion, always from the highest of motives; it gave, never took.23

I almost feel sorry for the American troops scattered round the world on military bases situated on other people’s land. They’re ‘can-do’ Americans, accustomed to getting their way, accustomed to thinking of themselves as the best, and they’re frustrated as hell, unable to figure out ‘why they hate us’, why we can’t win them over, why we can’t at least wipe them out. Don’t they want freedom and democracy? At one time or another the can-do boys tried writing a comprehensive set of laws and regulations, even a constitution, for Iraq; setting up mini-bases in neighborhoods; building walls to block off areas; training and arming ‘former’ Sunni insurgents to fight Shias and al-Qaeda; enlisting Shias to help fight, against whomever; leaving weapons or bomb-making material in public view to see who picks it up, then pouncing on them; futuristic vehicles and machines and electronic devices to destroy roadside bombs; setting up their own Arabic-language media, censoring other media; classes for detainees on anger control, an oath of peace, and the sacredness of life and property; regularly revising the official reason the United States was in the country in the first place… one new tactic after another, and when all else fails call it a ‘success’ and give it a nice inspiring action name, like ‘surge’… and nothing helps. They’re can-do Americans, using good ol’ American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home; employing psychologists and anthropologists… and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you’re selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you’re totally ruining your customers’ lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality. They’re can-do Americans, accustomed to playing by the rules – theirs; and they’re frustrated as hell.

Here now the Google Cavalry rides up on its silver horse. Through its think tank (or ‘think/do tank’), Google Ideas, the company paid for eighty former Muslim extremists, neo-Nazis, US gang members and other former radicals to gather in Dublin in June, 2011 (‘Summit Against Violent Extremism’, or SAVE) to explore how technology can play a role in ‘de-radicalization’ efforts around the globe. Now is that not Can-do ambitious?

The ‘formers,’ as they have been dubbed by Google, were surrounded by 120 thinkers, activists, philanthropists, and business leaders. The goal was to dissect the question of what draws some people, particularly young people, to extremist movements and why some of them leave. The person in charge of this project was Jared Cohen, who spent four years on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, and was soon to be an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), focusing on counter-radicalization, innovation, technology, and statecraft.24

So… it’s ‘violent extremism’ that’s the big mystery, the target for all these intellectuals to figure out. Why does violent extremism attract so many young people all over the world? Or, of more importance probably to the State Department and CFR types, why do violent extremists single out the United States as their target of choice?

Readers of my rants do not need to be enlightened as to the latter question. There is simply an abundance of terrible things US foreign policy has done in every corner of the world. As to what attracts young people to violent extremism, consider this: what makes a million young Americans willing to travel to places like Afghanistan and Iraq to risk life and limb to kill other young people, who have never done them any harm, and to commit unspeakable atrocities and tortures?

Is this not extreme behavior? Can these young Americans not be called ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’? Are they not violent? Do the Google experts understand their behavior? If not, how will they ever understand the foreign Muslim extremists? Are the experts prepared to examine the underlying phenomenon – the deep-seated belief in ‘American exceptionalism’ drilled into every cell and nerve ganglion of American consciousness from prekindergarten on? Do the esteemed experts, then, have to wonder about those who believe in ‘Muslim exceptionalism’?

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, declared: ‘He [Obama] is trying to say: “Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you”.’25

Why do they hate us? Part 2

For some time in 2005 the Pentagon was engaged in fighting against the American Civil Liberties Union, members of Congress, and others who were pushing for the release of new photos and videos of prisoner ‘abuse’ (otherwise known as ‘torture’) in the American gulag. The Pentagon was blocking release of these materials because, they claimed, it would inflame anti-American feelings and inspire terrorist acts abroad. This clearly implied that so-called anti-Americans come to their views as a result of American actions or behavior. Yet, the official position of the Bush administration, repeated numerous times and never rescinded by the Obama administration, is that the motivation behind anti-American terrorism has nothing to do with anything the United States does abroad, or has ever done, but has to do with personal defects of the terrorists.²⁶

In a similar vein, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes toured the Middle East in 2005 for the stated purpose of correcting the ‘mistaken’ impressions people have of the United States, which, she would have the world believe, are the root cause of anti-American hatred and terrorism; it was all a matter of misunderstanding, image, and public relations. At her confirmation hearing in July, Hughes said: ‘The mission of public diplomacy is to engage, inform, and help others understand our policies, actions and values.’27 But what if the problem is that the Muslim world, like the rest of the world, understands America only too well?

Predictably, this confidante of President Bush (this being her only qualification for the position) uttered one inanity after another on her tour. Here she is in Turkey: ‘to preserve the peace, sometimes my country believes war is necessary,’ and declaring that women are faring much better in Iraq than they did under Saddam Hussein.²⁸ When her remarks were angrily challenged by Turkish women in the audience, Hughes replied: ‘Obviously we have a public relations challenge here … as we do in different places throughout the world.’²⁹ Right, Karen, it’s all just PR, nothing of any substance to worry your banality-filled little head about.

The Arab News, a leading English-language Middle East daily, summed up Hughes’s performance thus: ‘Painfully clueless.’³⁰

The Washington Post reported that Hughes’s ‘audiences, especially in Egypt, often consisted of elites with long ties to the United States, but many people she spoke with said the core reason for the poor U.S. image remained U.S. policies, not how those policies were marketed or presented.’³¹ Might she and her boss learn anything from this? Nah.

Why do they hate us? Part 3

The Pentagon awarded three contracts in June 2005, worth up to $300 million, to companies it hoped would inject more creativity into US psychological operations to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly their opinion of the American military. ‘We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media,’ said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element.

Dan Kuehl, a specialist in information warfare at the National Defense University, added: ‘There are a billion-plus Muslims that are undecided. How do we move them over to being more supportive of us? If we can do that, we can make progress and improve security.’32 And so it goes. And so it has gone since September 11, 2001. The world’s only superpower has felt misunderstood, unloved. ‘How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America?’ asked George W. a month after 9/11. ‘I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am – like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.’³³

Psychological operations, information warfare, cutting-edge media … surely there’s a high-tech solution. But again – what if it’s not a misunderstanding? What if the people of the world simply don’t believe that we’re so good? What if they – in their foreign ignorance and Al Jazeera brainwashing – have come to the bizarre conclusion that saturation bombing, invasion, occupation, destruction of homes, torture, depleted uranium, killing a hundred thousand, and daily humiliation of men, women and children do not indicate good intentions?

Why can’t the US government talk about why they hate us?

Following an act of terrorism, we rarely receive from our officials and media even a slightly serious discussion of the terrorists’ motivation. Was there any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed?

Any perceived wrong they wished to make right? Anything they sought to obtain revenge for? And why is the United States the most common target of terrorists?

But such questions are virtually forbidden in the mainstream world. At a White House press briefing in January 2010, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, John Brennan, was asked a question by veteran reporter Helen Thomas concerning an attempt by ‘the underwear bomber,’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day 2009:

THOMAS: What is really lacking always for us is you don’t give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. … What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out or why.

BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents … [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they’re] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.

THOMAS: And you’re saying it’s because of religion?

BRENNAN: I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.

THOMAS: Why?

BRENNAN: I think … this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.

THOMAS: But you haven’t explained why.34

You’ve got to be carefully taught

It needs to be repeated: the leading myth of US foreign policy, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous … schoolbooks, comicbooks, church sermons, Hollywood films, all forms of media, all the time; hardened into historical concrete. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post in 2009:

We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again … And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.35

How many young service members have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares ‘What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it,’ he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by simply not dropping any bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you as if you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it ‘humanitarian intervention.’ It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, ‘progressives,’ as just that. Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

God bless America. And its bombs

When they bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador and Nicaragua I said nothing because I wasn’t a communist.

When they bombed China, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, and the Congo I said nothing because I didn’t know about it.

When they bombed Lebanon and Grenada I said nothing because I didn’t understand it.

When they bombed Panama I said nothing because I wasn’t a drug dealer.

When they bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen I said nothing because I wasn’t a terrorist.

When they bombed Yugoslavia and Libya for ‘humanitarian’ reasons I said nothing because it sounded so honorable.

Then they bombed my house and there was no one left to speak out for me. But it didn’t really matter. I was dead.36

It has become a commonplace to accuse the United States of choosing as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns of modern times – seventy-eight consecutive days – was carried out against the people of the former Yugoslavia: white, European, Christians. The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are: (a) it poses an obstacle – could be anything – to a particular desire of the American Empire; (b) it is virtually defenseless against aerial attack; (c) it does not possess nuclear weapons.

A Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of double standards

On February 21, 2008, following a demonstration against the United States’ role in Kosovo’s declaration of independence, rioters in the Serbian capital of Belgrade broke into the US embassy and set fire to an office. The attack was called ‘intolerable’ by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,37 and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he would ask the UN Security Council to issue a unanimous statement ‘expressing the council’s outrage, condemning the attack, and also reminding the Serbian government of its responsibility to protect diplomatic facilities.’³⁸

This is of course standard language for such situations. But what the media and American officials didn’t remind us is that in May 1999, during the US/NATO bombing of Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by a US missile, causing considerable damage and killing three embassy employees. The official Washington story on this – then, and still now – is that it was a mistake. But this is almost certainly a lie. According to a joint investigation by the Observer of London and Politiken newspaper in Denmark, the embassy was bombed because it was being used to transmit electronic communications for the Yugoslav army after the army’s regular system was made inoperable by the bombing. The Observer was told by ‘senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US’ that the embassy bombing was deliberate, which was ‘confirmed in detail by three other Nato officers – a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior [NATO] headquarters officer in Brussels.’39

Moreover, the New York Times reported at the time that the bombing had destroyed the embassy’s intelligence-gathering nerve center, and two of the three Chinese killed were intelligence officers. ‘The highly sensitive nature of the parts of the embassy that were bombed suggests why the Chinese … insist the bombing was no accident. … “That’s exactly why they don’t buy our explanation”,’ said a Pentagon official.⁴⁰ There were several other good reasons not to buy the story as well.⁴¹

In April 1986, after the French government refused the use of its airspace to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes were forced to take another, longer route. When they reached Libya they bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and all communication links knocked out.⁴²

And in April 2003, the US ambassador to Russia was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry due to the fact that the residential quarter of Baghdad where the Russian embassy was located was bombed several times by the United States during its invasion of Iraq.⁴³ There had been reports that Saddam Hussein was hiding in the embassy.⁴⁴

So, we can perhaps chalk up the State Department’s affirmations about the inviolability of embassies as yet another example of US foreign policy hypocrisy. But I think that there is some satisfaction in that American foreign policy officials, as morally damaged as they must be, are not all so unconscious that they don’t know they’re swimming in a sea of hypocrisy. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2004 that

The State Department plans to delay the release of a human rights report that was due out today, partly because of sensitivities over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq, U.S. officials said. One official … said the release of the report, which describes actions taken by the U.S. government to encourage respect for human rights by other nations, could ‘make us look hypocritical.’45

And in 2007 the Washington Post informed us that Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary of State and current member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, noted that ‘we have to be able to cope with the argument that the U.S. is inconsistent and hypocritical in its promotion of democracy around the world. That may be true.’⁴⁶

The empire’s deep dark secret

‘In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined,’ declared Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on February 25, 2011.

Remarkable. Every one of the many wars the United States has engaged in since the end of World War II has been presented to the American people, explicitly or implicitly, as a war of necessity, not a war of choice; a war urgently needed to protect American citizens, American allies, vital American ‘interests,’ freedom and/or democracy, or kill dangerous anti-American terrorists and various other bad guys. Here is President Obama speaking of Afghanistan: ‘But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.’⁴⁷

This being the case, how can a future administration say it will not go to war if any of these noble causes is seriously threatened? The answer, of course, is that these noble causes are irrelevant. The United States goes to war where and when it wants, and if a noble cause is not self-evident, the government, with indispensable help from the American media, will manufacture one. Secretary Gates is now admitting that there is a choice involved. Well, Bob, thanks for telling us. You were Bush’s Secretary of Defense as well, and before that spent twenty-six years in the CIA and the National Security Council. You sure know how to keep a secret.

Reforming the Indonesian military, for forty years

(June 13, 2005)

On May 25, 2005 President Bush stated that it makes sense for the United States to maintain close military ties with Indonesia, despite the objections of human rights activists who say such coordination should be withheld until Indonesia does more to address human rights abuses by its military. ‘We want young officers from Indonesia coming to the United States,’ said Bush. ‘We want there to be exchanges between our military corps – that will help lead to better understandings.’ Bush made his remarks after meeting with the Indonesian president, who, Bush added, ‘told me he’s in the process of reforming the military, and I believe him.’48 (In May 2002, Indonesian Defense Minister Matori met with US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Matori said his government had begun to ‘reform the military.’ Rumsfeld believed him enough to call for ‘military-to-military relations’ to be ‘re-established.’)⁴⁹

Indonesian officials saying they’re going to reform the military is like officials in Nevada saying they’re going to crack down on gambling. For forty years the Indonesian military has engaged in mass murder and other atrocities, in Jakarta, East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere, taking the lives of well over a million people, including several Americans in recent years. For forty years relations between the US and Indonesian militaries have been one of the very closest of such contacts in the Third World for the United States, despite the occasional objections and prohibitions from Congress. For forty years, American officials have been saying that they have to continue training and arming Indonesia’s military because the contact with the American military will have some kind of ennobling effect. For forty years it has had no such effect at all. As Senator Tom Harkin (D.–Iowa) observed in 1999: ‘I have seen no evidence in my 24 years in Congress of one instance where because of American military involvement with another military that the Americans have stopped that foreign army from carrying out atrocities against their own people. No evidence, none.’50

Yet the pretense continues, for what else can an American official say? Something like the following? ‘We don’t care how brutal the Indonesian military is because they got rid of Sukarno and his irritating nationalism and neutralism for us, and for forty years they’ve been killing people we call communists, killing people we call terrorists, and protecting our oil, natural gas, mining, and other corporate interests against Indonesian protestors. Now if that’s not freedom and democracy, I don’t know what is.’

[As we’ll see from State Department cables in the WikiLeaks chapter, the Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats that the Indonesian military’s human rights abuses in the province of West Papua were stoking unrest in the region.

The United States also overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces – despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder – after the Indonesian president threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.]

Terrorism

A safer world for Americans…if they don’t leave home

Supporters of US foreign policy have been repeating the point ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001: US counterterrorism policy has worked. How do they know? Because there haven’t been any successful terrorist attacks in the United States in all the years since that infamous day.

True, but there weren’t any terrorist attacks in the United States in the six years before September 11, 2001 either, the last one being the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995. The absence of terrorist attacks in the US appears to be the norm, with or without a War on Terror.

More significantly, in the years since 9/11 the United States has been the target of terrorist attacks on scores of occasions, not even counting those in Iraq or Afghanistan – attacks on military, diplomatic, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States; in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific; more than a dozen times in Pakistan alone. The attacks include the October 2002 bombings of two nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia, which killed more than 200 people, almost all of them Americans and citizens of their Australian and British war allies; the following year brought the heavy bombing of the US-managed Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, the site of diplomatic receptions and 4th of July celebrations held by the American embassy; and other horrendous attacks in later years on US allies in Madrid and London because of the war.

Land of the free, home of the War on Terror

David Hicks is a 31–year-old Australian who in a plea-bargain with a US military court served nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That was after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a terrible slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap – mon Dieu! – in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court). ‘If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn’t hide behind a gag order,’ said Hicks’s attorney Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.1

Like so many other ‘terrorists’ held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been ‘sold’ to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that, once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies, almost anyone was fair game.

Other ‘terrorists’ have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds. Many others – abroad and in the United States – have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a ‘terrorist organization,’ as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political.

It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.2

Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Most of these guys weren’t fighting. They were running,’ General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.³

Thousands of people have been thrown into hell on earth for no earthly reason. The world media have been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for years. Guantánamo’s former commander, General Jay Hood, said: ‘Sometimes we just didn’t get the right folks.’⁴ Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact ‘the right folks.’

Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps ‘terrorist training camps,’ or ‘anti-American terrorist training camps,’ or ‘al-Qaeda terrorist training camps.’ Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy that Washington wants to stigmatize is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al-Qaeda, as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against the atrocities of American imperialism while being a member of al-Qaeda and retaliating against the atrocities of American imperialism while not being a member of al-Qaeda; as if al-Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, and there are chapters of al-Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups – which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight – is on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA director Stansfield Turner testified: ‘I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras’ actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism.’5 The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington’s agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the kidnappings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.⁶ Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundullah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.⁷

The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies.

Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this twenty-first-century Devil’s Island says this policy undermines Washington’s own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp’s residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees – 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked – were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries. ‘There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it’s hard to understand why the people are still there,’ said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. ‘We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn’t just random. But we didn’t find it.’

The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and ‘highly questionable,’ such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle Eastern country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al-Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes ‘involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports.’ With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: ‘This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee’s name and a name found on one of the hard drives.’

Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half the individuals in his report the United States ‘had no first-hand knowledge of their activities’ in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.8

When Michael Scheuer, the former CIA officer who headed the Agency’s Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he declared: ‘We absolutely got the wrong people.’⁹ Never mind. They were all treated equally: all thrown into solitary confinement; shackled blindfolded, forced to undergo excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine; sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation were used, alomg with two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you tortured these officials, they might admit that it’s ‘torture lite.’)

‘The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment,’ a senior American defense official said in 2003, ‘so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited.’¹⁰

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?

Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell’s 1984 ‘three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today’s slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism.’

Saved again, thank the Lord, saved again

(August 18, 2006)

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. (General Douglas MacArthur, 195711)

So now we’ve (choke) just been (gasp) saved from the simultaneous blowing up of as many as ten airplanes headed toward the United States from the UK. Wow, thank you Brits, thank you Homeland Security. And thanks for preventing the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, saving lower Manhattan from a terrorist-unleashed flood, smashing the frightful Canadian ‘terror plot’ with seventeen arrested, ditto the three Toledo terrorists, and squashing the Los Angeles al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper.

The Los Angeles plot of 2002 was proudly announced by George W. in 2006. It has since been totally discredited. Declared one senior counterterrorism official: ‘There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage.’¹²

And the scare about ricin in the UK, which our own Mr Cheney used as part of the build-up for the invasion of Iraq, telling an audience on January 10, 2003: ‘The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested … suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world’s deadliest poisons.’ It turned out there was not only no plot, there was no ricin. The Brits discovered almost immediately that the substance wasn’t ricin but kept that secret for more than two years.¹³

From what is typical in terrorist scares, it is likely that the individuals arrested in the UK on August 10, 2006 were guilty of what George Orwell, in 1984, called ‘thoughtcrimes.’ That is to say, they haven’t actually done anything. At most, they’ve thought about doing something the government would label ‘terrorism.’ Perhaps not even very serious thoughts, perhaps just venting their anger at the exceptionally violent role played by the UK and the US in the Middle East and thinking out loud how nice it would be to throw some of that violence back in the face of Blair and Bush. And then, the fatal moment for them that ruins their lives forever: their angry words are heard by the wrong person, who reports them to the authorities. (In the Manhattan flood case the formidable, dangerous ‘terrorists’ made mention on an Internet chat room about blowing something up.14)

Soon a government agent provocateur appears, infiltrates the group, and then actually encourages the individuals to think and talk further about terrorist acts, to develop real plans instead of youthful fantasizing, and even provides the individuals with some of the means for carrying out these terrorist acts, like explosive material and technical know-how, money and transportation, whatever is needed to advance the plot. It’s known as ‘entrapment,’ and it’s supposed to be illegal, it’s supposed to be a powerful defense for the accused, but the authorities get away with it all the time; and the accused get put away for a very long time. And because of the role played by the agent provocateur, we may never know whether any of the accused, on their own, would have gone much further, if at all, like actually making a bomb, or, in the present case, even making transatlantic flight reservations, since many of the accused reportedly did not even have passports. Government infiltrating and monitoring is one thing; encouragement, pushing the plot forward, and scaring the public to make political capital from it are quite something else.

Prosecutors have said that the seven men in Miami charged with conspiring to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI buildings in other cities had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda. This came after meeting with a confidential government informant who was posing as a representative of the terrorist group. Did they swear or hold such allegiance, one must wonder, before meeting with the informant? ‘In essence,’ reported the Independent, ‘the entire case rests upon conversations between Narseal Batiste, the apparent ringleader of the group, with the informant, who was posing as a member of al-Qaeda but in fact belonged to the [FBI] South Florida Terrorist Task Force.’ Batiste told the informant that ‘he was organizing a mission to build an “Islamic army” in order to wage jihad.’ He provided a list of things he needed: boots, uniforms, machine guns, radios, vehicles, binoculars, bullet-proof vests, firearms, and $50,000 in cash. Oddly enough, one thing that was not asked for was any kind of explosive material. After sweeps of various locations in Miami, government agents found no explosives or weapons. ‘This group was more aspirational than operational,’ said the FBI’s deputy director, while one FBI agent described them as ‘social misfits.’ And, added the New York Times, investigators openly acknowledged that the suspects ‘had only the most preliminary discussions about an attack.’ Yet Cheney later hailed the arrests at a political fundraiser, calling the group a ‘very real threat.’15

It was perhaps as great a threat as the suspects in the plot to unleash a catastrophic flood in lower Manhattan by destroying a huge underground wall that holds back the Hudson River. That was the story first released by the authorities; after a while it was replaced by the claim that the suspects were actually plotting something aimed at the subway tunnels that run under the river.¹⁶ Which is more reliable, one must wonder, information on Internet chat rooms or WMD tips provided by CIA Iraqi informers? Or information obtained, as in the current case in the UK, from Pakistani interrogators of the suspects, none of the interrogators being known to be ardent supporters of Amnesty International.

And the three men arrested in Toledo, Ohio, in February 2006 were accused of – are you ready? – plotting to recruit and train terrorists to attack US and allied troops overseas. For saving us from this horror we have a paid FBI witness to thank. He had been an informer with the FBI for four years, and most likely was paid for each new lead he brought in. In the Sears case, the FBI paid almost $56,000 to two confidential informants, and government officials also granted one of them immigration parole so he could remain in the country.17

There must be millions of people in the United States and elsewhere who have thoughts about ‘terrorist acts.’ I might well be one of them when I read about a gathering of Bush, Cheney, and assorted neocons that’s going to take place. Given the daily horror of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine in recent times, little of which would occur if not for the government of the United States of America and its allies, the numbers of people having such thoughts must be multiplying rapidly. If I had been at an American or British airport as the latest scare story unfolded, waiting in an interminable line, having my flight canceled, or being told I can’t have any carry-on luggage, I may have found it irresistible at some point to declare loudly to my fellow suffering passengers: ‘Y’know, folks, this security crap is only gonna get worse and worse as long as the United States and Britain continue to invade, bomb, overthrow, occupy, and torture the world!’ How long would it be before I was pulled out of line and thrown into some kind of custody?

If General MacArthur were alive today, would he dare to publicly express the thoughts cited above?

Policymakers and security experts, reports the Associated Press, say that ‘Law enforcers are now willing to act swiftly against al-Qaeda sympathizers, even if it means grabbing wannabe terrorists whose plots may be only pipe dreams.’¹⁸

The capture of dangerous would-be terrorists has been a growth industry in the United States ever since the events of September 11, 2001. Do you remember the ‘shoe bomber’? Richard Reid was his name and he was aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001; he tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes, didn’t succeed, and was overpowered by attendants and passengers. It’s because of him that we have to take our shoes off at the airport.

There was also ‘the underwear bomber,’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, referred to above, who tried to set off plastic explosives sewn into his underwear while aboard a Northwest Airlines flight as the plane approached Detroit airport in 2009. But he failed to detonate them properly, producing only some popping noises and a flame; another passenger jumped him and restrained him as others put out the fire. It’s because of Mr Abdulmutallab that we now virtually have to take our underwear off at airports.

And the reason we have strict rules about carrying liquids and gels aboard an airplane? We can thank some other young clowns in Europe in 2006 with pipe dreams about blowing up ten airliners with liquid explosives; they scarcely made it to step one. Since the ‘bomb made from liquids and gels’ story was foisted upon the public, several chemists and other experts have pointed out the technical near-impossibility of manufacturing such a bomb in a moving airplane, if for no other reason than the necessity of spending at least an hour or two in the airplane bathroom.

Then there was Faisal Shahzad, the ‘Times Square bomber,’ who on May 1, 2010 parked his car in the heart of New York City, tried to detonate various explosive devices in the car, but succeeded in producing only smoke. He then walked away from the car, after which he was arrested. It’s because of him that cars are no longer permitted in Times Square. (No, that’s a joke, but maybe not for long.)

The incompetence of these would-be bombers in being unable to detonate their explosives is remarkable. You’d think they could have easily gotten that critical and relatively simple part of the operation down pat beforehand. What I find even more remarkable is that neither of the two men aboard the airplanes thought of going into the bathroom, closing the door, and then trying to detonate the explosives. An 8-year-old child would have thought of that. Are we supposed to take the ‘threat’ posed by such men seriously?

‘The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind passengers that you may not take any liquids onto the plane. This includes ice cream, as the ice cream will melt and turn into a liquid.’ This was actually heard by one of my readers at Atlanta airport in 2012. He laughed out loud. He informs me that he didn’t know what was more bizarre, that such an announcement was made or that he was the only person that he could see who reacted to its absurdity.

Another example of the frightful terrorist threat was in October 2010 when we were told that two packages addressed to Chicago had been found aboard American cargo planes, one in Dubai, the other in England, containing what might, or might not, be an explosive device; which might, or might not, have exploded. Authorities said it was not known if the intent was to detonate the packages in flight or in Chicago.

Now get this. Terrorists, we are told, are shipping bombs in packages to the United States. They of course would want to make the packages as innocuous looking as can be, right? Nothing that would provoke any suspicion in the mind of an already very suspicious American security establishment, right? So what do we have? The packages were mailed from Yemen… and addressed to Jewish synagogues in Chicago… Well folks, nothing to see here, just keep moving.19

A tale of two terrorists

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person ever charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks, testifying at his 2006 trial in Alexandria, Virginia: the sobbing September 11 survivors and family members who testified against him were ‘disgusting’… He and other Muslims want to ‘exterminate’ American Jews… executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was ‘the greatest American.’20 Moussaoui expressed his willingness to kill Americans ‘any time, anywhere’… ‘I wish it had happened not only on the 11th, but the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th.’²¹

Orlando Bosch, one of the masterminds behind the October 6, 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger plane, blown out of the sky with seventy-three people on board, including the entire young Cuban fencing team, interviewed on April 8, 2006 by Juan Manuel Cao of Channel 41 in Miami:

CAO: Did you down that plane in 1976?

BOSCH: If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself … and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.

CAO: In that action 73 persons were killed…

BOSCH: No chico, in a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.

CAO: But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?

BOSCH: Who was on board that plane? Four members of the Communist Party, five north Koreans, five Guyanese … Who was there? Our enemies.

CAO: And the fencers? The young people on board?

BOSCH: I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant. We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.

CAO: If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult … ?

BOSCH: No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba.

The difference between Zacarias Moussaoui and Orlando Bosch is that one of them was put on trial and sentenced to life in prison while the other walks around Miami a free man, free enough to be interviewed on television. In 1983 the City Comission of Miami declared a ‘Dr Orlando Bosch Day.’22

Bosch had a partner in plotting the bombing of the Cuban airliner: Luis Posada, a Cuban-born citizen of Venezuela. He lives as a free man in the United States. His extradition has been requested by Venezuela for several crimes, including the downing of the airliner, part of the plotting having taken place in Venezuela. But the Bush and Obama administrations have refused to send him to Venezuela, for, despite his horrible crime, he’s an ally of the empire; Venezuela and Cuba are not. Nor will Washington try him in the US for the crime. However, the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation (1973), of which the United States is a signatory, gives Washington no discretion. Article 7 says that the state in which ‘the alleged offender is found shall, if it does not extradite him, be obliged, without exception whatsoever and whether or not the offence was committed in its territory, to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.’²³ Extradite or prosecute. The United States does neither.

Iraq

Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.

‘Most people don’t understand what they have been part of here,’ said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December 2011. ‘We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them.’

‘It is pretty exciting,’ said another young American soldier in Iraq. ‘We are going down in the history books, you might say.’1

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume, leather-bound, richly-embossed set of ‘The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another.’ The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi-failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for twelve years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly; how the people of that unhappy land lost everything…

The loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84 percent of the higher education establishments had been ‘destroyed, damaged and robbed.’ The intellectual stock was further depleted as many thousands of academics and other professionals fled abroad or were kidnapped or assassinated; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats. ‘Now I am isolated,’ said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. ‘I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash.’2

Loss of a functioning health-care system. And loss of the public’s health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis rampaged through the country. Iraq’s network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, was severely damaged by the war and looting.

The UN’s World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering from ‘dangerous deficiencies of protein.’ Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly among children, already a problem because of the twelve years of US-imposed sanctions, increased as poverty and disorder made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.

Thousands of Iraqis lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, especially children who pick them up.

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, the soil, the blood, and the genes, producing malformed babies. And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous. The most awful birth defects result. The BBC told of doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. The level of heart defects among newborn babies was said to be thirteen times higher than in Europe. The BBC correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage, and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads. He added that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. One doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 – when she saw about one case every two months – with the situation in 2010, when she saw cases every day. ‘I’ve seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead,’ she said.3

(‘Years from now when America looks out on a democratic Middle East, growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima’ [in World War II] – George W. Bush⁴)

The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable electricity all generally fell well below pre-invasion levels, producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. To add to the misery, people waited all day in the heat to purchase gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country’s chief source of revenue, being less than half its previous level.

The water and sewerage system and other elements of the infrastructure had been purposely destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf War of 1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing the most essential parts of it. Then came Washington’s renewed bombing.

The American military assaulted at least one hospital to prevent it from giving out casualty figures from US attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the hospital had been in the habit of doing.

Numerous homes were broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family said that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family’s money.

There was destruction and looting of the country’s ancient heritage, perhaps the world’s greatest archive of the human past. Sites were left unprotected by the US military, which was busy protecting oil facilities.

Iraq’s legal system, outside of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; now, religious law increasingly prevails.

Women’s rights, previously enjoyed, fell under great danger of being subject to harsh Islamic law. There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend. Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.

I see that Frontline on PBS this week has a documentary called ‘Bush’s War’. That’s what I’ve been calling it for a long time. It’s not the ‘Iraq War.’ Iraq did nothing. Iraq didn’t plan 9/11. It didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. It did have movie theaters and bars and women wearing what they wanted and a significant Christian population and one of the few Arab capitals with an open synagogue. But that’s all gone now. Show a movie and you’ll be shot in the head. Over a hundred women have been randomly executed for not wearing a scarf. (Filmmaker Michael Moore, March 24, 2008)

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam’s secular society; many have emigrated. The Kurds of Northern Iraq evicted Arabs from their homes. Arabs evicted Kurds in other parts of the country.

A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government featured a wide variety of torture and abuse; a human-rights disaster area. Only a very small portion of the many tens of thousands imprisoned by US forces were convicted of any crime.

Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the first US occupation administration of Iraq in 2003, made free enterprise a guiding rule, shutting down 192 state-owned businesses where the World Bank estimated 500,000 people were working.5

Many people were evicted from their homes because they were Baathist, Saddam Hussein’s party. US troops took part in some of the evictions. They also demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one of their buddies.

When US troops didn’t find who they were looking for, they took who was there; wives were held until the husband turned himself in, a practice which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a particular evil of the Nazis; it’s also an example of collective punishment of civilians, forbidden under the Geneva Convention.

Continual American bombing assaults on neighborhoods left an uncountable number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.

Haditha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi… names that will live in infamy for the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and human rights carried out in those places by US forces.

American soldiers and private security companies regularly killed people and left the bodies lying in the street; civil war, death squads, kidnapping, car bombs, rape, each and every day… Iraq became the most dangerous place on earth. US-trained Iraqi military and police forces killed even more, as did the insurgency. An entire new generation growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.

US intelligence and military police officers often freed dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.

Iraqis protesting about particular issues were shot by US forces on several occasions.

At various times, Iraqi newspapers were closed down by the American occupation for what they printed; reporters were shot by American troops; the US killed, wounded, or jailed reporters from Al Jazeera television, closed the station’s office, and banned it from certain areas because occupation officials didn’t like the news the station was reporting; the Pentagon planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to serve propaganda purposes.

This war [in Iraq] is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan … it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad. (Thomas Friedman, much-acclaimed New York Times foreign affairs analyst, November 20036)

President Bush has placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy agenda in unprecedented ways. (Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post, and former speech-writer for George W. Bush, 2007⁷)

[The war in Iraq] is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken. (David Brooks, NPR commentator and New York Times columnist, 2007⁸)

If this is what leading American public intellectuals believed and imparted to their audiences, is it any wonder that the media can short-circuit people’s critical faculties altogether? It should also be noted that these three journalists were all with ‘liberal’ media.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. (Washington Post, May 5, 2007)

It was indeed common. National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR’s Baghdad bureau in 2006, met with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as ‘a moderate’ and as a person trying to lead his followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: ‘What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?’ The cleric replied that he’d ‘rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now.’9

That same year, in a BBC interview, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed when it was suggested that some Iraqis believe life is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi’s life. If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison, that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, ‘Am I going to see my child again?’¹⁰

No matter… drum roll, please… Stand tall American GI hero! And don’t even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And – deep breath here! – Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it.¹¹ How much will Iraq be paying the United States?

On December 14, 2011, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq War. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul – as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect – to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth? Barack H. Obama believes only in being the president of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

But freedom has indeed reigned – for the great multinationals to extract everything they can from Iraq’s resources and labor without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations, or worker protections.

Yet, despite all of the above, when the subject is Iraq and the person I’m having a discussion with has no other argument left to defend US policy, at least at the moment, I may be asked:

‘Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power?’

And I say: ‘No.’

And the person says: ‘No?’

And I say: ‘No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.’

And many Iraqis actually supported him.

US foreign policy, the mainstream media, and Alzheimer’s

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D – Death and Destruction. The bunker-buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model. But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)… well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: ‘Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?’

In actuality, before the US invasion high Iraqi officials had stated clearly on repeated occasions that they had no such weapons. In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: ‘We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.’12 In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: ‘The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.’¹³ Hussein himself told Rather in February 2003: ‘These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.’¹⁴

Moreover, General Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.¹⁵

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world that the WMD were non-existent.

And if there were still any uncertainty remaining, in July 2010 Hans Blix, former chief United Nations weapons inspector, who led a doomed hunt for WMD in Iraq, told a British inquiry into the 2003 invasion that those who were ‘100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq turned out to have ‘less than zero percent knowledge’ of where the purported hidden caches might be. He testified that he had warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting – as well as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in separate talks – that Hussein might have no weapons of mass destruction.16

Those of you who don’t already have serious doubts about the American mainstream media’s knowledge and understanding of US foreign policy should consider this: despite the two revelations on Dan Rather’s CBS programs, and the other revelations noted above, in January 2008 we find CBS reporter Scott Pelley interviewing FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?¹⁷

The United States and Israel are preparing to attack Iran because of their alleged development of nuclear weapons, which Iran has denied on many occasions. Of the Iraqis who warned the United States that it was mistaken about the WMD, Saddam Hussein was executed, Tariq Aziz is awaiting execution. Which Iranian officials is USrael going to hang after their country is laid to waste?

Would it have mattered if the Bush administration had fully believed Iraq when it said it had no WMD? Probably not. There is ample evidence that Bush knew this to be the case, or at a minimum should have seriously suspected it; the same applies to Tony Blair. Saddam Hussein did not sufficiently appreciate just how psychopathic his two adversaries were. Bush was determined to vanquish Iraq, for the sake of Israel, for control of oil, and for expanding the empire with new bases, though in the end most of this didn’t work out as the empire expected; for some odd reason, it seems that the Iraqi people resented being bombed, invaded, occupied, demolished, and tortured.

But if Iran is in fact building nuclear weapons, we have to ask: is there some international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not? If the United States had known that the Japanese had deliverable atomic bombs, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been destroyed? Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written: ‘The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.’18

Examine a map: Iran sits directly between two of the United States’ great obsessions – Iraq and Afghanistan… directly between two of the world’s greatest oil regions – the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea… it’s part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination – Russia and China… Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!

The sign has been put out front: ‘Iraq is open for business’

In 2005, the British NGO Platform, issued a report, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, disclosing the American occupation’s massive giveaway of the sovereign nation’s most valuable commodity, oil. Among its findings:

The report revealed how an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields – accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves – for development by multinational oil companies.

The estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands. The contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42 to 162 percent. The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are known as production sharing agreements. PSAs have been heavily promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. However, PSAs last for 25–40 years, are usually secret, and prevent governments from later altering the terms of the contract.19 Crude Designs author and lead researcher Greg Muttitt says: ‘The form of contracts being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available. Iraq’s oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil companies.’²⁰

Noam Chomsky remarked: ‘We’re supposed to believe that the US would’ve invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we’re supposed to believe.’²¹

Another charming tale about the noble mission

On April 6, 2004 Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez’s memoir, Powell was talking tough that day:

‘We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,’ Powell said. ‘There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.’ Then Bush spoke: ‘At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. … There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!’ (Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, pp. 349–50)

Who would have thought? Bush has been vindicated

(December 11, 2007)

We’re making progress in Iraq! The ‘surge’ is working, we’re told. Never mind that the war is totally and perfectly illegal. Not to mention totally and perfectly, even exquisitely, immoral. It’s making progress. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the al-Qaeda types have greatly increased their number all over the Middle East and South Asia, so their surge is making progress too. Good for them. And speaking of progress in the War on Terror, is anyone progressing faster and better than the Taliban?

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. (Real Americans don’t do Arab body counts.) An analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: ‘The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.’ The article then continued in the same critical vein.22

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead or in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons; there must also be a few million more wounded who are homebound or otherwise physically limited; so the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down.²³ On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like… well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down. Remember that insurgent attacks on American forces is how the Iraqi violence (post-2003 invasion) all began in the first place.

Oh, did I mention that 2007 was the deadliest year for US troops since the war began?²⁴ It’s been the same worst year for American forces in Afghanistan.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that ‘Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq.’ The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.25

How long can it be before vacation trips to ‘Exotic Iraq’ are flashed across our television screens? ‘Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon.’ Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a ‘business development/tourism’ expert to work in Baghdad, ‘with a particular focus on tourism and related services.’²⁶

We’ve been told often by American leaders and media that the US forces can’t leave because of the violence, because there would be a bloodbath. Now there’s an alleged significant decrease in the violence. Is that being used as an argument to get out – a golden opportunity for the United States to leave, with head held high? Of course not.

The past is unpredictable: leaving Iraq vs leaving Vietnam

(August 10, 2007)

As the call for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq grows louder, those who support the war are rewriting history to paint a scary picture of what happened in Vietnam after the United States military left in March 1973.

They speak of invasions by the North Vietnamese communists, but fail to point out that a two-decades-long civil war had simply continued after the Americans left, minus a good deal of the horror that US bombs and chemical weapons had been causing.

They speak of the ‘bloodbath’ that followed the American withdrawal, a term that implies killing of large numbers of civilians who didn’t support the communists. But this never happened. If it had taken place the anti-communists in the United States who supported the war in Vietnam would have been more than happy to publicize a ‘commie bloodbath.’ It would have made big headlines all over the world. The fact that you can’t find anything of the sort is indicative of the fact that nothing like a bloodbath took place. It would be difficult to otherwise disprove this negative.

‘Some 600,000 Vietnamese drowned in the South China Sea attempting to escape,’ proclaimed the conservative WorldNetDaily website recently.27 Has anyone not confined to a right-wing happy farm ever heard of this before?

They mix Vietnam and Cambodia together in the same thought, leaving the impression that the horrors of Pol Pot included Vietnam. This is the conservative National Review Online:

Six weeks later, the last Americans lifted off in helicopters from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, leaving hundreds of panicked South Vietnamese immediately behind and an entire region to the mercy of the communists. The scene was similar in Phnom Penh [Cambodia]. The torture and murder spree that followed left millions of corpses.²⁸

And here’s dear old Fox News, on July 26, 2007, reporters Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, with their guest, actor Jon Voight. Voight says ‘Right now, we’re having a lot of people who don’t know a whole lot of things crying for us pulling out of Iraq. This – there was a bloodbath when we pulled out of Vietnam,

2.5 million people in Cambodia and Vietnam – South Vietnam were slaughtered.’ Alan Colmes’s response, in its entirety: ‘Yes, sir.’ Hannity said nothing. The many devoted listeners of Fox News could only nod their heads knowingly.

In actuality, instead of a bloodbath of those who had collaborated with the enemy, the Vietnamese sent them to ‘re-education’ camps, a more civilized treatment than in post-World War II Europe where many of those who had collaborated with the Germans were publicly paraded, shaven bald, humiliated in other ways, and/or hanged from the nearest tree. But some conservatives today would have you believe that the Vietnamese camps were virtually little Auschwitzes.29

Another historical reminder: since it’s generally accepted that the United States lost the war in Vietnam, and since we were told back then that the war was a battle for our freedom, then the ‘fight for our freedom’ must have been unsuccessful, and we must be under the occupation of the North Vietnamese Army. Next time you’re out on the street and you see a passing NVA patrol, please wave and tell them that I say hello.

Can anyone find a message hidden here?

The following quotations all come from the same article in the Washington Post of August 4, 2006 by Ann Scott Tyson concerning the Iraqi town of Hit:

Residents are quick to argue that the American presence incites those attacks, and they blame the U.S. military rather than insurgents for turning their town into a combat zone. The Americans should pull out, they say, and let them solve their own problems.

‘We want the same thing. I want to go home to my wife,’ said an American soldier.

‘Another U.S. officer put it more bluntly: “Nobody wants us here, so why are we here? That’s the big question.”’

‘If we leave, all the attacks would stop, because we’d be gone.’

‘The problem is with the Americans. They only bring problems,’ said watermelon vendor Sefuab Ganiydum, 35. ‘Closing the bridge, the curfew, the hospital. It’s better for U.S. forces to leave the city.’

‘What did we do to have all this suffering?’ asked Ramsey Abdullah Hindi, 60, sitting outside a tea shop. Ignoring U.S. troops within earshot, he said Iraqis were justified to attack them. ‘They have a right to fight against the Americans because of their religion and the bad treatment. We will stand until the last,’ he said somberly.

City officials, too, are adamant that U.S. troops leave Hit.

‘I’m the guy doing the good stuff and I get shot at all the time! Nobody is pro-American in this city. They either tolerate us or all-out hate us,’ said a US Marine major.

‘If we do leave, the city will be a lot better and they’ll build it a lot better.’

This just in: Bush has just read this article and says the hidden message is that the United States is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.

Chutzpah of an imperial size

Do you remember the classic example of chutzpah? It’s the young man who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan. The Bush administration’s updated version of that was starting a wholly illegal, immoral, and devastating war and then dismissing all kinds of criticism of its action on the grounds that ‘we’re at war.’

They used this excuse to defend warrantless spying, to defend the imprisonment of people for years without charging them with a crime, to abuse and torture them, to ignore the Geneva Convention and other international treaties; they used it against Democrats, accusing them of partisanship during ‘a time of war’; they used it to justify the expansion of presidential powers and the weakening of checks and balances. In short, they claimed ‘We can do whatever we want about anything at all related to this war, because we’re at war.’

‘War is war,’ said Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, ‘and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. Give me a break.’30 Scalia, in his public talks, implies that prisoners held in the far-flung American gulag were all ‘captured on the battlefield.’³¹ But this is simply false. Very few of the poor souls were captured on any kind of battlefield, few had even a gun in their hand; most were just in the wrong place at the wrong time or were turned in by an informer for an American bounty or a personal grudge.

The American public, like all publics, requires only sufficient repetition from ‘respectable’ sources to learn how to play the game. In April 2006 many cities of Wisconsin held referendums on bringing the troops home from Iraq. Here’s Jim Martin, 48, a handyman in Evansville. He thinks that his city shouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money running a referendum that means nothing. ‘The fact of the matter remains, we’re at war,’ he said.32 And here now is Chris Simcox, a leader in the Minuteman movement that patrols the Mexican border: ‘If I catch you breaking into my country in the middle of the night and we’re at war … you’re a potential enemy. I don’t care if you’re a busboy coming to wash dishes.’³³

Dahlia Lithic of Slate.com summed up the legal arguments put forth by the Bush administration thus:

The existing laws do not apply because this is a different kind of war. It’s a different kind of war because the president says so. The president gets to say so because he is president. … We follow the laws of war except to the extent that they do not apply to us. These prisoners have all the rights to which they are entitled by law, except to the extent that we have changed the law to limit their rights.³⁴

Yet, George W. cut taxes heavily, something probably unprecedented while at war. Didn’t he realize that we’re at war?

Reconstruction, thy name is not the United States

(January 9, 2006)

In January 2006 the Bush administration announced that it did not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February. When the last of the reconstruction budget is spent, US officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq’s 26 million people.35

It should be noted that these services, including sanitation systems, were largely destroyed by US bombing – most of it rather deliberately – beginning in the first Gulf War: forty days and nights the bombing went on, demolishing everything that goes into the making of a modern society; followed by twelve years of merciless economic sanctions, accompanied by twelve years of often daily bombing supposedly to protect the so-called no-fly zones; finally the bombing, invasion and widespread devastation beginning in March 2003 and continuing even as you read this. ‘The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq,’ Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. McCoy said: ‘This was just supposed to be a jump-start.’³⁶ It’s a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn’t kill. And afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the damage.

On January 27, 1973, in Paris, the United States signed the ‘Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.’ Among the principles to which the United States agreed was that stated in Article 21: ‘In pursuance of its traditional [sic] policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina.’

Five days later, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he stipulated the following:

(1) The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years.

Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid, or ever will be.

During the same period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as relentlessly as was Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of America’s ‘traditional policy’ of zero reconstruction.

Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There goes our neighborhood. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for ‘just compensation’ for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, the same amount the people of Grenada received.

In 1998, Washington, in its grand wisdom, fired more than a dozen cruise missiles into a building in Sudan, which it claimed was producing chemical and biological weapons. The completely pulverized building was actually a major pharmaceuticals plant, vital to the Sudanese people. The United States effectively admitted its mistake by releasing the assets of the plant’s owner it had frozen. Surely now it was compensation time. It appears that nothing has ever been paid to the owner, who filed suit, or to those injured in the bombing.37

The following year we had the case of Yugoslavia; seventy-eight days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the reconstruction needs were breathtaking. In all the years since Yugoslavian bridges fell into the Danube, the country’s factories and homes leveled, its roads made unusable, transportation torn apart … the country has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.

The day after the above announcement about the US ending its reconstruction efforts in Iraq, it was reported that the United States is phasing out its commitment to reconstruction in Afghanistan as well.38 This after several years of the usual launching of bombs and missiles on towns and villages, resulting in the usual wreckage and ruin.

The fairy tale behind the war

(December 6, 2005)

As it became apparent that the US war in Iraq was an embarrassing tragedy, there were lots of accusations going around between the Democrats and the Republicans, followed by counter-accusations, congressional investigations, demands for more investigations… Who said what? When did they say it? How did it contribute to the buildup for war?… intelligence failures, the administration should have known, we were misled, they lied, but the Democrats believed it also, voted for it… round and round it goes, back and forth, what passes for serious parliamentary debate in the US of A in the twenty-first century…

It’s time once again to remind ourselves of the big lie, the biggest lie of all, the lie that makes this whole controversy rather irrelevant. For it didn’t matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it didn’t matter if the intelligence was right or wrong, or whether the Bush administration lied about the weapons, or who believed the lies and who didn’t. All that mattered was the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was a threat to use the weapons against the United States, an imminent threat to wreak great havoc upon America – ‘Increasingly we believe the United States will become the target of those [Iraqi nuclear] activities,’ declared Vice President Cheney six months before the invasion, as but one example.39

Think about that. What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for attacking the United States other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? ‘Oh,’ some people might argue, ‘he was so crazy, who knew what he might have done?’ But when it became obvious in late 2002 that the US was intent upon invading Iraq, Saddam opened up the country to the UN weapons inspectors much more than ever before, with virtually full cooperation. This was not the behavior of a crazy person; this was the behavior of a survivalist. He didn’t even use those weapons when he was invaded in 1991 when he certainly had some of them. Moreover, we now know that Iraq had put out peace feelers in early 2003 hoping to prevent the war.⁴⁰ They were not crazy at all.

No, the United States didn’t invade Iraq because of any threat of an attack using WMD. Nor can it be argued that mere possession of such weapons – or the belief of same – was reason enough to take action, for then the United States would have to invade Russia, France, Israel et al.

The elephant in Saddam Hussein’s courtroom

(November 10, 2005)

The trial of Saddam Hussein has begun. He is charged with the deaths of more than 140 people who were executed after gunmen fired on his motorcade in the predominantly Shiite Muslim town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in an attempt to assassinate him in 1982. This appears to be the only crime he’s being tried for. Yet for a few years now we’ve been hearing about how Saddam used chemical weapons against ‘his own people’ in the town of Halabja in March 1988. (Actually, the people were Kurds, who could be regarded as Saddam’s ‘own people’ only if the Seminoles were President Andrew Jackson’s own people.) The Bush administration never tires of repeating that line to us. As recently as October 21, Karen Hughes, White House envoy for public diplomacy, told an audience in Indonesia that Saddam had ‘used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas.’ When challenged about the number, Hughes replied: ‘It’s something that our U.S. government has said a number of times in the past. It’s information that was used very widely after his attack on the Kurds. I believe it was close to 300,000. That’s something I said every day in the course of the campaign. That’s information that we talked about a great deal in America.’ The State Department later corrected Hughes, saying the number of victims in Halabja was about 5,000.41 (This figure, too, may well have been inflated for political reasons; for at least the next six months following the Halabja attack one could find the casualty count being reported in major media as ‘hundreds’, even by Iran with whom Iraq was at war from 1981 to 1988; then, somehow, it ballooned to ‘5,000.’⁴²)

It should be noted, incidentally, that Abraham Lincoln did in fact kill his own people in the American Civil war, hundreds of thousands of them! Given the repeated administration emphasis of the Halabja event, one would think that it would be the charge used in the court against Saddam. Well, I can think of two reasons why the US would be reluctant to bring that matter to court. One, the evidence for the crime has always been somewhat questionable; for example, at one time an arm of the Pentagon issued a report suggesting that it was actually Iran which had used the poison gas in Halabja.⁴³ And two, the United States, in addition to providing Saddam abundant financial and intelligence support, supplied him with lots of materials to help Iraq achieve its chemical and biological weapons capability; it would be kind of awkward if Saddam’s defense raised this issue in the court. But the United States has carefully orchestrated the trial to exclude any unwanted testimony, including the well-known fact that not long after the 1982 carnage Saddam is being charged with, in December 1983, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – perfectly well informed about the Iraqi regime’s methods and the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops – arrived in Baghdad, sent by Ronald Reagan with the objective of strengthening the relationship between the two countries.44 There are photos and film available depicting the warm greetings extended to each other by Saddam and Rumsfeld.

War is peace, occupation is sovereignty

(October 17, 2005)

The town of Rawa in Northern Iraq is occupied. The United States has built an army outpost there to cut off the supply of foreign fighters purportedly entering Iraq from Syria. The Americans engage in house searches, knocking in doors, summary detentions, road blocks, air strikes, and other tactics highly upsetting to the people of Rawa. Recently, the commander of the outpost, Lt. Col. Mark Davis, addressed a crowd of 300 angry people. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he told the murmuring citizens. ‘Some of you are concerned about the attack helicopters and mortar fire from the base,’ he said. ‘I will tell you this: those are the sounds of peace.’⁴⁵ He could have said, making as much sense, that they were the sounds of sovereignty. Iraq is a sovereign nation, Washington assures us, particularly in these days of the constitutional referendum, although the vote will do nothing to empower the Iraqis to relieve their daily misery, serving only a public relations function for the United States. The votes, it should be noted, were counted on an American military base; and on the day of the referendum American warplanes and helicopters were busy killing some seventy people around the city of Ramadi.46

The British also insist that Iraq is a sovereign nation. Recently, hundreds of residents filled the streets in the southern city of Basra, shouting and pumping their fists in the air to condemn British forces for raiding a jail and freeing two British soldiers. Iraqi police had arrested the Britons, who were dressed as civilians, for allegedly firing their guns (at whom or what is not clear), and either trying to plant explosives or having explosives in their vehicle. British troops then assembled several armored vehicles, rammed them through the jailhouse wall, and freed the men, as helicopter gunships hovered above.⁴⁷

An intriguing side question: we have here British soldiers dressed as civilians (at least one report said dressed as Arabs), driving around in a car with explosives, firing guns… Does this not feed into the frequent speculation that coalition forces have been to some extent part of the ‘insurgency’? The same insurgency that’s used as an excuse by the coalition to remain in Iraq?

Afghanistan

Please tell me again… what is the war in Afghanistan about?

(February 3, 2012)

With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent… or better than nothing… or let’s get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven’t yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9/11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009:

But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9–11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.1

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the ‘plotting to attack America’ in 2001 was carried out in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn’t the United States attacked those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does ‘an even larger safe haven’ mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere.

The only ‘necessity’ that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia – which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world – and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of South Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: ‘One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.’2

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial, or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions.3 Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9/11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990–91, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be ‘won’ short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare ‘victory.’ Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might include the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy,’ but certainly not ‘pipeline.’

What it’s about for Germany

The German president, Horst Koehler, resigned in June 2010 because he said something government officials are not supposed to say. He said that Germany was fighting in Afghanistan for economic reasons. No reference to democracy. Nothing about freedom. Not a word about Good Guys fighting Bad Guys. The word ‘terrorism’ was not mentioned at all. Neither was ‘God.’ On a trip to German troops in Afghanistan he had declared that a country such as Germany, dependent on exports and free trade, must be prepared to use military force. The country, he said, had to act ‘to protect our interests, for example free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and earnings.’

‘Koehler has said something openly that has been obvious from the beginning,’ said the head of Germany’s Left Party. ‘German soldiers are risking life and limb in Afghanistan to defend the export interests of big economic interests.’4 Other opposition politicians had called for Koehler to take back the remarks and accused him of damaging public acceptance of German military missions abroad.⁵

As T.S. Eliot famously observed: ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’

The myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, 2009 Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan twenty years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.6

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance from foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he was willing to send countless young Americans to a horrible death, or maimed survival. And for what? Every point he made in his statement was simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had lived next door to the country for more than sixty years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

As to the US leaving… utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea – fifty-six years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan – sixty-four years. It’s not even correct to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West European-style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were Cold War anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when one considers all the harm and suffering it has already inflicted upon those utterly downtrodden people for more than thirty years.

The eternal struggle between the good guys and the bad guys

The United States and its wholly owned subsidiary NATO regularly drop bombs on Afghanistan which kill varying amounts of terrorists (or ‘terrorists,’ also known as civilians, also known as women and children). They do this rather often, against people utterly defenseless against aerial attack.

US/NATO spokespersons tell us that these unfortunate accidents happen because the enemy is deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way to provoke a backlash against the foreign forces. We are told at times that the enemy had located themselves in the same building as the victims, using them as ‘human shields.’7 Therefore, it would seem, the enemy somehow knows in advance that a particular building is about to be bombed and they rush a bunch of civilians to the spot before the bombs begin to fall. Or it’s a place where civilians normally live and, finding out that the building is about to be bombed, the enemy rushes a group of their own people to the place so they can die with the civilians. Or, what appears to be much more likely, the enemy doesn’t know of the bombing in advance, but then the civilians would have to always be there – that is, they live there; they may even be the wives and children of the enemy. Is there no limit to the evil cleverness and the clever evilness of this foe?

Western officials also tell us that the enemy deliberately attacks from civilian areas, even hoping to draw fire to drive a wedge between average Afghans and international troops.⁸ Presumably the insurgents are attacking nearby Western military installations and troop concentrations. This raises the question: why are the Western forces building installations and/or concentrating troops near civilian areas, deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way?

US/NATO military leaders argue that any comparison of casualties caused by Western forces and by the Taliban is fundamentally unfair because there is a clear moral distinction to be made between accidental deaths resulting from combat operations and deliberate killings of innocents by militants. ‘No [Western] soldier ever wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming any Afghan citizen,’ said Major John Thomas, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. ‘If that does inadvertently happen, it is deeply, deeply regretted.’9 Is that not comforting language? Can any right-thinking, sensitive person fail to see who the good guys are?

During its many bombings, from Vietnam to Iraq, Washington has repeatedly told the world that the resulting civilian deaths were accidental and very much ‘regretted.’ But if you go out and drop powerful bombs over a populated area, and then learn that there have been a number of ‘unintended’ casualties, and then the next day go out and drop more bombs and learn again that there were ‘unintended’ casualties, and then the next day you go out and bomb again… at what point do you lose the right to say that the deaths were ‘unintended’?

During the US/NATO seventy-eight-day bombing of Serbia in 1999, which killed many civilians, a Belgrade office building – which housed political parties, television and radio stations, a hundred private companies, and more – was bombed. But before the missiles were fired into this building, NATO planners spelled out the risks: ‘Casualty Estimate 50–100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 – Apts in expected blast radius.’¹⁰ The planners were saying that about 250 civilians living in nearby apartment buildings could be expected to perish in the bombing, in addition to 50 to 100 government and political party employees, likewise innocent of any crime calling for execution. So what do we have here? We have grown men telling each other: We’ll do A, and we think that B may well be the result. But even if B does in fact result, we’re saying beforehand – as we’ll insist afterward – that it was unintended.

It was actually worse than this. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, the main purpose of the Serbian bombings – admitted to by NATO officials – was to make life so difficult for the public that support of the government of Slobodan Milosevic would be undermined.11 This, in fact, is the classic definition of ‘terrorism’, as used by the FBI, the CIA, and the United Nations: the use or threat of violence against a civilian population to induce the government to change certain policies.

The women: their last great chance

In their need to defend the US occupation of Afghanistan, many Americans have cited the severe oppression of women in that desperate land and would have us believe that the United States is the last great hope of those poor women. However, in the 1980s the United States played an indispensable role in the overthrow of a secular and relatively progressive Afghan government, one which endeavored to grant women much more freedom than they’ll ever have under the current government, more perhaps than ever again. Here are some excerpts from a 1986 US Army manual on Afghanistan discussing the policies of this government concerning women: ‘provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men’; ‘abolished forced marriages’; ‘bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs’; ‘extensive literacy programs, especially for women’; ‘putting girls and boys in the same classroom’; ‘concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics.’¹²

The overthrow of this government paved the way for the coming to power of an Islamic fundamentalist regime, soon in the hands of the awful Taliban. And why did the United States in its infinite wisdom choose to do such a thing? Mainly because the Afghan government was allied with the Soviet Union and Washington wanted to draw the Russians into a hopeless military quagmire. The women of Afghanistan will never know how the campaign to raise them to the status of full human beings would have turned out, but this, some might argue, is but a small price to pay for a marvelous Cold War victory.

Iran

A designer monster: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

(December 17, 2006)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man seemingly custom-made for any American administration in its endless quest for enemies with whom to scare Congress, the American people, and the world, in order to justify the cost and questionable behavior of the empire. We’ve been told, repeatedly, that Ahmadinejad has declared that he wants to ‘wipe Israel off the map’; that he claims the Holocaust never happened; that he held a conference in Iran for ‘Holocaust deniers’; and that his government passed a law requiring Jews to wear a yellow insignia, à la Nazis. On top of all that, we are told, he’s aiming to build nuclear bombs, one of which would surely be aimed at Israel. What decent person would not be alarmed by such a man?

However, as with all such designer monsters made bigger than life during the Cold War and since by Washington, the truth about Ahmadinejad is a bit more complicated. According to people who know Farsi, the Iranian leader has never said anything about ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ In his October 29, 2005 speech, when he reportedly first made the remark, the word ‘map’ does not even appear. According to the translation of Juan Cole, American professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, Ahmadinejad said that ‘the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.’ His remark, said Cole, ‘does not imply military action or killing anyone at all,’ which presumably is what would make the remark threatening.1

At the December 2006 conference, Ahmadinejad declared: ‘The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.’² Obviously, the man is not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.

As for the Holocaust myth, I have yet to read or hear words from Ahmadinejad’s mouth saying simply and clearly and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. Indeed, it would be difficult to find any so-called ‘Holocaust-denier’ who actually, ever, umm, y’know… denies the Holocaust. (Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nutcase somewhere.)

The Iranian president has commented about the peculiarity of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. He also wonders about the accuracy of the number of Jews – 6 million – killed in the Holocaust, as have many other people of all political stripes, including Holocaust survivors like author Primo Levi. (The much publicized World War I atrocities which turned out to be false made the public very skeptical of the Holocaust claims for a long time.)

In a talk at Columbia University, September 24, 2007, Ahmadinejad said: ‘I’m not saying that it [the Holocaust] didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.’³ That should have put the matter to rest. But of course it didn’t. Two days later, September 26, a bill (H.R. 3675) was introduced in Congress ‘To prohibit Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University’, to punish the school for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak. (Don’t you just love the way members of Congress love freedom of speech?) The bill’s first ‘finding’ states that ‘Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for the destruction of the State of Israel, a critical ally of the United States.’ That same day, television comedian Jay Leno had great fun ridiculing Ahmadinejad for denying that the Holocaust ever happened ‘despite all the eye-witness accounts.’

The conference in Tehran (‘Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision’) gave a platform to various points of view, including six members of Jews United Against Zionism, at least two of whom were rabbis. One was Ahron Cohen, from London, who declared: ‘There is no doubt whatsoever, that during World War II there developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People.’ He also said that ‘the Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further their illegitimate philosophy and aims,’ indicating as well that the figure of 6 million Jewish victims is debatable. The other rabbi was Moshe David Weiss, who told the delegates: ‘We don’t want to deny the killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists have given much higher figures for how many people were killed. They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression [of the Palestinians].’ His group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish religious law in that a Jewish state can’t exist until the return of the Messiah.4

Another speaker was Shiraz Dossa, professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University in Canada. In an interview after the conference, he described himself as an anti-imperialist and an admirer of Noam Chomsky, and said that he ‘was invited because of my expertise as a scholar in the German-Jewish area, as well as my studies in the Holocaust. … I have nothing to do with Holocaust denial, not at all.’ His talk was ‘about the war on terrorism, and how the Holocaust plays into it. Other people [at the conference] have their own points of view, but that [Holocaust denial] is not my point of view. … There was no pressure at all to say anything, and people there had different views.’5 Clearly, the conference – which the White House called ‘an affront to the entire civilized world’⁶ – was not set up to be simply a forum for people to deny that the Holocaust ever took place at all.

As to the yellow star story – that was a complete fabrication by a prominent Iranian-American neoconservative, Amir Taheri. There are further egregious examples of Ahmadinejad’s policies and words being twisted out of shape in the Western media, making him look like a danger to all that’s holy and decent. Political science professor Virginia Tilley has written a good account of this. ‘Why is Mr. Ahmadinejad being so systematically misquoted and demonized?’ Tilley asks. ‘Need we ask? If the world believes that Iran is preparing to attack Israel, then the US or Israel can claim justification in attacking Iran first. On that agenda, the disinformation campaign about Mr Ahmadinejad’s statements has been bonded at the hip to a second set of lies: promoting Iran’s (nonexistent) nuclear weapon programme.’⁷

Time magazine, in its 2006 year-ending issue, chose not to select its usual ‘Person of the Year’ and instead chose ‘You,’ the Internet user. Managing editor Richard Stengel said that if it came down to one individual it probably would have been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but that ‘It just felt to me a little off selecting him.’⁸ In previous years Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ has included Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

One closing thought: if Ahmadinejad is anywhere near the bête noire anti-Semite he’s portrayed as, why hasn’t Iran at least started its holocaust by killing or throwing into concentration camps its own Jews, an estimated 30,000 in number? These are Iranian Jews who have representation in parliament and who have been free for many years to emigrate to Israel but have chosen not to do so.

What you need to succeed is sincerity, and if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made (Old Hollywood axiom)

A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not. (President Ronald Reagan, 19879)

On April 23, 2012, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that, as president, ‘I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities.’ Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see… There are the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There are the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There are the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There are the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds (thousands by now?) of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying ‘We possess many tools… and using these tools over the past three years, I believe – I know – that we have saved countless lives.’ Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the president of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that ‘today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.’

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; ‘It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.’ But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli–American–Iranian–Holocaust–Nobel Peace Prize circus

Everyone now knows it. In 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, to ‘wipe Israel off the map.’ Who can count the number of times it has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A 2012 Lexis–Nexis search of ‘All News (English)’ for <Iran and Israel and ‘off the map’> for the previous seven years produced the message: ‘This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.’

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio–television simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19, 2012:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to ‘wipe Israel off the face of the map.’ The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

TEYMOOR NABILI: As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this – they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …

DAN MERIDOR: Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.

TEYMOOR NABILI: ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.’

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to ‘wipe it off the map.’ And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier, which we’ve seen has no basis in reality.

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by Dan Meridor:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons – to use nuclear weapons – to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

‘Nuclear weapons’ is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myths.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 1960s, once observed: ‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, 2002, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: ‘Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.’10

The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats, the Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace

(February 3, 2012)

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being ‘the only nuclear power in the Middle East’ is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But – in the real, non-propaganda world – is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you’ve forgotten…

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion ‘Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.’ She ‘also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.’11

2009: ‘A senior Israeli official in Washington’ asserted that ‘Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.’¹²

In 2010 the Sunday Times (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, ‘believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.’

January 2012, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: ‘Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they trying to develop a nuclear capability.’¹³

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that ‘three leading Israeli security experts – the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz – all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.’

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

QUESTION: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

BARAK: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: ‘We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are ‘certain things [the Iranians] have not done’ that would be necessary to build a warhead.14

Admissions like the above – and there are others – are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, they are only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted. On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quotation above was reported as: ‘But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.’ Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: ‘Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No…’¹⁵

One of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007.

PLAYBOY: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

VAN CREVELD: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I’ve researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn’t deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they’re the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. … We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can’t relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities … Who can be behind all this but USrael? How do we know? It’s called ‘plain common sense.’ Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented succinctly on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist: ‘That’s not what the United States does.’16 Does anyone know Leon Panetta’s email address? I’d like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than fifty foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully.¹⁷

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this ‘threat’ was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran’s lifeline – oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America’s unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: ‘In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.’ How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the twenty-first century by the leader of the ‘Free World.’ (Is that expression still used?)

The neoconservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Consider Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neocon think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, ‘See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.’ … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.18

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: being ‘the only nuclear power in the Middle East’ is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?

Arab leaders: Arab people

One of the most common threads running through the WikiLeaks papers is Washington’s manic obsession with Iran. In country after country the United States exerts unceasing pressure on the government to tighten the noose around Iran’s neck, to make the American sanctions as extensive and as painful as can be, to inflate the alleged Iranian nuclear threat, to discourage normal contact as if Iran were a leper.

‘Fear of “different world” if Iran gets nuclear weapons. Embassy cables reveal how US relentlessly cajoles and bullies governments not to give succour to Tehran,’ read a Guardian headline on November 28, 2010. And we’re told that Arab governments support the United States in this endeavor, that fear of Iran is widespread. John Kerry, the Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, jumped on this bandwagon. ‘Things that I have heard from the mouths of King Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] and Hosni Mubarak [Egyptian president] and others are now quite public,’ he said. He went on to say there was a ‘consensus on Iran’ (Guardian, December 2). If all this is to have real meaning, the implication must be that the Arab people feel this way, and not just their dictator leaders. So let us look at some numbers.

The annual ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’ was conducted in summer 2010 by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. A sample of the results:

• ‘If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, which of the following is the likely outcome for the Middle East region?’ More positive 57 percent, Would not matter 20 percent, More negative 21 percent.
• Among those who believe that Iran seeks nuclear weapons, 70 percent believe that Iran has the right to its nuclear program.
• ‘In a world where there is only one superpower, which of the following countries would you prefer to be that superpower?’ France 35 percent, China 16 percent, Germany 13 percent, Britain 9 percent, Russia 8 percent, United States 7 percent, Pakistan 6 percent.
• ‘Name two countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you.’ Israel 88 percent, US 77 percent, Algeria 10 percent, Iran 10 percent, UK 8 percent, China 3 percent, Syria 1 percent.
• ‘Which world leader (outside your own country) do you admire most?’ (partial list) Recep Erdogan [Turkey] 20 percent, Hugo Chavez 13 percent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 12 percent, Hassan Nasrallah [Hezbollah/Lebanon] 9 percent, Osama bin Laden 6 percent, Saddam Hussein 2 percent (Barack Obama not mentioned).19

Another peace scare. Boy, that was close.

(December 11, 2007)

In 2007, the US intelligence community’s new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – ‘Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities’ – made a point of saying up front (in bold type): ‘This NIE does not [stress in original] assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.’ The report goes on to state: ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.’

Isn’t that good news, that Iran isn’t about to attack the United States or Israel with nuclear weapons? Surely everyone is thrilled that the horror and suffering that such an attack – not to mention an American or Israeli retaliation or pre-emptive attack – would bring to this old world. Let’s consider some of the happy reactions from American leaders.

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the NIE’s conclusion that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003.²⁰

National Security Adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said that the report ‘tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.’²¹

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ‘argued forcefully at a Persian Gulf security conference … that U.S. intelligence indicates Iran could restart its secret nuclear weapons program “at any time” and remains a major threat to the region.’22

John R. Bolton, President Bush’s former ambassador to the United Nations and pit bull of the neoconservatives, dismissed the report with: ‘I’ve never based my view on this week’s intelligence.’²³

And Bush himself added:

Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The NIE says that Iran had a hidden – a covert nuclear weapons program. That’s what it said. What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program? … Nothing has changed in this NIE that says, ‘Okay, why don’t we just stop worrying about it?’ Quite the contrary. I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously. My opinion hasn’t changed.²⁴

Hmmm. Well, maybe the reaction was more positive in Israel. Here’s a report from Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli columnist:

The earth shook. Our political and military leaders were all in shock. The headlines screamed with rage. … Shouldn’t we be overjoyed? Shouldn’t the masses in Israel be dancing in the streets? After all, we have been saved! … Lo and behold – no bomb and no any-minute-now. The wicked Ahmadinejad can threaten us as much as he wants – he just has not got the means to harm us. Isn’t that a reason for celebration? So why does this feel like a national disaster?²⁵

We have to keep this in mind: America, like Israel, cherishes its enemies. Without enemies, the United States appears to be a nation without moral purpose and direction. The various managers of the National Security State need enemies to protect their jobs, to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to give themselves a mission, to send truckloads of taxpayer money to the corporations for whom the managers will go to work after leaving government service. They understand the need for enemies only too well, even painfully. Here is US Col. Dennis Long, speaking in 1992, just after the end of the Cold War, when he was director of ‘total armor force readiness’ at Fort Knox:

For 50 years, we equipped our football team, practiced five days a week and never played a game. We had a clear enemy with demonstrable qualities, and we had scouted them out. [Now] we will have to practice day in and day out without knowing anything about the other team. We won’t have his playbook, we won’t know where the stadium is, or how many guys he will have on the field. That is very distressing to the military establishment, especially when you are trying to justify the existence of your organization and your systems.26

In any event, all of the above is completely irrelevant if Iran has no intention of attacking the United States or Israel, which would be the case even if they currently possessed a large stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Intentional misunderstanding

(November 6, 2007)

International misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary: it is that contradiction in terms, intentional misunderstanding – a contradiction, because in order to misunderstand deliberately, you must at least suspect, if not actually understand what you intend to misunderstand. (Enoch Powell, British MP, 1983²⁷)

In October 2007, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told assembled world leaders at the United Nations that the time had come to take action against Iran:

None disagrees that Iran denies the Holocaust and speaks openly of its desire to wipe a member state – mine – off the map. And none disagrees that, in violation of Security Council resolutions, it is actively pursuing the means to achieve this end. Too many see the danger but walk idly by – hoping that someone else will take care of it. … It is time for the United Nations, and the states of the world, to live up to their promise of never again. To say enough is enough, to act now and to defend their basic values.28

Yet, as mentioned before, we were informed by Haaretz (frequently described as ‘the New York Times of Israel’) that the same Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had said a few months earlier, in a series of closed discussions, that in her opinion ‘Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.’ Haaretz reported that ‘Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.’²⁹ What are we to make of such a self-contradiction, such perfect hypocrisy?

And here is Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International:

The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan [early 1990s], in order to create a new political order in the country. Bush’s representative to the Bonn conference, James Dobbins, says that ‘the Iranians were very professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance [Afghan foes of the Taliban] to make the final concessions that we asked for.’ Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence. The then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he says, ‘looked down and rustled his papers.’ No reply was ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They’re mad.³⁰

Dobbins has further written:

The original version of the Bonn agreement … neglected to mention either democracy or the war on terrorism. It was the Iranian representative who spotted these omissions and successfully urged that the newly emerging Afghan government be required to commit to both.31

Only weeks after Hamid Karzai was sworn in as interim leader in Afghanistan, President Bush listed Iran among the ‘axis of evil’ – surprising payback for Tehran’s help in Bonn. A year later, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, all bilateral contacts with Tehran were suspended. Since then, confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program has intensified.³²

Shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran made another approach to Washington, via the Swiss ambassador, who sent a fax to the State Department. The Washington Post described it as ‘a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table – including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.’ The Bush administration ‘belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax.’ Richard Haass, head of policy planning at the State Department at the time and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Iranian approach was swiftly rejected because in the administration ‘the bias was toward a policy of regime change.’³³

So there we have it. The Israelis know it, the Americans know it. Iran is not any kind of military threat. Before the invasion of Iraq I posed the question: What possible reason would Saddam Hussein have for attacking the United States or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide? He had no reason, and neither do the Iranians.

George W. Bush

‘Come out of the White House with your hands up!’

(May 21, 2006)

‘I used to be called brother, John, Daddy, uncle, friend,’ John Allen Muhammad said at his trial in Maryland this month. ‘Now I’m called evil.’ Muhammad, formerly known as ‘the DC Sniper,’ was on trial for six slayings in Maryland in 2002. Already sentenced to die in Virginia for several other murders, he insisted that he was innocent despite the evidence against him – including DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics analysis of a rifle found in his car.1

Bereft of any real political power, I’m reduced to daydreaming… a courtroom in some liberated part of the world, in the not-too-distant future, a tribunal… a defendant testifying… ‘I used to be called brother, George, son, Daddy, uncle, friend, Dubya, governor, president. Now I’m called war criminal,’ he says sadly, insisting on his innocence despite the overwhelming evidence presented against him.

Can the man ever take to heart or mind the realization that America’s immune system is trying to get rid of him? Probably not. No more than his accomplice can.

In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Yankee Stadium for a baseball game. During the singing of ‘God Bless America’ in the seventh inning, an image of Cheney was shown on the scoreboard. It was greeted with so much booing that the Yankees quickly removed the image.2 Yet last month the vice president showed up at the home opener for the Washington Nationals to throw out the first pitch. The Washington Post reported that he ‘drew boisterous boos from the moment he stepped on the field until he jogged off. The derisive greeting was surprisingly loud and long, given the bipartisan nature of our national pastime, and drowned out a smattering of applause reported from the upper decks.’³

It will be interesting to see if Cheney shows up again before a large crowd in a venue which has not been carefully chosen to insure that only right-thinking folks will be present. Even that might not help. Twice in the last few months, a public talk of Donald Rumsfeld has been interrupted by people in the audience calling him a war criminal and accusing him of lying to get the United States into war. This happened in a meeting room at the very respectable National Press Club in Washington and again at a forum at the equally respectable Southern Center for International Policy in Atlanta.

In Chile, in November 2005, as former dictator Augusto Pinochet moved closer to being tried for the deaths of thousands, he declared to a judge: ‘I lament those losses and suffer for them. God does things, and he will forgive me if I committed some excesses, which I don’t believe I did.’⁴

Dubya couldn’t have said it better. Let’s hope that one day we can compel him to stand before a judge, not one appointed by him.

After the war-crimes trial we’ll need a second tribunal for shameless lying, gross insults to our intelligence, and just plain weird stupidity and stupid weirdness

George W. Bush, speaking on March 29, 2006 to the Freedom House organization in Washington:

We’re a country of deep compassion. We care. One of the great things about America, one of the beauties of our country, is that when we see a young, innocent child blown up by an IED [improvised explosive device], we cry. We don’t care what the child’s religion may be, or where that child may live, we cry. It upsets us. The enemy knows that, and they’re willing to kill to shake our confidence.5

In the words of Voltaire: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’

If you sometimes think that the dumbness, lies, hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, and arrogance could never have been as bad as now…

Here is President George H.W. Bush, in a speech to the US Air Force Academy, May 29, 1991:

Nowhere are the dangers of weapons of proliferation more urgent than in the Middle East. After consulting with governments inside the region and elsewhere about how to slow and then reverse the buildup of unnecessary and destabilizing weapons, I am today proposing a Middle East arms control initiative. It features supplier guidelines on conventional arms exports; barriers to exports that contribute to weapons of mass destruction; a freeze now, and later a ban on surface-to-surface missiles in the region; and a ban on production of nuclear weapons material.

The next day (that is to say the very next day, May 30, 1991), Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced that the United States would give Israel $65 million worth of US fighter planes and underwrite most of a new Israeli missile program.⁶

In that same speech, Bush, Sr. declared: ‘Our service men and women in the Gulf, weary from months in the desert, now help suffering Kurds.’ The truth was that since the Gulf War fighting had ceased in February, the United States had been doing its best to suppress the Kurdish revolt against the rule of Saddam Hussein, a revolt which the Bush administration had openly encouraged for Kurds and Shiites in Washington’s perennial professed role of democratic liberator; but when the heat of the moment had cooled down, the prospect of a Kurdish autonomous area next to US ally Turkey and/or an Iraq–Iran–Shiite coalition next to the Saudi allies made successful revolts appear unpalatable to the United States. Accordingly, the Kurds and Shiites were left to their [not very nice] fates. But hey, that’s business.

Seconds later in his talk, Daddy Bush succeeded in pushing the following words past his lips: ‘We do not dictate the courses nations follow.’

Civil liberties holds an important place in the heart of the Bush administration’s rhetoric

‘This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America and, I repeat, limited,’ said President George W. Bush in 2006 about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying on Americans without a court order.7 Let’s give the devil his due. It’s easy to put down the domestic spying program, but the fact is that the president is right, it is indeed limited. It’s limited to those who are being spied upon. No one – I repeat, no one – who is not being spied upon is being spied upon.

Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But he of course was talking about citizens watching the government, not the reverse.

A marriage made in heaven… or in Albania

Former White House counsel Harriet Miers once called George

W. Bush the most brilliant man she has ever known.⁸ She’s now no longer alone in her bizarre little padded cell. On June 10, 2007 during the president’s visit to Albania – arguably the most backward country in all of Europe, today as well as when it was a Soviet satellite – the joyous townspeople of Fushe Kruje yelled ‘Bushie! Bushie!’ and Albania’s prime minister gushed over the ‘greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times.’

This was reported by Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, and prompted a letter from a reader, which said in part: ‘Regarding Eugene Robinson’s June 12 op-ed. … It was inevitable that somebody would sneer at the Albanian reception of President Bush … [Robinson] patronizingly writing of “a wonderful reverse-Borat moment”. … U.S. support for Albania following the collapse of communism explains Albanian gratitude to the United States.’9

Ah yes, the wonderful collapse of Communism and the even more wonderful birth of democracy, freedom, capitalism… and much increased poverty and deprivation in the former Soviet dominion. What actually happened is that the first election in ‘Free Albania,’ in March 1991, resulted in an overwhelming endorsement of the Communists. And what did the United States then do? Of course it proceeded to undertake a campaign to overthrow this very same elected government. The previous year in neighboring Bulgaria, another former Soviet satellite, the Communists also won the election. And the United States overthrew them as well.¹⁰ These were the first of the post-Cold War, non-violent, overthrows of governments of the former Soviet Union and its satellites directed and financed by the United States.¹¹

Condoleezza Rice

Is the bullshit not enough to murder your brain?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, testifying on April 5, 2006 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a US–India nuclear pact:

India’s society is open and free. It is transparent and stable. It is multiethnic. It is a multi-religious democracy that is characterized by individual freedom and the rule of law. It is a country with which we share common values. … India is a rising global power that we believe can be a pillar of stability in a rapidly changing Asia. In other words, in short, India is a natural partner for the United States.

And here is a State Department human rights report – released the very same day – that had this to say about India:

The Government generally respected the rights of its citizens and continued efforts to curb human rights abuses, although numerous serious problems remained. These included extrajudicial killings, disappearances, custodial deaths, excessive use of force, arbitrary arrests, torture, poor prison conditions, and extended pretrial detention, especially related to combating insurgencies in Jammu and Kashmir. Societal violence and discrimination against women, trafficking of women and children for forced prostitution and labor, and female feticide and infanticide remained concerns. Poor enforcement of laws, widespread corruption, a lack of account-ability, and the severely overburdened court system weakened the delivery of justice.

The Dragon Lady gets hers, a bit

We dissenters, we fringe people in America, we beggars, we do not get many occasions for public vindication and satisfaction in the mainstream political arena. The ‘bad guys’ always seem to come out ahead, and unscathed. Thus did I take some pleasure on January 18, 2005 to hear Condoleezza Rice verbally slapped around by Senator Barbara Boxer at the Senate hearings on Rice’s nomination to be Secretary of State. Boxer documented in detail several of the very serious lies and contradictions that Rice had engaged in, in her attempts to justify the Iraq War; nothing that we dissenters had not reported in countless places some time ago, but confronting the Dragon Lady to her face was something else.

And now Rice’s voice was clearly strained as she asked that she be questioned ‘without impugning my credibility or my integrity.’ She proceeded to defend her past remarks and in the process rewrote yet more history – saying that the no-fly zones, used by the US and Britain to bomb Iraq repeatedly over the years, had been authorized by the UN. Not so; it was a joint private creation of Washington and London. And then she said that the US had good reason to fear Saddam Hussein because we knew that he had a biological weapons capability, failing to mention that we knew about that because we had given him that capability in the 1980s.

I had the thought that if these further statements of Rice were challenged by the senators, along with the many other questionable statements she made in discussing Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela (she said that she could not think of anything positive to say about the Chávez government), the Dragon Lady might just crack a bit. I pictured Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, when, under intense questioning by a Navy board of inquiry, he suddenly takes out a pair of metal balls from his pocket and begins to nervously and obsessively play with them. And that was the end of Captain Queeg.

Well, a poor, ungratified dissenter can dream, can he not?

There’s no business like show business (2010)

She played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor.

And accompanied the one and only Aretha Franklin.

A gala benefit performance in Philadelphia.

At the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Before 8,000 people.

And they loved it.

How many of them knew that the pianist was a genuine, unindicted war criminal?

Guilty of crimes against humanity.

Defender of torture.

With much blood on her pianist hands.

Whose style in office for years could be characterized as hypocrisy, disinformation, and outright lying.

But what did the audience care?

This is America.

Home of the Good Guys.

She was fighting against the Bad Guys.

And we all know that the show must go on.

So let’s hear it, folks… Let’s have a real all-American hand…

Let’s hear it for our own darling virtuoso… The Sweetheart

of Baghdad… Miss Condoleezza Rice!

Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and Torture

The stain on humankind that does not go away

(June 8, 2007)

A report in the March 2007 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, a journal of the American Medical Association, based on interviews of hundreds of survivors of the 1990s’ conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, concludes that

aggressive interrogation techniques or detention procedures involving deprivation of basic needs, exposure to adverse environmental conditions, forced stress positions, hooding or blindfolding, isolation, restriction of movement, forced nudity, threats, humiliating treatment and other psychological manipulations do not appear to be substantially different from physical torture in terms of the extent of mental suffering they cause, the underlying mechanisms of traumatic stress, and their long-term traumatic effects.

The report adds that these findings do not support the distinction between torture and ‘other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’ (an expression taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, often used in international human rights conventions and declarations). Although these conventions prohibit both types of acts, the report points out that ‘such a distinction nevertheless reinforces the misconception that cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment causes lesser harm and might therefore be permissible under exceptional circumstances.’1

These conclusions directly counter the frequent declarations by George W. Bush, the Pentagon et al. that ‘We don’t torture.’ They would have the world believe that aggressive psychological torture isn’t really torture; although they of course have often employed the physical kind as well, to a degree leading on a number of occasions to a prisoner’s death. (Justice Andrew Collins of the British High Court: ‘America’s idea of what is torture is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations.’²)

The conclusions of the journal’s report do not, however, counter the argument of those like Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who loves to pose the classic question: ‘What if a bomb has been set to go off, which will kill many people, and only your prisoner knows where it’s located. Is it okay to torture him to elicit the information?’

Humankind has been struggling for centuries to tame its worst behaviors; ridding itself of the affliction of torture is high on that list. Finally, a historic first step was taken by the United Nations General Assembly in 1984 with the drafting of the ‘Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’ (which came into force in 1987, was ratified by the United States in 1994). Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.’

Such marvelously clear, unambiguous and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back. If torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. If today it’s deemed acceptable to torture the person who has the vital information, tomorrow it will be acceptable to torture his colleague, or his wife or child, who – it’s suspected – may know almost as much. Would we allow slavery to resume for just a short while to serve some ‘national emergency’ or some other ‘higher purpose’?

‘I would personally rather die than have anyone tortured to save my life’: the words of Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who lost his job after he publicly condemned the Uzbek regime in 2003 for its systematic use of torture.3

If you open the window of torture, even just a crack, the cold air of the Dark Ages will fill the whole room.

Being serious about torture – or not

(March 4, 2009)

In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975–79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.⁴ As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: ‘I was only following orders!’ Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it. Here’s the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta:

What I have expressed as a concern, as has the president, is that those who operated under the rules that were provided by the Attorney General in the interpretation of the law [concerning torture] and followed those rules ought not to be penalized. And … I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals. I think they did their job.⁵

Operating under the rules… following the rules… doing their job… are all of course the same as following orders.

The UN Convention Against Torture, which has been ratified by the United States, states quite clearly: ‘An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.’ The Torture Convention enacts a prohibition against torture that is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

Of course, those giving the orders are no less guilty. On the very day of Obama’s inauguration, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture invoked the Convention in calling on the United States to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantánamo prisoners.6

On several occasions, President Obama has indicated his reluctance to pursue war crimes charges against Bush officials, by expressing a view such as: ‘I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.’ This is the same excuse Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given for not punishing Khmer Rouge leaders. In December 1998 he asserted: ‘We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate.’⁷ Hun Sen has been in power all the years since then, and no Khmer Rouge leader has been convicted for their role in the historic mass murder.

And by not indicting, or even investigating, Bush officials, Obama is indeed saying that they’re above the law. Like the Khmer Rouge officials have been. Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy.

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.8

One reason for the non-prosecution may be that serious trials of the many Bush officials who contributed to the torture policies might reveal the various forms of Democratic Party non-opposition and collaboration.

It should also be noted that the United States supported Pol Pot (who died in April 1998) and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan.⁹ A lingering bitterness by American cold warriors toward Vietnam, the small nation which monumental US power had not been able to defeat, and its perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, appears to be the only explanation for this policy. Humiliation runs deep when you’re a superpower.

Neither should it be forgotten in this complex cautionary tale that the Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive American ‘carpet bombing’ of Cambodia in 1969–70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.¹⁰ Thank you Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Well done, lads.

By the way, if you’re not already turned off by many of Obama’s appointments, listen to how James Jones opened his talk at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 8, 2009: ‘Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.’¹¹

Lastly, Spain’s High Court recently announced it would launch a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and fourteen civilians in Gaza.12 Spain has for some time been the world’s leading practitioner of ‘universal jurisdiction’ for human-rights violations, such as their indictment of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a decade ago. The Israeli case involved the dropping of a bomb on the home of the Hamas leader; most of those killed were children. The United States does this very same thing every other day in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Given the refusal of American presidents to invoke even their ‘national jurisdiction’ over American officials-cum-war criminals, we can only hope that someone reminds the Spanish authorities of a few names, like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Feith, Perle, Yoo, and a few others with a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a social conscience. There isn’t even a need to rely on international law alone, for there’s an American law against war crimes, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996.¹³

The noted Israeli columnist Uri Avnery, writing about the Israeli case, tried to capture the spirit of Israeli society that produces such war criminals and war crimes. He observed:

This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.¹⁴

It would take very little substitution to apply this statement to the United States – like ‘American’ for ‘Jewish’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ for ‘a Chosen People.’

The two nations have something else of importance in common: the major problem in establishing both the United States and Israel as nations was what to do with the indigenous people. They chose the same solution. Kill ’em. Without legality. Without mercy.

Not your father’s kind of torture

(December 6, 2005)

We’ve been raised to associate torture with acts such as the German and Japanese practices on prisoners during World War II, the Salem witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition, and what we’ve seen in torture museums, Hollywood films, and our comic books … bodies stretched out on racks; locked into devices which press metal points into the victim’s flesh and twist muscles and bones into agonizingly painful positions; red-hot pincers burning off flesh; the tearing out of fingernails; thumbscrews to crush fingers and toes; eyes gouged out … while the torturer’s assistant, a hunchback named Igor, looks on, salivating with sadistic glee.

To the extent that Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, and the rest of the torture apologists and denyers think about it at all, these are the kinds of images they’d like us to associate with torture, which, they hope, will show that what the US does is not torture. But who decided, and where is it written, that the historical torture methods, both real and imagined, comprise the sine qua non definition of torture? No one who has gone through the American dungeons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, or spent time at any of the many secret CIA facilities, and no American who would be subjected to the same, would have any hesitation calling what they experienced ‘torture.’ Merely reading some of the stories is enough to convince a person with any sensitivity. (Yes, to answer your question, that would exclude Cheney, Bush and Gonzales.) I’ve put together a long and graphic list of the techniques employed – from sleep deprivation, the use of dogs, drowning simulation, and lying naked on a sheet of ice, to electric shock, anal assault with various implements, being kept in highly stressful positions for hours on end, and ninety-nine other ways to totally humiliate a human being; many of which the Nazis, Japanese et al. could have learned from.15

Interestingly, the United States granted immunity to a number of the German and Japanese torturers after the war in exchange for information about their torture methods.

Does the Obama administration use torture?

(April 6, 2012)

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he has abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new director of the CIA, explicitly stated that ‘rendition’ was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: ‘Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.’¹⁶

The English translation of ‘cooperate’ is ‘torture.’ Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by America’s national secutity team. Kosovo and Diego Garcia – both of which house very large and secretive American military bases – if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same goes for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued on January 22, 2009 (‘Executive Order 13491 – Ensuring Lawful Interrogations’) leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only ‘in any armed conflict.’ Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of ‘armed conflict,’ which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. What about, for example, torture in a ‘counterterrorism’ environment?

One of Mr Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had

left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ – picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions ‘that violate our human values.’17

He gave no examples of such a place.

Johnny got his gun

(January 2007)

In the past year Iran has issued several warnings to the United States about the consequences of an American or Israeli attack. One statement, issued in November 2006 by a high-ranking Iranian military official, declared: ‘If America attacks Iran, its 200,000 troops and 33 bases in the region will be extremely vulnerable, and both American politicians and military commanders are aware of it.’¹⁸ Iran apparently believes that American leaders would be so deeply distressed by the prospect of their young men and women being endangered and possibly killed that they would forswear any reckless attacks on Iran. As if American leaders have been deeply stabbed by pain about throwing youthful American bodies into the bottomless snakepit called Iraq, or the other one which goes by the name Afghanistan, or were restrained by fear of retaliation or by moral qualms while feeding 58,000 young lives to the Vietnam beast. As if American leaders, like all world leaders, have ever had such concerns.

Let’s have a short look at some modern American history, which may be instructive in this regard. A report of the US Congress in 1994 informed us that

Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical followup after their participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans who became ill after the secret testing.19

In the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, we find a remarkable variety of government programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs: marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSD; widespread exposure to the highly toxic dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam … literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring.²⁰

In the 1990s, many thousands of American soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments. Exposure to harmful chemical or biological agents was suspected, but the Pentagon denied that this had occurred. Years went by while the veterans suffered terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin problems, scarred lungs, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, personality changes, passing out, and much more. Eventually, the Pentagon, inch by inch, was forced to move away from its denials and admit that, yes, chemical weapon depots had been bombed; then, yes, there probably were releases of deadly poisons; then, yes, American soldiers were indeed in the vicinity of these poisonous releases, 400 soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, ‘a very large number’, probably more than 15,000; then, finally, a precise number – 20,867; then, ‘The Pentagon announced that a long-awaited computer model estimates that nearly 100,000 US soldiers could have been exposed to trace amounts of sarin gas.’21

If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the outset about what it knew all along about these various substances and weapons, the soldiers might have had a proper diagnosis early on and received appropriate care sooner. The cost in terms of human suffering is incalculable.

Soldiers have also been forced to take vaccines against anthrax and nerve gas not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as safe and effective; and punished, sometimes treated like criminals, if they refused. (During World War II, soldiers were forced to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the result that some 330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B virus.²²)

And through all the recent wars, countless American soldiers have been put in close proximity to the radioactive dust of exploded depleted uranium-tipped shells and missiles on the battlefield; depleted uranium has been associated with a long list of rare and terrible illnesses and birth defects. The widespread dissemination of depleted uranium by American warfare – from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq – should be an international scandal and crisis, like AIDS, and would be in a world not so intimidated by the United States.

The catalog of Pentagon abuses of American soldiers goes on. Troops serving in Iraq or their families have reported purchasing with their own funds bullet-proof vests, better armor for their vehicles, medical supplies, and global positioning devices, all for their own safety, which were not provided by the army… Continuous complaints by servicewomen of sexual assault and rape at the hands of their male counterparts are routinely played down or ignored by the military brass… Numerous injured and disabled vets from all wars have to engage in an ongoing struggle to get the medical care they were promised… Read ‘Army Acts to Curb Abuses of Injured Recruits’ (New York Times, May 12, 2006) for accounts of the callous, bordering on sadistic, treatment of soldiers in bases in the United States… repeated tours of duty, which fracture family life and increase the chance not only of death or injury but of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).23

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, on December 4, 2006 and other days, ran a series on army mistreatment of soldiers home from Iraq and suffering serious PTSD. At Colorado’s Fort Carson these afflicted soldiers are receiving a variety of abuse and punishment much more than the help they need, as officers harass and punish them for being emotionally ‘weak.’

Keep the above in mind the next time you hear a president or a general speaking on Memorial Day about ‘honor’ and ‘duty’ and about how much we ‘owe to the brave young men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of freedom and democracy.’ These officials have scarcely any more concern for the hapless American servicemen than they do for the foreigners they kill as in a video game. And read Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.

The moral progression of mankind

When it comes to supporting the rights of Jews, there is no greater leader than the Third Reich, and we show that by holding people accountable when they violate the rights of our Jewish citizens. We show that by supporting the advance of religious and ethnic tolerance and supporting those Jewish people in countries where their human rights are denied or violated, like Austria. (Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, March 6, 1941)

When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America, and we show that by holding people accountable when they break the law or violate human rights. We show that by supporting the advance of freedom and democracy and supporting those in countries that are having their human rights denied or violated, like North Korea. (Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, December 2, 2005)

Can you guess which of these statements I’ve made up?

A drone attack, coming soon to a country (or city) near you?

On January 13, 2006 the United States of America, in its shocking and awesome wisdom, saw fit to fly an unmanned Predator aircraft over a remote village in the sovereign nation of Pakistan and fire a Hellfire missile into a residential compound in an attempt to kill some ‘bad guys.’ Several houses were incinerated, eighteen people were killed, including an unknown number of ‘bad guys’; reports since then give every indication that the unknown number is as low as zero, al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, the principal target, not being among them. Outrage is still being expressed in Pakistan. In the United States the reaction in the Senate typified the American outrage.

‘We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again,’ said Senator John McCain of Arizona.

‘It’s a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do?’ asked Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana.

‘My information is that this strike was clearly justified by the intelligence,’ said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi.24

Similar US attacks using such drones and missiles have angered citizens and political leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. It has not been uncommon for the destruction to be so complete that it is impossible to establish who was killed, or even how many people. Amnesty International has lodged complaints with the Busheviks following each suspected Predator strike. A UN report in the wake of the 2002 strike in Yemen called it ‘an alarming precedent [and] a clear case of extrajudicial killing’ in violation of international laws and treaties.²⁵

Can it be imagined that American officials would fire a missile into a house in Paris or London or Ottawa because they suspected that high-ranking al-Qaeda members were present there? Even if the US knew of their presence for an absolute fact, and was not just acting on speculation, as in the Predator cases mentioned above? Well, they most likely would not attack, but can we put anything past Swaggering–Superarrogant–Superpower–Cowboyson-steroids? After all, they’ve already done it to their own – a US drone attack killed two American citizens in Yemen in 2011, and on May 13, 1985, a bomb dropped by a police helicopter over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania burned down an entire block, some sixty homes destroyed, eleven dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict an organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.

The victims in Philadelphia were all black of course. So let’s rephrase the question: can it be imagined that American officials would fire a missile into a residential area of Beverly Hills or the Upper East Side of Manhattan? Stay tuned.

The right to exercise one’s mind

(December 6, 2005)

The Supreme Court announced in 2005 it would review a Pennsylvania case concerning prisons denying dangerous prisoners access to most reading material, television, and radio. These prisoners are permitted to read only religious and legal materials and paperback books from the prison library. A three-judge federal appeals court that struck the policy down did so over the dissent of Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr, President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

‘“On their face,” Alito wrote, “these regulations are reasonably related to the legitimate penological goal of curbing prison misconduct” – because prisoners would be deterred from misbehaving by the prospect of being sent to a place where they have to do without TV and magazines.’26

Never mind Alito’s views on abortion, civil liberties, or gay rights, which have preoccupied those evaluating his fitness for the high court. But consider the deep-seated, plain, simple meanness of the man in wishing to deprive prisoners of mental stimulation through their long nights and years behind bars. Why doesn’t he advocate that these prisoners be deprived of food? Surely that would be an even greater deterrent against misbehavior.

Since I gave up hope, I feel better

(May 1, 2008)

More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. (Woody Allen)

Food riots, in dozens of countries, in the twenty-first century. Is this what we envisioned during the post-World War II, moon-landing twentieth century as humankind’s glorious future?

American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980) once asserted that the role of the artist was to ‘inoculate the world with disillusionment.’ So just in case you, for whatever odd reason, still cling to the belief/hope that the United States can be a positive force in ending or slowing down the new jump in world hunger, here are some disillusioning facts of life.

On December 14, 1981 a resolution was proposed in the United Nations General Assembly which declared that ‘education, work, health care, proper nourishment, national development are human rights.’ Notice the ‘proper nourishment.’ The resolution was approved by a vote of 135:1. The United States cast the only ‘No’ vote.

A year later, on December 18, 1982, an identical resolution was proposed in the General Assembly. It was approved by a vote of 131:1. The United States again cast the only ‘No’ vote.

The following year, December 16, 1983, the resolution was again put forward, a common practice at the United Nations. This time it was approved by a vote of 132:1. There’s no need to tell you who cast the sole ‘No’ vote.

These votes took place under the Reagan administration.

Under the Clinton administration, in 1996, a United Nations-sponsored World Food Summit affirmed the ‘right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food.’ The United States took issue with this, insisting that it does not recognize a ‘right to food.’ Washington instead championed free trade as the key to ending the poverty at the root of hunger, and expressed fears that recognition of a ‘right to food’ could lead to lawsuits from poor nations seeking aid and special trade provisions.27

The situation did not improve under the administration of George W. Bush. In 2002, in Rome, world leaders at another UN-sponsored World Food Summit again approved a declaration that everyone had the right to ‘safe and nutritious food.’ The United States continued to oppose the clause, again fearing it would leave them open to future legal claims by famine-stricken countries.28

Moreover, those defending the US opposition to a Human Right to Food (HRF) have been motivated by the fact that it is not protected by the US Constitution; that it is associated with un-American and socialist political systems; that the American way is self-reliance; that freedom from want is an invention of President Franklin Roosevelt; that food anxiety is an energizing challenge that can mobilize the needy to surmount their distressing circumstances; that taking on HRF obligations would be too expensive.²⁹

Wikileaks

Wikileaks, the United States, Sweden, and Devil’s Island

DECEMBER 16, 2010: I’m standing in the snow in front of the White House. Standing with Veterans for Peace.

I’m only a veteran of standing in front of the White House; the first time was February 1965, handing out flyers against the war in Vietnam. I was working for the State Department at the time and my biggest fear was that someone from that noble institution would pass by and recognize me. Five years later I was still protesting Vietnam, although long gone from the State Department. Then came Cambodia. And Laos. Soon Nicaragua and El Salvador. Then Panama was the new great threat to America, to freedom and democracy and all things holy and decent, so it had to be bombed without mercy. This was followed by the first war against the people of Iraq, and the bombing of Yugoslavia. Then the land of Afghanistan had rained down upon it depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous bombs, and other witches’ brews and weapons of the chemical dust; then Iraq again. And I’ve skipped a few. I think I hold the record for picketing the White House the most times by a right-handed batter.

And through it all, the good, hard-working, righteous people of America have believed mightily that their country always means well; some even believe to this day that we never started a war, certainly nothing deserving of the appellation ‘war of aggression.’

On that same snowy day Julian Assange of WikiLeaks was freed from prison in London and told reporters that he was more concerned that the United States might try to extradite him than he was about being extradited to Sweden, where he faced ‘sexual’ charges.1

That’s a fear many political and drug prisoners in various countries have expressed in recent years. The United States is the new Devil’s Island of the Western world. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, political prisoners were shipped to that godforsaken strip of French land off the eastern coast of South America. One of the current residents of the new Devil’s Island is Chelsea Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Manning faces virtual life in prison if found guilty, of something. Without being tried or convicted of anything, she is allowed only very minimal contact with the outside world; or with people, daylight, or news; among the things she is denied are a pillow, sheets, and exercise; her sleep is restricted and frequently interrupted. See Glenn Greenwald’s discussion of how Manning’s treatment constitutes torture.²

A friend of the young soldier says that many people are reluctant to talk about Manning’s deteriorating physical and mental condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, seizure of their computer without a warrant, and even attempted bribes. ‘This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on her behalf.’³ A developer of the transparency software used by WikiLeaks was detained for several hours last summer by federal agents at a Newark, New Jersey airport, where she was questioned about her connection to WikiLeaks and Assange as well as her opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴

This is but a tiny incident from the near-century buildup of the American police state, from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the crackdown against Central American protesters in the 1980s… elevated by the War on Drugs… now multiplied by the War on Terror. It’s not the worst police state in history, not even the worst police state in the world today, but nonetheless it is a police state, and certainly the most pervasive police state ever – a Washington Post study revealed that there are 4,058 separate federal, state and local ‘counterterrorism’ organizations spread across the United States, each with its own responsibilities and jurisdictions.5 The police of America, of many types, generally get what and who they want. If the United States gets its hands on Julian Assange, under any legal pretext, fear for him; it might be the end of his life as a free person; the actual facts of what he’s done or the actual wording of US laws will not matter; hell hath no fury like an empire scorned.

John Burns, chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times, after interviewing Assange, stated: ‘He is profoundly of the conviction that the United States is a force for evil in the world, that it’s destructive of democracy.’⁶ Can anyone who believes that be entitled to a full measure of human rights on Devil’s Island?

The WikiLeaks documents have added to the steady, gradual erosion of people’s belief in the US government’s good intentions, which is necessary to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. Many more individuals over the years would have been standing in front of the White House if they had had access to the plethora of information that floods people today; which is not to say that we would have succeeded in stopping any of the wars – that’s a question of to what extent the United States is a democracy.

One further consequence of Assange’s predicament may be to put an end to the widespread belief that Sweden, or the Swedish government, is peaceful, progressive, neutral, and independent. Stockholm’s behavior in this matter and others has been as American-poodle-like as London’s, as it lined itself up with an Assange accuser who has been associated with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans, who are of course US-government-supported. This is the same Sweden that for some time in recent years was working with the CIA on its torture-rendition flights and has about 500 soldiers in Afghanistan. Sweden is the world’s largest per capita arms exporter, and for years has taken part in US/NATO military exercises, some within its own territory. The left should get themselves a new nation to admire. Try Cuba.

There’s also the old stereotype held by Americans of Scandinavians practicing a sophisticated and tolerant attitude toward sex, an image that was initiated, or enhanced, by the celebrated 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), which had been banned for a while in the United States. And now what do we have? Sweden sending Interpol on an international hunt for a man who apparently upset two women, perhaps for no more than sleeping with them both in the same week.

And while they’re at it, American progressives should also lose their quaint belief that the BBC is somehow a liberal broadcaster. Americans are such suckers for British accents. John Humphrys, the presenter of the BBC Today program, asked Assange: ‘Are you a sexual predator?’ Assange said the suggestion was ‘ridiculous,’ adding: ‘Of course not.’ Humphrys then asked Assange how many woman he had slept with.7 Would even Fox News have descended to that level? I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He would then have known precisely how to reply to such a question: ‘You mean including your mother?’

Another group of people who should learn a lesson from all this are the knee-reflex conspiracists. Several of them have already written me snide letters informing me of my naiveté in not realizing that Israel is actually behind the release of the WikiLeaks documents; which is why, they inform me, nothing about Israel is mentioned. I had to inform them that I had already seen a few documents putting Israel in a bad light. I’ve since seen others, and Assange, in an interview with Al Jazeera on December 23, 2010 stated that only a meager number of files related to Israel had been published so far because the publications in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish much sensitive information about Israel. (Imagine the flak Germany’s Der Spiegel would get hit with.) ‘There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel,’ said Assange. ‘In the next six months we intend to publish more files.’8

Naturally, several other individuals have informed me that it’s the CIA that is actually behind the document release.

The saga of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks, to be put to ballad and film (March 5, 2012)

Defense lawyers say Manning was clearly a troubled young soldier whom the Army should never have deployed to Iraq or given access to classified material while she was stationed there … They say she was in emotional turmoil, partly because she was a gay soldier at a time when homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.⁹

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Chelsea Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base her legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young woman to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to WikiLeaks. They should not be presenting her that way any more than Chelsea should be tried as a criminal or traitor. She should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Chelsea also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat:

If you had free reign [sic] over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Chelsea Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as ‘solitary confinement.’ Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making her testify against and implicate Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video Collateral Murder and documented in the ‘Iraq War Logs,’ made public by Manning and WikiLeaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two small children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army–Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law – something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed – forced the Obama administration to pull virtually all American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, she would be a free woman today, like the numerous American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities such as Haditha and Fallujah.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq War, the WikiLeaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there – one long and detailed cable being titled ‘Corruption in Tunisia: What’s Yours is Mine’ – how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other WikiLeaks revelations based on the embassy cables that have made the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano ‘took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.’
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American General David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. ‘We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,’ Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: (a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; (b) torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; (c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; (d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; (e) continual criticism of the Iraq War by Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, permanent Security Council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: email and website addresses, Internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay, were asked to obtain dates, times, and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran, and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary, and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on ‘current and emerging leaders and advisers.’ The UN directive also specifically asked for ‘biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats.’ A cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special ‘Iran observer’ in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: ‘there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch.’ [US support for the coup government has been unwavering ever since.]
• [There has been much US criticism of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa for his hostile behavior toward the mass media, but a March 31, 2009 State Department cable stated:] ‘There is more than a grain of truth to Correa’s observation that the Ecuadorian media play a political role, in this case the role of the opposition. Many media outlet owners come from the elite business class that feels threatened by Correa’s reform agenda, and defend their own economic interests via their outlets.’
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth.
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through Sweden could be intercepted. [The American interest was clear: reportedly 80 percent of all the Internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.]
• Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or ‘Afghanistan is over for Europe.’
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily ‘manage’ the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a ‘weak and fractured’ Iraq, and were even ‘fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government.’ The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits.
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceuticals company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have ‘inserted staff’ and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces – despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder – after the Indonesian president threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption, and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US secretary of state to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with Al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic Church and the state by identifying the Church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five [arrested in the US]. Better US–Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the ‘Cuban Five.’ ‘Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.’
• UK officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the runup to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for ‘human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess.’ [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba among the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a ‘boy-play’ party for Afghan police recruits. [Yes, it’s what you think.]
• Even though the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government not to go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up-front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organizations as a ‘government death squad.’
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnapped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and anally assaulted. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re ‘widespread severe torture’ by India. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: ‘The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC–GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.’ Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. [American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of ‘the world’s largest democracy’; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.]
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite television channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

Conspiracies

Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy

All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided. (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. III)

I believe in conspiracies. So do all of you. American and world history are full of conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy. The cover-up of Watergate was a conspiracy. So was Enron. And Iran–Contra. The October Surprise really took place. For a full year, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney conspired to invade Iraq while continually denying that they had made any such decision. The Japanese conspired to attack Pearl Harbor while negotiating with Washington to find peaceful solutions to the issues separating the two governments. There are numerous people sitting in prison at this very moment in the United States for having been convicted of ‘conspiracy’ to commit this or that crime.

However, it doesn’t follow that all conspiracy theories are created equal, all to be taken seriously. Many people send me emails about perceived conspiracies which I don’t place much weight on. Here are a few examples.

If they try to access my website a few times and keep getting an error message, they ask me if the FBI or Homeland Security or America Online has finally gotten around to shutting me down.

If they send me an email and it’s returned to them, for whatever reason, they wonder if AOL is blocking their particular mail or perhaps blocking all my mail.

If they fail to receive a copy of my monthly Anti-Empire Report, they wonder if AOL or some government agency is blocking it.

If they come upon a news item on the Internet which exposes really bad behavior of the powers-that-be, they point out how ‘the mainstream media is completely ignoring this,’ even though I may already have read it in the Washington Post or the New York Times. To make the claim that the mainstream media is completely ignoring a particular news item, one would need to have access to the full version of a service like Lexis–Nexis and know how to use it expertly. Google often won’t suffice if the news item has not appeared on the website of any mainstream media even though it may be in print or have been broadcast, although the creation of Google News has improved chances of finding an item.

No matter how many times I’m critical of Israel, no matter how many years I’ve gone without issuing a single favorable word about Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, if I happen to discuss a number of US interventions but don’t make any mention of how Israel is the driving force behind [most? almost all? all?] of these interventions, then I’m a closet Zionist.

With every new audiotape or videotape from Osama bin Laden my correspondents were sure to inform me that the man was really dead and that the tape was a CIA fabrication. In January 2006, when bin Laden, on an audiotape, recommended that Americans read my book Rogue State, the mainstream media were eager to interview me. But a number of my correspondents were quick to inform me and the entire Internet that the tape was phony, implying that I was being naive to believe it. When I ask them why the CIA would want to publicize and increase the book sales of a writer like myself, who has been exposing the intelligence agency’s crimes his entire writing life, I get no answer that’s worth remembering, often not even understandable.

‘Why do you bother criticizing Bush (or Obama)? He’s not the real power. He’s just a puppet,’ they say to me. The real power behind the throne, I’ve been told, is/was Dick Cheney/David Rockefeller/the Federal Reserve/the Council on Foreign Relations/the Bilderberger Group/the Trilateral Commission/Bohemian Grove, and so on. Why, I wonder, are the annual meetings of the Bilderberger Group et al. thought to be so vital to their members and so indicative of their power? To the extent that the Bilderbergerites have access to those in power and are able to influence them, they have this access and power all year long, whether or not they gather together in a once-a-year closed meeting. I think their meetings are primarily a social thing. Money and power like to enjoy cocktails with money and power.

Finally, there’s September 11, 2001. Among those in the ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ I am a sinner because I don’t champion the idea that it was an ‘inside job,’ although I don’t dismiss this idea categorically. I think it more likely that the Bush administration had received intelligence that something was about to happen involving airplanes, perhaps took it to mean an old-fashioned hijacking with political demands, and then let it happen, to make use of it politically, as they certainly did.

When I say that I don’t think that 9/11 was an ‘inside job,’ it’s not because I believe that men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld et al. were not morally depraved enough to carry out such a monstrous act; these men consciously and directly instigated the Iraqi and Afghanistan horrors which have cost many more American lives than were lost on 9/11, not to mention more than a million Iraqis and Afghans who dearly wanted to remain among the living. In the Gulf War of 1991, Cheney and other American leaders purposely destroyed electricity-generating plants, water-pumping systems, and sewerage systems in Iraq, then imposed sanctions upon the country making the repair of the infrastructure extremely difficult. Then, after twelve years, when the Iraqi people had performed the heroic task of getting these systems working fairly well again, the US bombers came back to inflict devastating damage to them all once more. My books and many others document one major crime against humanity after another by our America once so dear and cherished.

So it’s not the moral question that makes me doubt the inside-job scenario. It’s the logistics of it all – the incredible complexity of arranging it all so that it would work and not be wholly and transparently unbelievable. That and the gross overkill – they didn’t need to destroy all those buildings and planes and people. One of the twin towers killing more than a thousand would certainly have been enough to sell the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and the new American Police State. The American people are not such a hard sell. They really yearn to be true believers. Look how so many of them worship Obama despite his waging one war after another.

To win over people like me, the 9/11 truth people need to present a scenario that makes the logistics reasonably plausible. They might start by trying to answer questions like the following. Did planes actually hit the towers and the Pentagon and crash in Pennsylvania? Were these the same four United Airline and American Airline planes that took off from Boston and Newark? At the time of collision, were they being piloted by people or by remote control? If by people, who were these people? What happened to all the passengers?

Also, why did building 7 collapse? If it was purposely demolished – why? All the reasons I’ve read so far I find not very credible. As to the films of the towers and building 7 collapsing, which make it appear that this had to be the result of controlled demolitions – I agree, it does indeed look that way. But what do I know? I’m no expert. It’s not like I’ve seen, in person or on film, numerous examples of buildings collapsing due to controlled demolition and numerous other examples of buildings collapsing due to planes crashing into them, so I could make an intelligent distinction. We are told by the 9/11 truth people that no building constructed like the towers has ever collapsed due to fire. But how about fire plus a full-size, loaded airplane smashing into it? How many examples of that do we have?

But there’s at least one argument those who support the official version use against the skeptics that I would question. It’s the argument that if the government planned the operation there would have to have been many people in on the plot, and surely by now one of them would have talked and the mainstream media would have reported their stories. But in fact a number of firemen, the buildings’ janitor, and others have testified to hearing many explosions in the towers some time after the planes crashed, supporting the theory of planted explosives. But scarce little of this has made it to the mainstream media. Similarly, following the JFK assassination at least two men came forward afterward and identified themselves as being one of the three ‘tramps’ on the grassy knoll in Dallas. So what happened? The mainstream media ignored them both. I know of them only because the tabloid press ran their stories. One of the men was the father of actor Woody Harrelson.

But I do wish you guys in the 9/11 Truth Movement luck; if you succeed in proving that it was an inside job, that would do more to topple the empire than anything I have ever written.

Lockerbie: don’t believe anything until it’s been officially denied

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was a Libyan who spent eight years in a Scottish prison charged with the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people. Many of those who investigated the case, including several in prominent establishment legal positions, argued for years that the evidence against Megrahi was exceedingly thin and unpersuasive. At one point a court in Scotland appeared to agree and ordered a new appeal for Megrahi. But then Megrahi was released back to Libya because of terminal cancer, from which he died in 2012.

Briefly, the key international political facts are these. For well over a year after the bombing, the US and the UK insisted that Iran, Syria, and a Palestinian group, the PFLP–GC, had been behind the bombing, allegedly done at the behest of Iran as revenge for the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988, which claimed 290 lives. (An act the US called an accident, but which came about because of deliberate American intrusion into the Iran–Iraq war on the side of Iraq.)

Then the buildup to the US invasion of Iraq came along in 1990 (how quickly do nations change from allies to enemies on the empire’s chessboard) and the support of Iran and Syria was desired for the operation. Suddenly, in October 1990, the US declared that it was Libya – the Arab state least supportive of the US buildup to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq – that was behind the bombing after all. Megrahi and another Libyan were fingered.

The PFLP–GC was headquartered in, financed by, and closely supported by Syria. The support for the scenario described above was, and remains, impressive, as the following sample indicates: In April 1989, the FBI leaked the news that it had tentatively identified the person who unwittingly carried the bomb aboard the plane. His name was Khalid Jaafar, a 21–year-old Lebanese American. The report said that the bomb had been planted in Jaafar’s suitcase by a member of the PFLP–GC.

In May, the State Department stated that the CIA was ‘confident’ of the Iran/Syria/PFLP–GC account of events. Then The Times in London reported that ‘security officials from Britain, the United States and West Germany were “totally satisfied” that it was the PFLP–GC’ behind the crime. In December 1989, Scottish investigators announced that they had ‘hard evidence’ of the involvement of the PFLP–GC in the bombing. A National Security Agency electronic intercept disclosed that Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Iranian interior minister, had paid Palestinian terrorists $10 million dollars to gain revenge for the downed Iranian airplane. Israeli intelligence also intercepted a communication between Mohtashemi and the Iranian embassy in Beirut ‘indicating that Iran paid for the Lockerbie bombing.’

For many more details about this case, which cast even greater doubt upon the official version of Libyan guilt, with full documentation, see killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm (‘I am absolutely astounded, astonished,’ said the Scottish law professor who was the architect of the trial. ‘I was extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would convict anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence.’)

And, by the way, Libya under Gaddafi never confessed to having carried out the act. They only took ‘responsibility,’ in the hope of getting various sanctions against them ended.

The conspiracy to trivialize conspiracy theories

During the Cold War when Washington was confronted with a charge of covert American misbehavior abroad, it was common to imply that the Russkies or some other nefarious commies were behind the spread of such tales; this was usually enough to discredit the story in the mind of any right-thinking American. Since that period, the standard defense against uncomfortable accusations and questions has been a variation of ‘Oh, that sounds like a conspiracy theory’ (chuckle, chuckle). Every White House press secretary learns that before his first day on the job.

Ironically, Pierre Salinger, press secretary to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was himself on the receiving end of this practice. When he died on October 16, 2004, the Washington Post obituary included this: ‘His journalistic reputation was besmirched in the 1990s, however, after his insistence that two major airline crashes were not what they seemed. He said that the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland was a Drug Enforcement Agency operation that went wrong – a theory for which no evidence materialized.’1 (There is, in fact, much more evidence in support of the incidental DEA role than of the Libyan role.)

‘Conspiracy’ researcher and author Jonathan Vankin has observed:

Journalists like to think of themselves as a skeptical lot. This is a flawed self-image. The thickest pack of American journalists are all too credulous when dealing with government officials, technical experts, and other official sources. They save their vaunted ‘skepticism’ for ideas that feel unfamiliar to them. Conspiracy theories are treated with the most rigorous skepticism.

Conspiracy theories should be approached skeptically. But there’s no fairness. Skepticism should apply equally to official and unofficial information.²

Yugoslavia

The international left still in bitter dispute

The events in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s were very contentious at the time and remain so today; contentious not only between the usual supporters and foes of American imperialism, but among those on the left. There has been hardly any issue in modern times that has divided the international left as much as this one; arguments about the US/NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ still pop up as a result of current events; the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 is the latest example – was it carried out to rescue the Libyan people from a terrible tyrant, or was it to remove Muammar Gaddafi because of his long history of not catering to the Western powers as they are accustomed to being catered to? The same question applies to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who had refused to fall happily under the dominion of the US/NATO/European Union/World Bank/IMF/WTO world government. The quasi-socialist Serbian state was regarded as Europe’s last ‘communist’ holdout. Moreover, post-Cold War, NATO needed to demonstrate a raison d’être if it was to remain alive as Washington’s enforcement thug.

One of the key issues in contention has been Kosovo. The prolonged US/NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, the world was assured, was in response to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ being carried out by the Serbian government against their ancient province of Kosovo. Numerous intelligent, well-meaning people remain convinced that the bombing took place after the mass forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well under way; which is to say that the bombing was launched in response to and to stop this ‘ethnic cleansing.’ In actuality, the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people from Kosovo did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of extreme anger and powerlessness on the part of the Serb leaders. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing began, the night of March 23/24, and the few days after. Or simply look at the New York Times of March 26, page 1, which reads: ‘with the NATO bombing already begun, a deepening sense of fear took hold in Pristina [Kosovo’s main city] that the Serbs would now vent their rage against ethnic Albanian civilians in retaliation’ (emphasis added). Only on March 27 do we find the first reference to a ‘forced march’ or anything of that sort. But the propaganda version is already set in marble.

Victors’ justice and impunity

(August 5, 2008)

So, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has finally been apprehended. He’s slated to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, charged with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

The ICTY was created by the United Nations in 1993. Its full name is ‘The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991’. Notice the ‘who’ – ‘Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law.’ Notice the ‘where’ – ‘Territory of the Former Yugoslavia.’ This is all spelled out in the statute of the Tribunal.1

In 1999, NATO (primarily the United States) bombed the Yugoslav republic of Serbia for seventy-eight consecutive days, ruining the economy, the ecology, power supply, bridges, apartment buildings, transportation, infrastructure, churches, schools, pushing the country many years back in its development, killing hundreds or thousands of people, traumatizing countless children, who’ll be reacting unhappily to certain sounds and sights for perhaps the remainder of their days; the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in the history of the world, at least up to that time. Nobody has ever suggested that Serbia had attacked or was preparing to attack a member state of NATO, and that is the only event which justifies a reaction under the NATO treaty.

The ICTY has already held one high-level trial in an attempt to convince the world of the justice of the NATO bombing – former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his Hague prison while trying to defend himself against charges that remain unproven. Radovan Karadzic is next. When will the Western leaders behind the bombing of Serbia be tried for war crimes, as called for by the Tribunal’s own statute, as noted above?

Shortly after the bombing began in March, 1999, professionals in international law from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the United States began to file complaints with the ICTY charging leaders of NATO countries with ‘grave violations of international humanitarian law,’ including:

wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences.

The Canadian suit named sixty-eight leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleged ‘open violation’ of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The complainants’ briefs pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was ‘not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries.’ Charging the war’s victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law.

In a letter to Louise Arbour, the court’s chief prosecutor, Michael Mandel, a professor of law in Toronto and the initiator of the Canadian suit, stated:

Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes. In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia.2

Arbour herself made little attempt to hide the pro-NATO bias she wore beneath her robe. She trusted NATO to be its own police, judge, jury, and prison guard. Here are her words:

I am obviously not commenting on any allegations of violations of international humanitarian law supposedly perpetrated by nationals of NATO countries. I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law.3

The ICTY on its website tells us: ‘By holding individuals accountable regardless of their position, the ICTY’s work has dismantled the tradition of impunity for war crimes and other serious violations of international law, particularly by individuals who held the most senior positions.’⁴ US/NATO leaders, however, have immunity not only for the 1999 bombings of Serbia, but the many bombings of Bosnia in the period 1993–95, including the use of depleted uranium. ‘Dismantling the tradition of impunity’ indeed.

Arbour was succeeded in 1999 as the ICTY’s chief prosecutor by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss diplomat. In accordance with her official duties, she looked into possible war crimes of all the participants in the conflicts of the 1990s surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing of Serbia and its province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians were trying to secede. In late December 1999, in an interview with the London Observer, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press criminal charges against NATO personnel (and not just against the former Yugoslav republics). She replied: ‘If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission.’

The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible NATO crimes, declaring: ‘It is very important for this tribunal to assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict within the former Yugoslavia.’ Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium (2000 was but a week away) was going to be one of more equal international justice? Could this really be?

No, it couldn’t. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials … ‘appalling’ … ‘unjustified’. Del Ponte got the message. Her office quickly issued a statement: ‘NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo.5

Del Ponte remained in her position until the end of 2007, leaving to become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a book about her time with the Tribunal, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. The book created something of a scandal in Europe, for in it she revealed how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted hundreds of Serbs in 1999, and took them to Kosovo’s fellow Muslims in Albania where they were killed, their kidneys and other body parts then removed and sold for transplant in other countries.

The KLA for years before and since has been engaging in other charming activities, such as heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and carrying out ethnic cleansing of Serbs who have had the bad fortune to be in Kosovo because it has long been their home.⁶ Between 1998 and 2002, the KLA appeared at times on the State Department terrorism list; at first because of its tactic of targeting innocent Serb civilians in order to provoke retaliation from Serb troops; later because mujahideen mercenaries from various Islamic countries, including some groups tied to al-Qaeda, were fighting alongside the KLA, as they were in Bosnia with the Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s’ Yugoslav civil wars. The KLA remained on the terrorist list until the United States decided to make them an ally, partly due to the existence of a major American military base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel. (It’s remarkable, is it not, how these American bases pop up all around the world?) In November 2005, following a visit there, Alvaro Gil-Robles, the human rights envoy of the Council of Europe, described the camp as a ‘smaller version of Guantánamo.’7

On February 17, 2008, in a move of highly questionable international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new ‘nation,’ thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory. The new country has as its prime minister a gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte’s book as the brain behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their organs. The new gangster state of Kosovo is supported by Washington and other Western powers who can’t forgive Serbia–Yugoslavia–Milosevic for not wanting to wholeheartedly embrace the NATO/US/European Union triumvirate, which recognizes no higher power, United Nations or other. The independent state of Kosovo is regarded as reliably pro-West, a state that will serve as a militarized outpost for the triumvirate.

In her book, Del Ponte asserts that there was sufficient evidence for prosecution of Kosovo Albanians involved in war crimes, but the investigation ‘was nipped in the bud,’ focusing instead on ‘the crimes committed by Serbia.’ She claims that she could do nothing because it was next to impossible to collect evidence in Kosovo, which was swarming with criminals, in and out of the government. Witnesses were intimidated, and even judges in The Hague were afraid of the Kosovo Albanians.⁸

Libya

Arguing Libya

On July 9, 2011 I took part in a demonstration in front of the White House, the theme of which was ‘Stop Bombing Libya.’ The last time I had taken part in a protest against US bombing of a foreign country which the White House was selling as a ‘humanitarian intervention,’ as they did in Libya, was in 1999 during the prolonged bombing of Serbia. At that time I went to a couple of such demonstrations and both times I was virtually the only American there. The rest, maybe two dozen, were almost all Serbs. ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is a great selling device for imperialism, particularly in the American market. Americans are desperate to renew their precious faith that the United States means well, that we are still ‘the good guys.’

This time there were about a hundred taking part in the protest. I don’t know if any were Libyans, but there was a new element – almost half of the protesters were black, marching with signs saying: ‘Stop Bombing Africa.’

There was another new element: people supporting the bombing of Libya, facing us from their side of Pennsylvania Avenue about 40 feet away. They were made up largely of Libyans, probably living in the area, who had only praise and love for the United States and NATO. Their theme was that Gaddafi was so bad that they would support anything to get rid of him, even daily bombing of their homeland, which eventually exceeded Serbia’s seventy-eight days. I of course crossed the road and got into arguments with some of them. I kept asking: ‘I hate that man there [pointing to the White House] just as much as you hate Gaddafi. Do you think I should therefore support the bombing of Washington? Destroying the beautiful monuments and buildings of this city, as well as killing people?’

None of the Libyans even tried to answer my question. They only repeated their anti-Gaddafi vitriol. ‘You don’t understand. We have to get rid of Gaddafi. He’s very brutal.’ (See the CNN video of the July 1 mammoth pro-Gaddafi rally in Tripoli for an indication that these Libyans’ views were far from universal at home: www.mathaba.net/news/?x=627196?rss)

‘But you at least get free education and medical care,’ I pointed out. ‘That’s a lot more than we get here. And Libya has the highest standard of living in the entire region, at least it did before the NATO and US bombing. If Gaddafi is brutal, what do you call all the other leaders of the region, whom Washington has long supported?’ One retorted that there had been free education under the king, whom Gaddafi had overthrown. I was skeptical of this but I didn’t know for sure that it was incorrect, so I replied: ‘So what? Gaddafi at least didn’t get rid of the free education like leaders in Britain and Europe did in recent years.’

A police officer suddenly appeared and forced me to return to my side of the road. I’m sure if pressed for an explanation, the officer would have justified this as a means of preventing violence from breaking out. But there was never any danger of that at all; another example of the American police-state mentality – order and control come before civil liberties, before anything.

Most Americans overhearing my argument with the Libyans would probably have interjected something like: ‘Well, no matter how much you hate the president you can still get rid of him with an election. The Libyans can’t do that.’ And I would have come back with: ‘Right. I have the freedom to replace George W. Bush with Barack H. Obama. Oh joy. As long as our elections are overwhelmingly determined by money, nothing of any significance will change.’

It doesn’t matter to them if it’s untrue. It’s a higher truth.

(November 1, 2011)

‘We came, we saw, he died.’ The words of US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Muammar Gaddafi.

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9/11: ‘We came, we saw, 3,000 died… ha-ha.’

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of perhaps thousands … this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, Al Jazeera) – from the declared imminence of a ‘bloodbath’ in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn’t intervene to stories of government helicopter gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi’s army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American ambassador, as if young soldiers were in need of Viagra!)1

The New York Times (March 22, 2011) observed: ‘The rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.’

The Los Angeles Times (April 7, 2011) added this about the rebels’ media operation:

It’s not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

•    No pro-[Gaddafi] reportage or commentary.

•    No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)

•    No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)

•    No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That’s [Gaddafi’s] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation as well, but it was the rebels’ trail of lies, of both omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for ‘humanitarian intervention’; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can’t get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on the aerial attacks, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.2

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.3

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴ The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the ‘basic source’ of legislation, and laws that contradict ‘the teachings of Islam’ would be nullified. There would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980–90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The US also fought on the same side as the Islamic militants in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Syria. The American government has imprisoned many people as ‘terrorists’ in the United States for a lot less than supporting al-Qaeda types.

What began in Libya as ‘normal’ civil war violence from both sides – repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention (the US continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) – was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this key issue is another video, Humanitarian War in Libya: There Is No Evidence.⁶ The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, secretary general, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland. Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi’s planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that’s the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of ‘eyewitnesses’: ‘little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally.’ After a while he declares that ‘there is no way’ to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization’s working with the National Endowment for Democracy in its effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in the film Humanitarian War in Libya at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of seventy-seven pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document’s table of contents, which shows that pages 17–71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as ‘redacted.’ In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: ‘Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya exactly a century ago, 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture – these were the weapons of Europe’s takeover’ in the Mideast.7

Unending American hostility

(July 1, 2011)

If I could publicly ask our beloved president Barack Obama one question, it would be this: ‘Mr President, in your short time in office you’ve waged war against six countries – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. This makes me wonder something. With all due respect: what is wrong with you?’

The American media has done its best to dismiss or ignore Libyan charges that NATO/US missiles have been killing civilians (the people they’re supposedly protecting), at least up until the recent bombing ‘error’ that was too blatant to be covered up. But who in the mainstream media has questioned the NATO/US charges that Libya was targeting and ‘massacring’ Libyan civilians a few months ago, which, we’ve been told, is the reason for the Western powers’ attacks? Don’t look to Al Jazeera for such questioning. The government of Qatar, which owns the station, has a deep-seated animosity toward Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and was itself a leading purveyor of the Libyan ‘massacre’ stories, as well as playing a military role itself in the war against Tripoli. Al Jazeera’s reporting on the subject has been remarkably slanted.

Alain Juppé, foreign minister of France, which has been the leading force behind the attacks on Libya, spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington on June 7, 2011. After his talk he was asked a question from the audience by local activist Ken Meyercord:

An American observer of events in Libya has commented: ‘The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent.’ That comment was made by Richard Haass, President of our Council on Foreign Relations. If Mr. Haass is right, and he’s a fairly knowledgeable fellow, then what NATO has done in Libya is attack a country that wasn’t threatening anyone; in other words, aggression. Are you at all concerned that as NATO deals more and more death and destruction on the people of Libya that the International Criminal Court may decide that you and your friends in the Naked Aggression Treaty Organization should be prosecuted rather than Mr. Gaddafi?

Monsieur Juppé then stated, without attribution, somebody’s estimate that 15,000 Libyan civilians had been killed by pro-Gaddafi forces. To which Mr. Meyercord replied: ‘So where are the 15,000 bodies?’ M. Juppé failed to respond to this, although in the tumult caused by the first question it was not certain that he had heard the second one.8

It should be noted that, as of June 30, 2011 NATO had flown 13,184 air missions (sorties) over Libya, 4,963 of which are described as strike sorties.⁹

If any foreign power fired missiles at the United States, would Barack Obama regard that as an act of war? If the US firing many hundreds of missiles at Libya is not an act of war, as Obama insists (to avoid having to declare war as required by US law), then the deaths resulting from the missile attacks are murder. That’s it. It’s either war or murder. To the extent there’s a difference between the two.

It should be further noted that since Gaddafi came to power in 1969 there has virtually never been a sustained period when the United States has been prepared to treat him and the many positive changes he’s instituted in Libya and Africa with any respect.¹⁰

A word from the man the world’s mightiest military power spent years trying to kill

The following is an excerpt from Recollections of My Life, written by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, April 8, 2011:

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called ‘capitalism,’ but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us … I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. … In the West, some have called me ‘mad’, ‘crazy’. They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip.

Latin America

The crime of GWS – governing while socialist

(December 11, 2007)

In Chile, during the 1964 presidential election campaign, in which Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was running against two other major candidates much to his right, one radio spot featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman’s cry: ‘They have killed my child – the communists.’ The announcer then added in impassioned tones: ‘Communism offers only blood and pain. For this not to happen in Chile, we must elect Eduardo Frei president.’1 Frei was the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, the majority of whose campaign costs were underwritten by the CIA, according to the US Senate.² One anti-Allende campaign poster which appeared in the thousands showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads.³

The scare campaign played up to the fact that women in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, are traditionally more religious than men, more susceptible to being alarmed by the specter of ‘godless, atheist communism’.

Allende lost. He won the men’s vote by 67,000 over Frei (in Chile men and women vote separately), but among the women Frei came out ahead by 469,000 – testimony, once again, to the remarkable ease with which the minds of the masses can be manipulated, in any and all societies.

In Venezuela, during the 2007 campaign concerning the constitutional reforms put forth by Hugo Chávez, the opposition played to the same emotional themes of motherhood and ‘communist’ oppression. (Quite possibly because of similar CIA advice.) ‘I voted for Chávez for President, but not now. Because they told me that if the reform passes, they’re going to take my son, because he will belong to the state,’ said a woman, Gladys Castro, interviewed in Venezuela before the vote for a report by Venezuelanalysis.com, an English-language news service published by North Americans in Caracas. The report added:

Gladys is not the only one to believe the false rumors she’s heard. Thousands of Venezuelans, many of them Chávez supporters, have bought the exaggerations and lies about Venezuela’s Constitutional Reform that have been circulating across the country for months. Just a few weeks ago, however, the disinformation campaign ratcheted up various notches as opposition groups and anti-reform coalitions placed large ads in major Venezuelan papers. The most outrageous was … [a] two-page spread in the country’s largest circulation newspaper, Últimas Noticias, which claimed about the Constitutional Reform: ‘If you are a Mother, YOU LOSE! Because you will lose your house, your family and your children. Children will belong to the state.’

This particular ad was placed by a Venezuelan business organization, Cámara Industrial de Carabobo, which has among its members dozens of subsidiaries of the largest US corporations operating in Venezuela.⁴

It’s widely believed that US hostility toward Chávez arises from Washington’s desire to grab Venezuela’s oil. However, in the post-World War II period, in Latin America alone, the US has had a similar contentious policy toward progressive governments and movements in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia. What these governments and movements all had in common was that they were or are leftist; it’s nothing to do with oil. For more than half a century Washington has been trying to block the rise of any government in Latin America that threatens to offer a viable alternative to the capitalist model. Venezuela of course fits perfectly into that scenario, oil or no oil. This ideology was the essence of the Cold War all over the world.

Chávez’s ideological crime is multiplied by his being completely independent of Washington, using his oil wealth to become a powerful force in Latin America, inspiring and aiding other independent-minded governments in the region, like Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, as well as carrying on close relations with the likes of China, Russia, and Iran. The man does not show proper understanding that he’s living in the Yankees’ back yard; indeed, in the Yankee’s world. The Yankee empire grew to its present size and power precisely because it did not tolerate men like Salvador Allende and Hugo Chávez and their quaint socialist customs. Despite its best efforts, the CIA was unable to prevent Allende from becoming Chile’s president in 1970. When subsequent parliamentary elections made it apparent to the Agency and their Chilean conservative allies that they would not be able to oust the left from power legally, they instigated a successful military coup, in 1973, during which Allende died.

In a 1970 memo to President Nixon, Henry Kissinger wrote: ‘The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on – and even precedent value for – other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.’

Chávez has spoken publicly about his being assassinated, and his government has several times uncovered what they perceived to be planned assassination attempts, from both domestic and foreign sources. In addition to the case of Salvador Allende, the cases of Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, military leader of Panama, have to be considered. Both were reformers who refused to allow their countries to become client states of Washington or American corporations. Both were firm supporters of the radical Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua; both banned an American missionary group, the Summer Institute of Linguistics – long suspected of CIA ties – because of suspicious political behavior; both died in mysterious plane crashes during the Reagan administration in 1981, Torrijos’s plane exploding in midair.5 Torrijos had earlier been marked for assassination by Richard Nixon.⁶

In contrast to the cases of Roldós and Torrijos, over the years, the United States has gotten along just fine with brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and leaders who did nothing to relieve the poverty of their populations – Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Greek Junta, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Duvalier, Mobutu, the Brazilian Junta, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, South African apartheid leaders, Portuguese fascists, and so on, all terrible guys, all seriously supported by Washington for an extended period; for none made it a regular habit, if ever, publicly to express strong disrespect for American leaders or their policies.

What if NBC cheered on a military coup against Bush?

(June 8, 2007)

During the Cold War, if an American journalist or visitor to the Soviet Union reported seeing churches full of people, this was taken as a sign that the people were rejecting and escaping from communism. If the churches were empty, this clearly was proof of the suppression of religion. If consumer goods were scarce, this was seen as a failure of the communist system. If consumer goods appeared to be more plentiful, this gave rise to speculation about was happening in the Soviet Union that was prompting the authorities to try to buy off the citizenry.7

I’m reminded of this kind of thinking concerning Venezuela. The conservative anti-communist American mind sees things pertaining to Washington’s newest bête noire in the worst possible light. If Chávez makes education more widely available to the masses of poor people, it’s probably for the purpose of indoctrinating them. If Chávez invites a large number of Cuban doctors to Venezuela to treat the poor, it’s a sign of a new and growing communist conspiracy in Latin America, which includes Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. If Chávez wins repeated democratic elections… here’s the former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: ‘I mean, we’ve got Chávez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money. He’s a person who was elected legally just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.’⁸

The latest manifestation of this mindset is the condemnation of the Venezuelan government’s refusal to renew the license of RCTV, a private television station. This has been denounced by the American government and media, and all other right-thinking people, as suppression of free speech, even though they all know very well that the main reason, the sine qua non, for the refusal of the license renewal has to do with RCTV’s unqualified support for the 2002 coup that briefly overthrew Chávez. If there was a successful military coup in the United States and a particular television station applauded the overthrow of the president (and the dissolving of Congress and the Supreme Court, as well as the suspension of the Constitution), and if then the coup was reversed by other military forces accompanied by mass demonstrations, and the same television station did not report any of this while it was happening to avoid giving support to the counter-coup, and instead kept reporting that the president had voluntarily resigned… how long would it be before the US government, back in power, shut down the station, arrested its executives, charging them under half a dozen terrorist laws, and throwing them into shackles and orange jumpsuits never to be seen again? How long? Five minutes? The Venezuelan government waited five years, until the station’s license was due for renewal. And none of the executives has been arrested. And RCTV is still free to broadcast via cable and satellite. Is there a country in the entire world that would be as lenient?9

It can be said that the media in Venezuela are a lot more free than in the United States. How many daily newspapers or television networks in the United States are unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? How many of them in the entire United States have earned the label ‘opposition media’? Maybe Fox News when a Democrat is in the White House. Venezuela has lots of opposition media.

Venezuela: hell hath no fury like an empire scorned

In 2007, Hugo Chávez lost a complicated and extensive reform referendum, which included removing term limits for the presidency, but he then proposed a more limited reform in 2009 to eliminate just term limits for all elected offices and he won. The American media and the opposition in Venezuela have made it sound as if Chávez was going to be guaranteed office for as long as he wanted; a veritable dictatorship. But in fact there was nothing at all automatic about the process – Chávez would have to be elected each time. It’s not unusual for a nation to have no term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not most of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation’s first 162 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

In 2005, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe succeeded in getting term limits lifted, the US mainstream media took scant notice. President Bush subsequently honored Uribe with the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in the period leading up to the February 15, 2007 referendum in Venezuela, the American media were competing with each other over who could paint Chávez and the Venezuelan constitutional process in the most critical and ominous terms. Typical was an op-ed in the Washington Post the day before the vote, which was headlined: ‘Closing in on Hugo Chávez.’ Its opening sentence read: ‘The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chávez.’10

For several years, the campaign to malign Chávez has at times included issues of Israel and anti-Semitism. The isolated vandalism of a Caracas synagogue on January 30, 2009 fed into this campaign. Synagogues are of course vandalized occasionally in the United States and many European countries, but no one ascribes this to a government policy driven by anti-Semitism. With Chávez they do. In the American media, the lead-up to the Venezuelan vote was never far removed from the alleged ‘Jewish’ issue.

‘Despite the government’s efforts to put the [synagogue] controversy to rest,’ the New York Times wrote a few days before the referendum vote, ‘a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews.’¹¹

A day earlier, a Washington Post editorial was entitled ‘Mr. Chávez vs. the Jews – With George W. Bush gone, Venezuela’s strongman has found new enemies.’¹² Shortly before, a Post headline had informed us ‘Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy – Government and Media Seen Fostering Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, Elsewhere.’¹³

So commonplace did the Chávez–Jewish association become that a leading US progressive organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, DC, distributed an article that read more like the handiwork of a conservative group than a progressive one. I was prompted to write to them as follows:

Dear People,

I’m very sorry to say that I found your Venezuelan commentary by Larry Birns and David Rosenblum Felson to be remarkably lacking. The authors seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between being against Israeli policies from anti-Semitism. It’s kind of late in the day for them to not have comprehended the difference. They are forced to fall back on a State Department statement to make their case. Is that not enough said?

They condemn Chávez likening Israel’s occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. But what if it’s an apt comparison? They don’t delve into this question at all.

They also condemn the use of the word ‘Zionism’, saying that ‘in 9 times out of 10 involving the use of this word in fact smacks of anti-Semitism.’ Really? Can they give a precise explanation of how one distinguishes between an anti-Semitic use of the word and a non-anti-Semitic use of it? That would be interesting.

The authors write that Venezuela’s ‘anti-Israeli initiative … revealingly transcends the intensity of almost every Arabic nation or normal adversary of Israel.’ Really. Since when are the totally gutless, dictator Arab nations the standard bearer for progressives? The ideal we should emulate. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are almost never seriously and harshly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Therefore, Venezuela shouldn’t be?

The authors state: ‘In a Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chávez charged that, “Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ … took all the world’s wealth for themselves.” Here, Chávez was not talking so much about Robin Hood, but rather unquestionably dipping into the lore of anti-Semitism.’ Well, here’s the full quotation: ‘The world has enough for all, but it turns out that some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, descendants of the same ones who threw Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way at Santa Marta there in Colombia …’ Hmm, were the Jews so active in nineteenth-century South America?

The ellipsis after the word ‘Christ’ indicates that the authors consciously and purposely omitted the words that would have given the lie to their premise. Truly astonishing.

(Note: The Reagan administration in 1983 flung charges of anti-Semitism against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, led by Daniel Ortega, who became the head once again in 2007–12 and continuing.14 Stay tuned. Daniel, watch out.)

The ideology of the ruling class in any society is one that tries to depict the existing social order as ‘natural’

(February 3, 2007)

In 1972 I traveled by land from San Francisco to Chile, to observe and report on Salvador Allende’s ‘socialist experiment.’ One of the lasting impressions of my journey through Latin America is of the strict class order of the societies I visited. There are probably very few places in the world where the dividing lines between the upper and middle classes, on the one hand, and the lower class, on the other, are more distinct and emotionally clung to, including Great Britain. In the Chilean capital of Santiago I went to look at a room in a house advertised by a woman. Because I was American she assumed that I was anti-Allende, the same assumption she’d have made if I had been European, for she wanted to believe that only ‘Indians,’ only poor dumb indígenas and their ilk, supported the government. She was pleased by the prospect of an American living in her home and was concerned that he might be getting the wrong impression about her country. ‘All this chaos,’ she assured me, ‘it’s not normal, it’s not Chile.’ When I relieved her of her misconception about me she was visibly confused and hurt, and I was a little uncomfortable as well, as if I had betrayed her trust. I made my departure quickly.

There’s the classic Latin American story of the servant of a family of the oligarchy. He bought steak for his patrón’s dog, but his own family ate scraps. He took the dog to the vet, but couldn’t take his own children to a doctor. And he complained not. In Chile, under Allende, there was a terribly nagging fear among the privileged classes that servants no longer knew their place. (In Sweden, for some years now, they have been able to examine children of a certain age – their height, weight, and various health measurements – and not be able to tell which social class the child is from; they have ended class warfare against children.)

In the 1980s, in Central America, servants rose up in much of the region against their betters, the latter of course being unconditionally supported with Yankee money, Yankee arms, even Yankee lives. At the end of that decade the New York Times offered some snapshots of El Salvador:

Over canapes served by hovering waiters at a party, a guest said she was convinced that God had created two distinct classes of people: the rich and people to serve them. She described herself as charitable for allowing the poor to work as her servants. ‘It’s the best you can do,’ she said.

The woman’s outspokenness was unusual, but her attitude is shared by a large segment of the Salvadoran upper class.

The separation between classes is so rigid that even small expressions of kindness across the divide are viewed with suspicion. When an American, visiting an ice cream store, remarked that he was shopping for a birthday party for his maid’s child, other store patrons immediately stopped talking and began staring at the American. Finally, an astonished woman in the check-out line spoke out. ‘You must be kidding,’ she said.15

The same polarization is taking place now in Venezuela as Hugo Chávez attempts to build a more egalitarian society. The Associated Press (January 29, 2007) presented some snapshots from Caracas. A man of European parents says that at his son’s private Jewish school some parents are talking about how and when to leave the country. The man wants a passport for his 10-year-old son in case they need to leave for good. ‘I think we’re headed toward totalitarianism.’ A middle-class retiree grimaces at what she sees coming: ‘Within one year, complete communism. … What he’s forming is a dictatorship.’ The fact that Chávez is himself part indígena and part black, and looks it, can well add to their animosity toward the man.

I wonder what such people think of George ‘I am the decider’ Bush and his repeated use of ‘signing statements,’ which effectively mean a law is what he says it is, no more, no less; plus his Patriot Act, his various assaults on the principle of habeas corpus, and his expanding surveillance state – to name some of the scary practices of his authoritarian rule. If Hugo Chávez tried to institute such measures into Venezuela the accusation of ‘dictatorship’ would have more meaning.

Chuck Kaufman, national co-coordinator of the Washington-based Nicaragua Network, was with a group which visited Venezuela last fall. Following is part of his report:

Venezuela is politically polarized. We witnessed the extremes of this during a dinner with lawyer and author Eva Golinger. Some very drunk opposition supporters recognized Golinger as author of The Chávez Code and a strong Chávez partisan. Some of them surrounded our table and began screaming at Golinger and the delegation, calling us ‘assassins,’ ‘Cubans,’ and ‘Argentines.’ The verbal abuse went on for long minutes until waiters ejected the most out-of-control anti-Chávez woman. We were later told that she worked in the Attorney General’s office, highlighting one of the many contradictions arising from the fact that Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution came into power democratically through the ballot box rather than by force of arms. Armed revolutions generally sweep opponents out of government jobs and places of influence such as the media, but in Venezuela many in the opposition are still in the civil service and most of the media is virulently anti-Chávez.16

I admire Hugo Chávez and what he’s trying to do in Venezuela, but I wish he wouldn’t go out of his way to taunt the Bush administration, as he does frequently. Doesn’t he know that he’s dealing with a bunch of homicidal maniacs? Someone please tell him to cool it or he will endanger his social revolution.

Nicaragua: Operation Because We Can

Captain Ahab had his Moby Dick; Inspector Javert had his Jean Valjean; the United States has its Fidel Castro. But Washington also has its Daniel Ortega. For more than thirty years, the most powerful nation in the world has found it impossible to share the Western hemisphere with one of its poorest and weakest neighbors, Nicaragua, if the country’s leader was not in love with capitalism.

From the moment the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the US-supported Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Washington was concerned about the rising up of that long-dreaded beast – ‘another Cuba.’ This was war. On the battlefield and in the voting booths. For almost ten years, the American proxy army, the Contras, carried out a particularly brutal insurgency against the Sandinista government and its supporters. In 1984, Washington tried its best to sabotage the elections, but failed to keep Sandinista leader Ortega from becoming president. And the war continued. In 1990, Washington’s electoral tactic was to hammer home the simple and clear message to the people of Nicaragua: if you re-elect Ortega all the horrors of the civil war and America’s economic hostility will continue. Just two months before the election, in December 1989, the United States invaded Panama for no apparent reason acceptable to international law, morality, or common sense (the United States naturally called it ‘Operation Just Cause’). One likely reason it was carried out was to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua that this is what they could expect, that the US–Contra war would continue and even escalate, if they re-elected the Sandinistas.

It worked; one cannot overestimate the power of fear, of murder, rape, and your house being burned down. Ortega lost, and Nicaragua returned to the rule of the free market, striving to roll back the progressive social and economic programs that had been undertaken by the Sandinistas. Within a few years widespread malnutrition, wholly inadequate access to health care and education, and other social ills, had once again become a daily fact of life for the people of Nicaragua.

Each presidential election since then has pitted perennial candidate Ortega against Washington’s interference in the process in shamelessly blatant ways. Pressure has been regularly exerted on certain political parties to withdraw their candidates so as to avoid splitting the conservative vote against the Sandinistas. US ambassadors and visiting State Department officials publicly and explicitly campaign for anti-Sandinista candidates, threatening all kinds of economic and diplomatic punishment if Ortega wins, including difficulties with exports, visas, and vital family remittances by Nicaraguans living in the United States. In the 2001 election, shortly after the September 11 attacks, American officials tried their best to tie Ortega to terrorism, placing a full-page ad in the leading newspaper which declared, among other things, that ‘Ortega has a relationship of more than thirty years with states and individuals who shelter and condone international terrorism.’17 That same year a senior analyst in Nicaragua for the international pollsters Gallup was moved to declare: ‘Never in my whole life have I seen a sitting ambassador get publicly involved in a sovereign country’s electoral process, nor have I ever heard of it.’¹⁸

Additionally, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – which would like the world to believe that it’s a private nongovernmental organization, when it’s actually a creation and an agency of the US government – regularly furnishes large amounts of money and other aid to organizations in Nicaragua which are opposed to the Sandinistas. The International Republican Institute (IRI), a long-time wing of NED, whose chairman is Arizona Senator John McCain, has also been active in Nicaragua creating the Movement for Nicaragua, which has helped organize marches against the Sandinistas. An IRI official in Nicaragua, speaking to a visiting American delegation in June, 2006, equated the relationship between Nicaragua and the United States to that of a son to a father. ‘Children should not argue with their parents,’ she said.

With the 2006 presidential election in mind, one senior US official wrote in a Nicaraguan newspaper the year before that should Ortega be elected, ‘Nicaragua would sink like a stone.’ In March 2006, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the US ambassador to the UN under Reagan and a prime supporter of the Contras, came to visit. She met with members of all the major Sandinista opposition parties and declared her belief that democracy in Nicaragua ‘is in danger’ but that she had no doubt that the ‘Sandinista dictatorship’ would not return to power. The following month, the American ambassador in Managua, Paul Trivelli, who openly spoke of his disapproval of Ortega and the Sandinista party, sent a letter to the presidential candidates of conservative parties offering financial and technical help to unite them for the general election in November. The ambassador stated that he was responding to requests by Nicaraguan ‘democratic parties’ for US support in their mission to keep Daniel Ortega from a presidential victory. The visiting American delegation reported: ‘In a somewhat opaque statement Trivelli said that if Ortega were to win, the concept of governments recognizing governments wouldn’t exist anymore and it was a nineteenth-century concept anyway. The relationship would depend on what his government put in place.’ One of the fears of the ambassador likely had to do with Ortega talking of renegotiating CAFTA, the trade agreement between the US and Central America, so dear to the hearts of corporate globalizationists.

Then, in June, US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said it was necessary for the Organization of American States (OAS) to send a mission of electoral observation to Nicaragua ‘as soon as possible’ so as to ‘prevent the old leaders of corruption and communism from attempting to remain in power’ (though the Sandinistas had not occupied the presidency, only lower offices, since 1990).

The explicit or implicit message of American pronouncements concerning Nicaragua was often the warning that if the Sandinistas come back to power, the horrible war, so fresh in the memory of Nicaraguans, would return. The London Independent reported in September that ‘One of the Ortega billboards in Nicaragua was spray-painted “We don’t want another war”. What it was saying was that if you vote for Ortega you are voting for a possible war with the US.’19

Per capita income in Nicaragua is $900 a year; some 70 per cent of the people live in poverty. It is worth noting that Nicaragua and Haiti are the two nations in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has intervened in the most, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, including long periods of occupation. And they are today the two poorest in the hemisphere, wretchedly so.

Yankee karma forces them to emigrate

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth. What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? On and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy since World War II. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.