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Dirty Wars and Self-Indulgence

By Douglas Valentine | Dissident Voice | June 7, 2013

Let me begin with some background not covered in the film.  Dirty War derives from “La Salle Guerre”, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.

Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including “selective terrorism,” a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao’s precepts for fighting a People’s War.

Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials – collaborators – who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome – a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café – designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors.

Whether the Great White Fathers are French or American or English, they agree that putting down a People’s War means torturing and slaughtering the people – despite the fact that most people are not engaged in terrorism or guerrilla action and have no blood on their hands.

As John Stockwell taught us years ago, Dirty War means destabilizing a targeted nation through covert methods, the type the CIA has practiced around the world for 66 years.  Destabilizing means “hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.

“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market; where children can’t go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.”

Economic warfare – strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion – is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.

You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.

You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.

America’s first was terror guru was Ed Lansdale, the advertising executive who made Levi’s blue jeans a national craze in the 1930’s.   He applied his sales skills to propaganda in the OSS and after WW II, concocted a new generation of psywar tactics as an agent of the Office of Policy Coordination assigned to the Philippines under military cover.  Lansdale’s bottomless black bag of dirty tricks included a “skull squadron” death squad that roamed the countryside, torturing and murdering Communist terrorists.

One of Lansdale’s counter-terror “psywar” tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood. The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.

Lansdale referred to his sadism as “low humor,” an excuse borrowed liberally by American officialdom during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Lansdale formalized “black propaganda” practices to vilify the Communists: one of his Filipino commando units would dress as rebels and commit atrocities, and then another unit would arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the “terrorists” away.

Lansdale brought his black propaganda and passion for atrocity to Saigon in 1954, along with a goon squad of Filipino mercenaries packaged as “Freedom Company.”

Under Lansdale’s guidance, Freedom Company sent Vietnamese commandoes into North Vietnam, under cover as relief workers, to activate stay-behind agent nets and conduct all manner of sabotage and subversion.  Disinformation was a Lansdale specialty, and his agents spread lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers’ disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.

In the South, with the help of the American media, Lansdale re-branded the heroic Vietminh as the beastly Viet Cong.

Lansdale’s greatest innovation, still used today, was to conduct all manner of espionage and terror under cover of “civic action.”  As a way of attacking Viet Minh agents in the South, Lansdale launched “Operation Brotherhood,” a Filipino paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. With CIA money, Operation Brotherhood built medical dispensaries that the CIA used as cover for terror operations, as depicted in the book and movie The Quiet American.

Levis never went out of fashion, nor did Lansdale’s dirty tricks. Think Saddam Hussein killing babies in their incubators. Such disinformation invariably works on an American public looking for any excuse to rationalize its urge for racist genocide.

Think Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and every Rambo and Bruce Willis films.

Only Americans were fooled by the propaganda, and the Vietnamese quickly caught on.  So the CIA in 1956 launched the Denunciation of Communists campaign, which compelled the Vietnamese people to inform on Commies or get tortured and murdered.  The campaign was managed by CIA agents who could arrest, confiscate land from, and execute Communists and their sympathizers on the CIA’s master list. In determining who was a Communist, the CIA used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens.

As happened later in the Phoenix program, the threat of an A or B classification was used to extort innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders were put to work building houses and offices for CIA officers and their lackeys. And, of course, the puppet Vietnamese President used his CIA created, funded and trained security forces to eliminate his political rivals.

As Lansdale confessed, “it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent.”

“This development was political,” Lansdale observes. “My first inkling came when several families appeared at my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as ‘special police’.”

Lansdale complained, but he was told that a “U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party.”

How We Got To Scahill’s Dirty War

By 1962, as the US expanded its Dirty Wars in the Far East and South America, the military replaced its Office of Special Operations with an up-dated Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA).  SACSA assigned unconventional warfare forces to the CIA and regular army commanders, who initially resisted.

The development of psychological warfare and special operations is explained in Michael McClintock’s Instruments of Statecraft. For the CIA politics behind it, see Burton Hersh’s The Old Boys.

In 1965 Lansdale went back to Vietnam to run the Revolutionary Development Cadre Program as the CIA’s “second station” with a staff of CIA officers, Green Beanies, and Daniel Ellsberg. Vietnam was a laboratory and the CIA was experimenting with Pacification, aka “the Other War.”

In 1967, the CIA created the Phoenix program to coordinate everyone in its Dirty War.  Phoenix combined existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to neutralize the civilians running the shadow government.  Neutralize means to kill, capture, or make to defect.  Central to Phoenix was that it targeted civilians. “By analogy,” said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, “if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia.”

Under Phoenix, due process was nonexistent.  South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on CIA blacklists were kidnapped, tortured, detained without trial, or murdered on the word of an informer. Phoenix managers imposed a quota of 1,800 neutralizations per month on the saps running the program in the field, opening it up to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers. One CIA officer described Phoenix as, “A very good blackmail scheme for the central government. `If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC.”‘

Because Phoenix assassinations (totaling 25,000+) were often conducted at night while its victims were home sleeping, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a “scalpel” designed to replace the “bludgeon” of My Lai-style search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to “win the hearts and minds” of the people.  But that was just propaganda and Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror – the psywar tactic in which enemy agents were brutally murdered along with their families and neighbors as a means of terrorizing the people into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.

This practice is at the heart of the film I will be reviewing.

As noted, conventional soldiers hated Phoenix. General Bruce Palmer, commander of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in 1968, objected to the “involuntary assignment of U.S. Army officers to the program. I don’t believe that people in uniform,” he said, “who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.”

Palmer’s was such a charming sentiment.  By 2004, Obama advisor Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, in an article for Small Wars Journal, was calling for a “global Phoenix Program.”  Tom Hayden wrote an article for The Nation about Kilcullen in 2008 titled “Reviving Vietnam War Tactics”.

Fact is, Phoenix never went out of fashion.  As McClintock notes, “Counterinsurgency and indeed all aspects of special warfare doctrine had developed a reasonable level of political sophistication by the mid-1970s, acknowledging the necessity of combining military and civil initiatives.”

By 1975 SACSA had expired, the nation had internalized its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and the CIA, wounded by the Church Committee hearings, went underground. The age of counter-terror began.  Central and South America were the new laboratories.   The CIA forged secret alliances with proxy nations like Israel and Taiwan, whose agents taught Latin American landowners how to organize criminals into death squads which murdered and terrorized labor leaders, Human Rights activists, and all other enemies of the Great White Fathers.

To compensate for the reduction in size of its paramilitary Special Operations Division, the CIA formed its Office of Terrorism. Meanwhile, the military branches beefed up their terror capabilities, all of which glommed together in December 1980 in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).  Steve Emerson chronicles this development in detail in Secret Warriors (1988).

JSOC’s mission, conducted on the Phoenix model with the CIA, is identifying and destroying terrorists and terror cells worldwide. Paramilitary personnel are often exchanged between JSOC and CIA.

By the early 1980s, CIA and military veterans of the Phoenix program were running counter-insurgency and counter-terror ops worldwide.

General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980′s, defined this advanced form of Dirty War as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.”  (Toledo Blade 1 Jan 1987)

All of which brings me to my review.

Dirty Wars

Dirty Wars is a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses.

The film owes more to Sergio Leone and Kathryn Bigelow than Constantinos Gavras. Scahill certainly is no Leslie Cockburn: there is no Tony Poe telling how the CIA facilitates heroin shipments; no Richard Secord suing him for unraveling the financial intrigues of the CIA’s secret operators. The CIA is rarely mentioned.

There is no reference to the Guerra Sucia in Argentina.

Scahill is no Franz Fallon documenting the devastating psychological effects of racism on society. There are no cameos by Jean-Paul Sartre advocating violent retribution on Hollywood, no mingling with the Taliban in their caves as they conspire against their Yankee oppressors at the Sundance Film Festival.

We get the first taste of his self-indulgent idiocy when he says it is “hard to tell” when the Dirty War began. He does tell us, however, that he is on the “front lines” of the war on terror.

Scahill (hereafter JS) brags that he wasn’t going to find the front lines in Kabul, although he could have, if he knew where to look. Instead he just looks around furtively on his way to the scene of a war crime. We see a close-up of his face.

The endless close-ups artfully convey the feeling that our hero is utterly alone, on some mythic journey of self-discovery, without a film crew or interpreters. There is no evidence that anyone went to Gardez to make sure everyone was waiting and not toiling in the fields or tending the flocks, or whatever they do. And we’ll never find out what the victims do. The stage isn’t big enough for JS and anyone else.

This is a major theme throughout the story – JS is doing all this alone and the isolation preys on him. He bears this heavy burden alone, with many soulless looks.

Initially, there is no mention that journalist Jerome Starkey reported what happened in Gardez. JS is too busy establishing himself as the courageous super-sleuth. As we drive along the road, he reminds us how much danger he is in.  Two journalists were kidnapped here, he says. This area is “beyond” NATO control. He must get in and out before nightfall or the Taliban will surely kill him like the Capitalist dog he is.

In my drinking days, we referred to this type of behavior as grandiosity. Telling everyone how you defied death, so the guys would talk about your exploits in the bars, and the girls would fall at your feet. For JS, this formula is working – a visit to his Facebook page reveals scores of “Millennial girls” wringing their hands and fretting for his safety as he strides across America’s secret battlefields in search of the truth. His carefully crafted Wiki bio furthers the legend.

Using the material gathered by Starkey (whom he eventually acknowledges), JS shows that in February 2010, American soldiers murdered five people in Gardez, including two pregnant women, and tried to cover it up by digging the bullets out of the targeted man’s body. He interviews the surviving family members. They weep. Violin music plays.  They seem more like props than human beings.

JS ingenuously asks various Afghan and American officials, why the cover-up? The officials suggest that the targeted man was working for the Taliban – and if you play that double-game, you risk your family and friends. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells JS they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He says there will be no investigation.

Cut to Capitol Hill where, by his own account, JS has greatness thrust upon him. “It is imperative,” he tells Chairman John Conyers, “that Congress investigates this shadow war to examine its legality.”

What, one wonders, was Conyers thinking? Forty-two years earlier, after hearing testimony from Bart Osborn and Michael Uhl about the Phoenix program, Conyers and three other U.S. representatives stated their belief that “The people of these United States … have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law …. In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples.”

His testimony, JS tells us, “throws him into the public arena,” ever so reluctantly. He revisits his Blackwater testimony and shows pictures of himself with numerous celebrities on TV.

B-takes of Scahill walking among the common folk in Brooklyn, plotting his next move.  Haunted by the horror of Gardez, he files FOIA requests and discovers that William McRaven is head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He’s stunned. He’s been a national security reporter for over a decade, and he’s never heard of JSOC before.  It’s covert. The story has been hidden in the shadows, he says.

This was the turning point of the film for me. For a National Security correspondent, this is an admission akin to a botanist saying he’d never heard of flowers. It’s an admission that fairly sums up the sorry state of reporting in America today. Has JS ever read a book?

JS discovers that Gardez is not an isolated incident, and that JSOC rampages across Afghanistan with “unprecedented authority.” He talks to a former JSOC soldier about its activities in Iraq, where it had hit lists and conducted night raids. This revelation, and the fact that McRaven took responsibility for Gardez, leads JS to conclude that JSOC is responsible for Gardez. It certainly wasn’t Congress, which according to JS, has no control over JSOC. JSOC money comes from rich donors.

JS learns that JSOC is not only in Afghanistan, but that it operates worldwide, and that its hit lists get bigger all the time. And we hear, for the first time, the catchy phrase, “the world is a battlefield.”

At this point JS decides, with the help of The Nation brain trust, to investigate JSOC in Yemen where CIA drones are wiping out people by the score.

B-take of JS sipping tea thoughtfully. He’s going to talk to the most powerful man in South Yemen. We view the scene of a drone strike: 46 killed, including five pregnant women. A woman in a black veil says her entire family, save one daughter, were wiped out. Violin music. But there’s no cover-up here. In fact, Obama personally kept the journalist in prison who reported the strike.

What will Obama do to JS?

Once again, we fear for JS. Luckily he lives to talk to Rachel Maddow and Morning Joe. The greatness thrust upon him forces him onto TV shows everywhere. There he is with Amy Goodman!

More close-ups. We count the pores on his nose, the hairs in his eyebrows. We feel the fear. He gets a strange call. Someone tells him JSOC tortures people without telling the CIA or regular army, which are too busy torturing people to care.

As he studies the hit lists, he comes across radical America Muslim, Anwar al-Awlaki. After talking to Tony Schaffer, he realizes JSOC targets Muslims and that is why, along with the US invasion of Iraq, Awlaki is pissed off. Awlaki is an American but is inciting people to revolution in Yemen, so Yemen allows the CIA to kill him.

Note – the CIA is mentioned maybe twice in the film. Apparently it is so covert it escaped his notice.

We see JS in an exotic location. An airplane lands. JS is back in the USA. He’s been traumatized by what he’s seen. He tells anyone who will listen that the US cannot kill its way to peace, as if peace is the objective. The war on terror, he concludes, is creating enemies, which of course is the objective.

Before the American people can rally to JS’s clarion call, Obama sends some guys to kill Osama bin Laden. This is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Was it done to subvert his investigation? In any event, McRaven and JSOC are now heroes. He meets a knowledgeable person who tells him the Dirty War will go on forever. He tells us about signature strikes that kill people randomly (but not that the CIA conducts them) and that the war on terror is out of control.

Pictures of JS pointing to countries on a map where JSOC operates. He decides to visit Somalia, where JSOC is snatching bodies and taking them to ships in the Arabian Sea, and outsourcing its Dirty War to mercenaries. He visits mercenaries wearing camo fatigues. There are no other journalists here, it is too dangerous. Someone hands JS a flak jacket.  Someone tells him they bury traitors alive. The tension soars. He’s surrounded by armed men. There’s a gunshot. He ducks behind sandbags.

We wonder who arranged for JS to meet these guys? Where did he get an interpreter? What’s the quid pro quo?

JS goes to a hospital morgue and look at a mutilated body. After which he wants to go home. But he learns that Awlaki’s son has been killed and reluctantly he returns to Yemen.

I liked this part of the film. It seemed genuine. We see home videos of Awlaki’s son doing youthful happy things. JS tries to understand why the US would deliberately kill a 16 year old kid? Which is a good question. Perhaps America is ruled by a murderous Cult of Death.

We see pictures of young girls smiling, and we revert back to the contrived scenes and monologue that drag the documentary down into gratuitous self-promotion. JS says he never had any idea where the story would lead, as if all this happened magically, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat.

The film ends and I wonder what he could have produced if he hadn’t melodramatized and spent so much time and film on close-ups. I wonder what he could have done if he’d read a few history books.

Ultimately, the film is so devoid of historical context, and so contrived, as to render it a work of art, rather than political commentary. And as art, it is pure self-indulgence.

And in this sense, it is a perfect slice of modern American life.

Douglas Valentine can be reached at dougvalentine77@gmail.com

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June 8, 2013 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Syria – Israel Is Losing the Battle

By Gilad Atzmon | June 7, 2013

In the last week we have been following desperate British and French attempts to push for military intervention in Syria. It is far from being a secret that both governments are dominated by the Jewish Lobby. In Britain it is the ultra Zionist CFI (Conservative Friends of Israel) – apparently 80% of Britain’s conservative MPs are members of the pro-Israeli Lobby. In France the situation is even more devastating, the entire political system is hijacked by the forceful CRIF.

But in case anyone fails to grasp why the Jewish Lobby is pushing for an immediate intervention, Debka, an Israeli news outlet provides the answer. Seemingly, the Syrian army is winning on all fronts. Israel’s military and geo-political calculations have proven to be wrong.

According to Debka, “the battle for Damascus is over”. The Syrian army had virtually “regained control of the city in an epic victory”. The rebels, largely mercenaries, have lost the battle they “can’t do much more than fire sporadically. They can no longer launch raids, or pose threats to the city centre, the airport or the big Syrian air base nearby.
 The Russian and Iranian transports constantly bringing replenishment for keeping the Syrian army fighting can again land at Damascus airport after months of rebel siege.”

But it isn’t just the capital. Debka reports that “Hezbollah and Syrian units have tightened their siege on the rebels holding out in the northern sector of al Qusayr; other (Syrian army) units have completed their takeover of the countryside around the town of Hama; and a third combined Syrian-Hizballah force has taken up positions around Aleppo.”

Debka maintains that senior IDF officers criticized the Israeli defense minister (Moshe Ya’alon) who “mislead” the Knesset a few days ago estimating that “Bashar Assad controlled only 40% of Syrian territory.” Debka suggests that the Israeli defense Ministry has drawn on a “flawed intelligence assessment and were concerned that the armed forces were acting on the basis of inaccurate intelligence.” Debka stresses, “erroneous assessments… must lead to faulty decision-making.”

Debka is clearly brave enough to admit that Israeli military miscalculations may have led to disastrous consequences. It reports, “the massive Israeli bombardment of Iranian weapons stored near Damascus for Hezbollah, turned out a month later to have done more harm than good. It gave Bashar Assad a boost instead of weakening his resolve.”

Debka is obviously correct. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that an Israeli attack on an Arab land cannot be accepted by the Arab masses, not even by Assad’s bitterest Arab opponents.

Debka maintains that the “intelligence focus on military movements in Syria especially around Damascus to ascertain that advanced missiles and chemical weapons don’t reach Hezbollah laid to a failure in detecting a major movement by Hezbollah militia units towards the Syrian-Israeli border.”

Israel is now facing a new reality. It is facing Hezbollah reinforcements streaming in from Lebanon towards the Golan heights and its border with Syria.

Israel, Debka concludes, will soon find itself “face to face for the first time with Hezbollah units equipped with heavy arms and missiles on the move along the Syrian-Israeli border and manning positions opposite Israel’s Golan outposts and villages.”

Debka is correct to suggest that instead of “growing weaker, Iran’s Lebanese proxy is poised to open another war front and force the IDF to adapt to a new military challenge from the Syrian Golan.”

Rather than The Guardian or Le Monde, it is actually the Israeli Debka that helps us to grasp why Britain and France are so desperate to intervene. Once again, it is a Zionist war which they are so eager to fight.

Sadly enough, it isn’t The Guardian or The New York Times that is there to reveal the latest development in Syria and expose Israeli lethal miscalculations. It is actually a ‘Zionist’ Israeli patriotic outlet that is providing the goods. I actually believe that this form of harsh self-criticism that is embedded in Israeli culture, is the means that sustains Israeli regional hegemony, at least monetarily. This ability to critically examine and disapprove of your own leadership is something I fail to encounter in Western media. Seemingly, the media in Israel is far more tolerant toward criticism than the Zionist dominated Media in the West.

June 7, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Corporate Media Drones on about Venezuela’s Defence Program

By Tamara Pearson | Venezuelanalysis | June 4th 2013

Merida – After President Nicolas Maduro attended a military display in Aragua state which included Venezuela’s three unarmed drones, some mainstream media have highlighted Venezuela’s defence program, stressing Venezuela’s relationship with Iran.

Maduro presided over a ceremony to hand over and display National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) equipment last week. There was a demonstration of Venezuela’s Harpy System of Drone Planes.

The unarmed planes are operated by remote, can take photographs and be used for disaster situations, agricultural research and protection of the electrical grid, according to Defence minister Diego Molero.

Molero said that through the Simon Bolivar satellite, the drones can observe any part of Venezuela. He also presented the Gavilan project, for a drone plane which he said has been designed completely with Venezuelan technology.

Venezuela’s Harpy drones are small and can only be used for remote controlled long distance surveillance. They weigh 85kg, have a maximum flight distance of 100km and flight time of 90 minutes, a cargo capacity of 17 kg, and video cameras which can transmit in real time.

Venezuela’s Cavim (Venezuelan Military Industrial Company) manufactured the drones, with the help of Venezuelan military engineers who were trained in Iran. The system consists of three planes, a launcher, and a control unit.

Ciudad CCS reports that the government eventually hopes to have “at least a dozen” Harpies (Arpías in Spanish).

“We’re advancing in the development and management of military science and technology, for preserving peace and security in Venezuela,” Maduro said at the demonstration, adding that Venezuela is “prepared to resist any attack that could be fabricated overseas, against Venezuela”.

Minister for internal affairs at the time, Tareck el Aissami reported in September last year that Venezuela’s drones had detected a plane with a US registration number, allegedly transporting drugs, in Venezuelan territory. The first Harpy (Arpia-001) was manufactured in January 2012.

Media and U.S. response

Last week’s military demonstration led to some corporate media headlines over the following days about Venezuela “launching” its drones system. Media in and outside Venezuela have reported that the drones are for surveillance and to be used to “curb drug trafficking” but has also emphasised that Iran “helped to build them”.

Univision Noticias headlined with, “Venezuela will use drones to protect the country from any threat”. Fox News and AP reported that “Venezuela’s announcement comes as the United States has begun to use unmanned drones to hunt drug traffickers on both the U.S.’s southern border with Mexico and in the open waters of the Caribbean.”

Last year the U.S. said it would watch Venezuela’s drone development closely, with U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland saying at the time, “Our concern, obviously, would be with any breaking of international sanctions on Iran. And we will be most vigilant in watching how this goes forward”.

Further, according to an April 2013 article by the InterAmerican Security Watch (IASW), which “monitors threats to regional security” and the Jerusalem Post, “the growing military ties between Iran and Venezuela… have raised concerns in both the US[sic] and Israel”.

The IASW also made the claim that “Iran’s extended reach in Latin America could pose a threat to US national security; Tehran’s strategies in the region could also threaten Jewish and Israeli interests”.

However, while Venezuela’s 3 small drones are unarmed and have not left Venezuelan territory, the U.S. has used armed and unarmed drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia, while Israel has used them in Lebanon. According to a February 2012 report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, U.S. drones had killed at least 2,413 civilians in Pakistan alone, between May 2009 and the date of the report.

June 5, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

MSNBC Aligns With Objectives of the State

By MICHAEL ARRIA | CounterPunch | June 5, 2013

Celebrated liberal news outlet MSNBC has made some new hires, a couple weeks ago one of them being Mother Jones blogger Adam Serwer. According to TVNewser’s Alex Weprin “MSNBC.com is staffing up ahead of a major relaunch later this year. The relaunched site will focus on the world of politics and the personalities that populate MSNBC’s programming. There will also, however, be plenty of political news and information.”

Recently journalist Charles Davis tweeted about an online run-in he once had with Serwer. Disturbed by the military culture that had permeated a women’s soccer game, he blogged, “No other country on Earth, barring perhaps North Korea, worships its military in such a prevalent, mindless and such seemingly oblivious fashion as the good ‘ol USA.”

This perturbed MSNBC’s new hire, who was writing for the American Prospect at the time, and prompted him to post this comment “We should support servicemembers unconditionally because their service is unconditional, and I have yet to hear a rational argument for why allowing servicemembers to disregard civilian authority over the military is a good idea, which is essentially what calling for civil disobedience by servicemembers is.”

Serwer continued:

“What if General Petraeus decides that the Afghan surge isn’t big enough, so he’s morally obligated to take over and make the decision for himself, to save us from ourselves? He’s morally obligated to protect his country in the way he thinks is best right? Who cares what the law says?

The whole point of civilian control is to ensure that the people with guns don’t get to do whatever they want, that the power given them can only be used with the consent of the political branches, elected by the people. And if you don’t think that power is being used properly, than you can change that through the political process.”

Davis responded on his blog:

“But no one’s arguing, of course, that soldiers should merely do whatever they feel. The argument, at least as I have made it, is that killing people is wrong, except in instances of absolute self-defense, no matter what politician or politically appointed court sanctions it. Now, abiding by one’s conscience is typically consistent with the whole not murdering people thing — poor foreigner or not — but where it differs, it’s subservient to that latter, foundational principal of any truly civilized society. Again, the argument is that people ought to defy orders to kill — and ostracize, rather than worship, the institutions tasked with carrying out the state-sponsored carnage — not that they should kill more people if they feel like it.

And instead of wading through a corrupt political process designed to thwart change and serve the needs of the powerful, the legitimacy of which Serwer asserts but does not bother to demonstrate, it’s the responsibility of all human beings with a capacity for moral thought, be they uniformed or not, to reject blind obedience [to] authority and the ‘legal’ facade it provides to immoral acts. The idea that only the political process is an acceptable means of challenging injustice treats the average person as but an unthinking cog in the machinery of the state, bound to abide by whatever ‘lawful’ edicts their rulers issue, a worldview that does not allow for principled civil disobedience. We, soldier and citizen, are not entitled to determine what’s right and wrong, whether it be a preemptive war or, say, the institution of slavery — that’s left to legislatures.”

It’s probably worth noting that Serwer’s entire response to all of Davis’ comments was, “We do have some job openings, but nothing quite as prestigious as writing for Code Pink, I’m sad to say.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that someone at MSNBC had worked out a bizarre calculus regarding his or her relationship to the state. For example, during the recent ten-year anniversary of the Iraq War, Ezra Klein (who economist Doug Henwood has referred to as a, “Neoliberal über-dweeb”) explained that his support of the Bush administration’s invasion was predicated on an “analytical failure.”  “It wasn’t worth doing precisely because the odds were high that we couldn’t do it right,” wrote Klein.

The bizarre and robotic nature of this “apology” aside, the political theorist Corey Robin immediately spotted something fishy in Klein’s grammar, “Klein doesn’t think a state invaded another state; he thinks ‘we’ went to war. He identifies with the state. Whether he’s supporting or dissenting from a policy, he sees himself as part of it. He sees himself on the jeeps with the troops. That’s why his calls for skepticism, for not taking things on authority, ring so hollow. In the end, he’s on the team. Or the jeep.”

After the tragic Trayvon Martin murder, Touré appeared on Piers Morgan’s program and took him to task for his interview with the family of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. One of Touré ‘s main problems with the interview seemed to be Morgan’s inability to understand how American journalism functioned. “What you understand as challenging, perhaps, maybe that’s what goes in England. That’s not what we do in terms of challenging in America…I would have liked to see him pushed and challenged, more followup, more pushback, more research to understand.”

Of all the things to criticize Piers Morgan for, the veracity of the American media in comparison to England’s is, probably, one of the least sensible. Later, when Touré sparked something of a controversy by arguing that President Obama had the right to assassinate an American citizen, he demonstrated very little of his aforementioned pushback. On a panel discussing drone strikes, the media personality seemed completely unaware that the administration had killed a 16-year-old kid: “What do you mean a 16-year old who is killed? I’m not talking about civilians.” After Steve Kornacki and S.E. Cupp explained to Touré who Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki was, he shrugged, “If people are working against America, then they need to die.”

The political theorist Falguni Sheth connected the dots between the two situations, “There is a certain nativist, if not xenophobic, consistency on Touré’s part. Rightfully insisting on paying attention to the racist context surrounding Martin’s death, he nevertheless challenges Morgan’s attitudes on the grounds that Morgan is not “from here.” For all of Touré’s understanding about the racial context of unfair murders, he appears to be ignorant of and indifferent to the fact that a young Muslim (American) boy was killed by a drone under the auspices of the POTUS. We see a similar nativism in Touré’s sentiments about restricting due process to “Americans”—even after he learns that Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki IS American.”

Aligning themselves with the objectives of the state is always an easier task for liberals when the leader is a Democrat, it requires much less cognitive dissonance on the part of the pundit. In his book, Killer Politics: How Big Money and Bad Politics Are Destroying the Great American Middle Class, MSNBC host Ed Schultz quotes Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech before opining, “… I do not believe that preemptive war with Iraq was justified. I think it was a blunder that set a dangerous modern-day precedent for preemptive war and seriously damaged U.S. credibility around the world-something only time and credible action in the future can mitigate. History alone knows how this war will play out. What we can be certain about is that Bush’s Iraq folly placed a tremendous financial burden on the nation that has critically weakened us both militarily and financially.”

Jesus. I wonder what it did to Iraq.

Things have, of course, shifted in the last five years and, thus, certain pronouns can be embraced without caveats. As Rachel Maddow explained to her viewing audience after the disastrous NATO intervention in Libya, “President Obama announced his own military intervention, but he pointedly declined the opportunity to do it in a way that US presidents usually do. Obama has foresworn “the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind… that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush.”

I think Serwer is going to fit right in.

Michael Arria writes for Vice’s Motherboard.tv.

June 5, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Perpetual War – and Obama’s Perpetual Con Game

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | May 29, 2013

Barack Obama is a master trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe, accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington’s “perpetual war” must one day end – sometime in the misty future after he is long gone from office. He informed his global audience of potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?) that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot be captured – a policy that his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He promises to be more merciful than before, “haunted” as he is by all the nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong.

He is a man of boundless introspection, inviting us to ride with him on his wildly spinning moral compass. But, most of all, he is not George Bush – of that we can be certain, if only because he is younger and oratorically gifted and Black. “Beyond Afghanistan,” he said, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Thus, magically, he redefined the U.S. war on terror out of existence (in perpetuity) by breaking the conflict down to its daily, constituent parts, while simultaneously affirming that America will soon travel “beyond Afghanistan” despite the fact that many thousands of Special Operations troops will continue their round the clock raids in the countryside while drones rain death from the skies for the foreseeable future.

Such conflicts, we must understand, are necessitated by the “imminence” of threats posed to U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for “association” with “terrorists” as defined by himself. He has no apologies for that.

America must turn the page on the previous era, because “the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11.” A reevaluation is in order, since “we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.” In that case, why not call for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the last 12 years, including Obama’s own NDAA preventive detention bill? Or, he could simply renounce these measures and refuse to employ them as a matter of policy. Instead, the president defended his own maximalist interpretation of the law, and claimed that the legal basis for his kill-at-will authority is firmly rooted in the Congress’s 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AMUF). Although he made vague reference to changes that Congress might make in the AMUF, there was no substantive indication that he sought to impose restrictions on his own or any other president’s authority to wage war precisely as he has for the last four years.

Obama’s blanket interpretation of AMUF – the legal logic – had previously been considered a state secret. It was news to much of the U.S. Senate, too, until assistant secretary of defense Michael Sheehan, in charge of special operations (death squads) at the Pentagon, told lawmakers earlier this month that the AMUF allows Obama to put “boots on the ground” anywhere he chooses, including “Yemen or the Congo,” if his classified logic compelled him to do so.

The senators were stunned – although it is no secret that Obama has already put U.S. Special Forces boots on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, and has sent a combat brigade on permanent posting on the continent. Central Africa is one part of the world in which al Qaida has found little traction. The purported “bad guy” hiding in the bush, Joseph Kony, is the Christian leader of the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Obama authorized the deployment under the doctrine of Humanitarian Military Intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a war-making notion that is, at best, ill-defined under international law and non-existent in U.S. statutes. However, if Obama is sincere (!) in wanting to phase out AMUF, as he averred last week, he’s always got R2P as a backup.

Death squad honcho Sheehan is a believer in the perpetual lifespan of AMUF, which he considers operative until al Qaida has been consigned to the “ash heap of history” – an eventuality that is “at least 10 to 20 years” away. Since this is the guy who carries out Obama’s kill orders (the identity of his counterpart in the CIA is, of course, a secret), one would think that Sheehan and Obama would be on the same page when it comes to al Qaida and AMUF. But then, we are told that page has turned.

Obama is very good at flipping pages, changing subjects, hiding the pea in his hand while we try to figure out which bowl it’s under. His call for Congress to come up with a substitute for AMUF – without yet offering his own version – is a ploy to more explicitly codify those powers assumed by Bush and expanded upon by the Obama administration. Or, the Congress can do nothing – a very likely outcome – and Obama can pretend to be the reluctant, self-restrained global assassin, preventive detainer and regime changer for the rest of his term.

Not a damn thing has changed.

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June 3, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

John McCain and the Desperate Flailing of Syrian Oppositionists’ External Supporters

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Going to Tehran | June 3rd, 2013

Much was made last week about the infiltration of Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) into Syria for a brief photo op with various anti-Assad “rebels”—who, it turns out, have allegedly been involved in kidnapping Lebanese Shi’a pilgrims.  (Senator McCain claims that none of the individuals with whom he was photographed identified themselves by names of those accused of kidnapping Shi’a pilgrims; his spokesman says it would be “regrettable” if the Senator had been photographed with people accused of committing such acts.)   Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, another GOP Senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, noted acidly, “They say there are some pro-Western people and we’re going to vet them.  Well, apparently we’ve got a senator over there who got his picture taken with some kidnappers, so I don’t know how good a job we’re going to do vetting those who are going to get the arms.”

In a blog post provocatively titled “Did John McCain Provide Material Support for Syrian Terrorists?”, see here, the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow wrote that a recent Supreme Court ruling (Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, issued in 2010) “upheld the [U.S.] government’s broad reading” of the statute that criminalizes “material support” for terrorism.  In this reading, “coordinated political advocacy”—that is, advocacy coordinated with groups engaged designated by Washington as terrorist organizations—counts as material support.  Those engaged in such “coordinated political advocacy” can be federally prosecuted; if convicted, they might go to jail for ten years.

In his post, Doug points to a number of cases where U.S. government’s expansive definition of material support for terrorism—now largely ratified by the Supreme Court—has produced disturbing legal outcomes.  He argues that:

“lawmakers who approved the law should be subject to the same legal risks.  Consider Sen. John McCain, who has been campaigning for war in Syria, just as he previously promoted war most everywhere else around the globe.”

After examining press reports on Sen. McCain’s trip to Syria—and on the activities of some of the rebels McCain met there—Doug concludes that Sen. McCain:

“would seem to have provided ‘material support’ to terrorists.”

“Having his photo taken with Islamic extremists could reasonably be interpreted as an endorsement, which, based on past cases, could be seen as providing ‘material support’ for terrorism.  Presumably that isn’t what Sen. McCain intended.  But the law’s application is not based on intent.

To be fair to the rest of us, the Justice Department should investigate…[A]s much as I oppose vague and ambiguous criminal enactments by the federal government, I would enjoy seeing Senator McCain in the dock,  It would be cosmic justice for his support of the catastrophic invasion in Iraq and endless occupation of Afghanistan.”

After his drive-by photo op in “liberated” Syria, Sen. McCain apparently traveled to Yemen.  We were struck by the Yemen Post’s report on his visit, see here; we also append the story below:

“According to several Yemeni-based local newspapers, US Senator John McCain, who briefly visited Yemen earlier this week to offer his support to the coalition government and discuss political and security developments is rumored to have directly urged President Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi to facilitate the transfer of Jihadists to Syria.

As the Free Syrian Army is struggling to secure its advances against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose lists of supporters while thin remains mighty in military might, Washington and its allies in the region are said to be looking at ways to swell the ranks of the opposition by allowing foreign fighters to enroll against Assad regime.

In a move which analysts have already qualified as dangerous given the repercussions a similar policy led to in the 1980s, when Jihadists were sent to fight off Russian troops in Afghanistan, security experts worry al-Qaeda will use this opportunity to increase its recruitment pool while offering precious ground experience to its militants, which experience would be used later on against Yemen central government.

A source told several newspapers, ‘Senator McCain’s visit was to drum up support for Jihadist groups fighting Bashar al-Assad regime.’

While the government has so far refused to comment on the issues, quite understandably since its military is still locked in an on-going military struggle against Islamic operatives in its southern provinces, all the while preparing for the return of some Gitmo terror prisoners.  Yemeni officials would have a difficult time reconciling the idea of Jihad in one place while fighting off the same rhetoric in its own backyard.”

If true, the Yemen Post report could be construed as another piece of evidence against the apparently terrorist-supporting Sen. McCain.  For, according to this story, McCain lobbied the Yemeni government to send more jihadi fighters to Syria, in order to swell the ranks of groups engaged in terrorist activity—representatives of which the Arizona senator had met with immediately before traveling to Yemen.

What all of this suggests is the mounting desperation that advocates of using Syrian oppositionists—whether Syrian or not—to overthrow the Assad government must now be feeling.  Their project has failed.  But, rather than accept this failure, many, like Sen. McCain, want the United States to double down on their unsuccessful pseudo-strategy—to provide still more support the opposition forces, and even to become directly involved militarily (through no-fly zones, etc.).

Fifty-two years ago, the United States foolishly tried to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government by invading Cuba with a force of anti-Castro rebels.  When that force, unsurprisingly, got into trouble almost immediately upon landing in Cuba, there were those who wanted President John F. Kennedy to order U.S. air support for the rebels.  While Kennedy made a huge blunder by proceeding with the invasion in the first place, he was sufficiently astute at least not to compound his mistake by taking the United States into an overt, aggressive war against Cuba (certainly a covert campaign of aggression was already underway).

Similarly, President Obama has made egregious blunders in his policy toward Syria since March 2011.  Let’s hope he doesn’t compound them by listening to John McCain and others desperate to hold on to delusions of American empire in the Middle East.

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June 3, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Stockpiling inmates

By Charles Davis | False Dichotomy | May 31, 2013

I was unaware that Sarah Palin was still a meme, but the Democratic Party is apparently still using her to raise money and build their email lists. Apparently, because who cares enough to look it up, the former Alaska governor said the US government is “stockpiling bullets” to use against the public. And so a petition has been launched by the Democratic Governors Association to demand an apology because that is important:

Accusing our government of actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people is not only offensive and wrong — it’s downright dangerous. For Sarah Palin to insinuate that the United States is similar to the tyrannical governments in Syria and Iran who do carry out those types of atrocities is completely reprehensible.

Good on the governors for looping Iran into the mix, rather than a Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. President Hillary  may have to bomb them someday, so it’s important to lay the groundwork now. Sarah Palin and Iran: Bad. Got it.

Of course, the unfortunate thing is that the US government is “actively stockpiling weapons to use against its own people” (no one cares about it using them against other people). You don’t end up with 2.3 million Americans in prison cells by asking them nicely. You force them in at the point of a gun. The FBI alone gets over $8 billion a year to do this. Federal prisons get over $8 billion to keep them there.

Is that the same as the sort of political repression that goes on in Syria or Iran? No, it’s different. The people getting shot in the streets by security forces are usually Black or Latino. And no one has anywhere near the size prison population that America does.

(via @FireTomFriedman)

June 1, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iranian-American given 25-yr jail term

Press TV – May 30, 2013

An American judge has passed a 25-year prison sentence for the Iranian-American citizen Manssor Arbabsiar over allegations of his participation in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US.

On Thursday, New York federal Judge John Keenan passed the maximum sentence and said Arbabsiar must be taught a lesson for his involvement in a plot that Washington cannot tolerate.

His lawyers argued for a jail term of 10 years and said that he is suffering from mental disorders.

Arbabsiar was arrested at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on September 29, 2011.

He was detained on charges of planning to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in a bomb attack at a restaurant in Washington.

Arbabsiar signed a plea bargain offered to him by Preet Bharara, US attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was represented by Sabrina Shroff, a federal public defender, appointed by the court.

Arbabsiar’s family says that the plea bargain was signed under duress. They add that Shroff misguided them about the terms of the plea agreement.

Iran has said the case was a false scenario made up by American and Israeli officials.

May 31, 2013 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Moscow disappointed political games prevented investigation into chemical weapons use in Syria

RT | May 31, 2013

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that “political games” prevented Russia from investigating the data on the use of toxic substances in Aleppo: the UN Secretariat couldn’t respond promptly to Moscow’s demand to look into the matter.

In March, the Syrian government invited the United Nations to investigate possible chemical weapons use in the Khan al-Assal area of rural Aleppo. Military experts and officials said a chemical agent, most likely sarin, was used in the attack which killed 26 people, including government forces.

Several countries, including Israel, the UK, France and the US – all vocal critics of Syrian President Bashar Assad – all claimed they had evidence that chemical weapons were used in Syria.

Damascus denied that a chemical attack was carried out by the Syrian army, blaming the rebels and Turkey for the incident: “The rocket came from a place controlled by the terrorists and which is located close to the Turkish territory. One can assume that the weapon came from Turkey,” Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi alleged in an interview with Interfax news agency.

Lavrov spoke following the reports that Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of alleged Syrian militants, who were reportedly planning a terrorist attack on the southern Turkish city of Adana.

Russia expressed concern over the incident, urging for a thorough investigation into the matter.

Almost a month ago, the Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad said that Damascus was ready to have the UN investigation team look into alleged chemical weapons use in Syria.

“We were ready and we are always ready, right now, to receive the delegation that was set up by [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon to investigate what happened in Khan al-Assal,” Muqdad said, referring to the March 19 incident near Aleppo.

Syrian rebels are accused of using a rocket with a chemical warhead, killing 25 people and injuring 86, according to SANA news agency.

The Syrian civil war has been raging for more than two years now, with more than 80,000 people killed, according to UN estimates.

In his latest statement on the matter, Lavrov noted the Russian government’s concern over the issue due to the chance of provocations around the situation.

May 31, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

FBI shot Todashev in crown of head

Press TV – May 30, 2013

sheidayi20130530171945227Photos shown by the father of Ibragim Todashev, a young man who was killed by FBI agents during investigations into the Boston Marathon bombings, reveal he sustained six gunshot wounds, one in the crown of his head.

27-year-old Todashev was killed by the FBI while he was being questioned about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombing suspects who was killed by police on April 19.

Law enforcement sources initially said Todashev was armed with a knife and that he “went crazy” brandishing the knife and stabbing an FBI agent. However, unidentified sources said Thursday that Todashev was not armed when the FBI shot him dead.

At a press conference on Thursday in Moscow, Ibragim’s father showed photos of his son’s body which were taken by Ibragim’s friends after the FBI handed the body to them.

“I can show you the photos taken after the killing of my son. I have 16 photographs. I just would like to say that looking at these photos is like being in a movie. I only saw things like that in movies: shooting a person, and then the kill shot. Six shots in the body, one of them in the head,” said Ibragim’s father at the press conference.

On May 22, the day the FBI killed Ibragim, ABC News reported that he was “about to sign a statement” confessing he and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were involved in a 2011 murder of three men in Massachusetts.

However, Ibragim’s father said that his son was questioned twice by the FBI about the Boston Marathon bombings but not about the 2011 murder.

Ibragim’s father also said that his son believed the April 15 Boston attack, in which three people were killed and more than 260 were wounded, was a “set-up.”

Moreover, investigative reporter Ralph Lopez revealed to The Digital Journal on Wednesday that the image released by the FBI as evidence that Tamerlan’s brother left a backpack at the scene of the Boston bombings was made with Photoshop.

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May 30, 2013 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

The Times’s Op Ed Page and the Draft

By Murray Polner · NYTX · May 29, 2013

Karl Eikenberry and David Kennedy’s “Americans and Their Military: Drifting Apart” (May 26) called for reinstatement of a draft, a favorite stance of the Times’ Op Ed page.

Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general, and Kennedy, a retired Stanford history professor, prefer a draft lottery which, they argue, would result in less willingness to go to war.

The truth is, we had a draft before Korea and Vietnam yet we still went to war and killed millions of people, including some 100,000 American GIs.

They also called for a draft “weighted to select the best-educated and most highly skilled.”

But no draft or draft lottery can ever be fair.

It’s good to recall that virtually no congressional son was drafted during Vietnam and in any future draft very few of the sons and possibly daughters of the very rich will ever be drafted, as I and millions of others were.

Anyone with political or money connections will always be able to avoid active military service.

The same situation would surely prevail if compulsory national service for all our kids is instituted, a system of government control found only among authoritarian nations.

Perhaps someday the Times’ Op Ed editors will instead commission a column defying our resident hawks and war profiteers and instead advocate allowing young people to live in peace in a country which avoids its endless and fruitless wars.

Murray Polner is the author of “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran”; editor of “When Can I Come Home: Amnesty, Exiles, Anti-War Prisoners and 0thers”; and co-author/editor with Thomas Woods Jr. of “We Who Dared To Say No To War.”

May 30, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

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