Gerry Pollet, Executive Director of Heart of America Northwest, spoke in Eugene, Oregon on March 7, 2011. In this excerpt, he talks about the perils of transporting nuclear waste over Oregon’s highways to Hanford.
In a remarkable Israeli position in terms of its background and connotations, and referencing the extent of anxiety and fear the Israeli entity is witnessing in the wake of revolutions in the Arab world, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel might ask the US for additional $20 billion in military assistance.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday, Barak said that Israel should not fear regional changes or the risk of offering valiant concessions to the Palestinians.
Barak said that while Israel did not “face an immediate threat to its security, the issue of qualitative military aid for Israel becomes more essential for us, and I believe also more essential for you [the US]. Israel should not fear the movement of Arab societies toward modernity.”
He nevertheless stressed that the Egyptian public might influence the new leadership in such a way which could cause it to distance itself from the peace treaty with Israel.
“It might be wise to invest another $20 billion to upgrade the security of Israel for the next generation or so….A strong, responsible Israel can become a stabilizer in such a turbulent region.”
He believes it is too early to tell whether Iran is taking advantage of regional unrest to expand its influence. Barak also noted that prior to the wave of Arab protests “You could see Arab leaders starting to hedge their bets on who is the strongest leader here, Iran or the United States.” In the interview Barak said that according to a senior Egyptian official, whose name he did not mention, Israel should expect “the cold shoulder” from Cairo if it fails to advance the Palestinian peace process.
Israel spends roughly nine percent of its gross national product to guard from potential threats. Its military expenditure amounted to USD 17 billion this year, of which US aid is USD 3 billion.
Tel Aviv has kept a wary eye on a recent tidal wave of anti-government protests that has raced across the Middle East, originating with revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, which have swept longstanding autocratic rulers from power.
Several Israeli media agencies, known for their close affiliation with Israel security and political devices, published a number of reports slamming the new interim Egyptian Prime Minister, Dr. Isam Sharaf, and described his as an “enemy to Israel”, and also described him and the new Foreign Minister as anti-smite.
Israeli TV stations, Channel 7 and Channel 10 along with The Marker and Maariv newspapers held extensive coverage of the swear-in ceremony of the new government headed by Dr. Sharaf.
They claimed that Dr. Sharaf is “known for his anti-Israel positions”, and opposes the Israeli policies towards the Palestinian people, and that Sharaf “insisted on showing his anti-Semitism by choosing another anti-Semite, the new Foreign Minister, Nabil Al Arabi”.
According to some Israeli reports, Dr. Sharaf and his new government “pose a threat to Israel and its interests, especially with Egypt”, and that he adopts stances that reject normalization with Tel Aviv.
It’s good to see that the Pentagon is unenthusiastic about military intervention in Libya. But that hasn’t stopped armchair generals such as Sen. John Kerry from pushing for a no-fly zone over that country.
Kerry thinks he can make his plan more appealing by couching it in internationalist terms, but we know the American people would bear the brunt of the burden. Kerry is joined by Sens. Joe Lieberman and John McCain, the Senate’s two most obnoxious militarists. Regarding the military’s reluctance to take on another country, McCain said, “[They] always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can.”
Maybe the Pentagon is acknowledging something that McCain, Kerry, and Lieberman seem to ignore: They are calling for war on a country that has not attacked the United States. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates criticized the discussion about a no-fly zone as “loose talk.” He added, “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down.”
Gates’s cautionary language is welcome after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s and President Obama’s press secretary had referred to U.S. action as a live option. In typical Clinton fashion, the secretary said, “We are taking no option off the table so long as the Libyan government continues to turn its guns on its own people.” Really? No option? Does that include a full-scale invasion? How about tactical nuclear weapons? Drones armed with Hellfire missiles have been particularly effective at killing innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Are they on the table too?
Gates was not alone in his warning. Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, and other officials said that taking out Libya’s air and missile defenses would be no small operation; hundreds of airplanes would be needed. Gates said he was advised that a no-fly zone “requires more airplanes than you would find on a single aircraft carrier.” It would be, he said, a “big operation in a big country.”
None of that stopped the Senate from unanimously passing a resolution prodding the UN Security Council to take up the question of a no-fly zone. And two U.S. amphibious warships were headed to Libya through the Suez Canal, supposedly for humanitarian purposes. But they aren’t called “warships” for nothing.
For all the bluster about a no-fly zone, it’s not quite clear what difference it would make. Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi is using ground forces primarily to battle rebels trying to drive him from power. According to the Associated Press, “Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that despite media reports of Libyan aircraft attacking rebel areas, the Pentagon had not confirmed any air attacks.”
So a no-fly zone would be little more than symbolic. But it could be a costly symbol. Mullen cautioned against underestimating Libya’s air defenses. Moreover, establishing a no-fly zone would be an act of war, with consequences no one can foresee. Haven’t we had enough of American politicians, sitting safely in their seats of power, sending young people off to war?
The case against U.S. intervention in Libya, however, goes beyond the prudential. There is no doubt that Qaddafi is a brutal and now desperate dictator willing to send mercenaries to mow down civilians seeking freedom from his iron grip. But that does not justify U.S. intervention, which would require the taxpayers to finance yet another open-ended military operation in the Arab and Muslim world. Regardless of how Obama and Clinton would intend the operation, the rest of the world would see it in the context of the long U.S. imperial record in the Middle East.
American presidents have sought to police the globe for generations. What has it gotten us? Endless war abroad, and big government and economic hardship at home. Instead of being a beacon of liberty, the country is a symbol of militarism and death. Obama, the fraudulent peace advocate, has followed the same interventionist course. He should not be allowed to extend it to Libya.
Recent polls suggest that while a majority of U.S. people disapprove of the war in Afghanistan, many on grounds of its horrible economic cost, only 3% took the war into account when voting in the 2010 midterm elections. The issue of the economy weighed heavily on voters, but the war and its cost, though clear to them and clearly related to the economy in their thinking, was a far less pressing concern.
U.S. people, if they do read or hear of it, may be shocked at the apparent unconcern of the crews of two U.S. helicopter gunships, which attacked and killed nine children on a mountainside in Afghanistan’s Kumar province, shooting them “one after another” this past Tuesday March 1st. (“The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting.” (NYT 3/2/11)).
Four of the boys were seven years old; three were eight, one was nine and the oldest was twelve. “The children were gathering wood under a tree in the mountains near a village in the district,” said Noorullah Noori, a member of the local development council in Manogai district. “I myself was involved in the burial,” Noori said. “Yesterday we buried them.” (AP, March 2, 2011) General Petraeus has acknowledged, and apologized for, the tragedy.
He has had many tragedies to apologize for just counting Kunar province alone. Last August 26th, in the Manogai district, Afghan authorities accused international forces of killing six children during an air assault on Taliban positions. Provincial police chief Khalilullah Ziayee said a group of children were collecting scrap metal on the mountain when NATO aircraft dropped bombs to disperse Taliban fighters attacking a nearby base. “In the bombardment six children, aged six to 12, were killed,” the police commander said. “Another child was injured.”
In the Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, Zekirullah, a young Afghan friend of mine, age 15, rises at 2:00 a.m. several mornings each week and rides his donkey for six hours through the pre-dawn to reach a mountainside where he can collect scrub brush and twigs which he loads on the donkey in baskets. Then he heads home and stacks the wood – on top of his family’s home – to be taken down later and burned for heat. They don’t have electrical appliances to heat the home, and even if they did the villagers only get electricity for two hours a day, generally between 1:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m. Families rely on their children to collect fuel for heat during the harsh winters and for cooking year round. Young laborers, wanting to help their families survive, mean no harm to the United States. They’re not surging at us: they’re not insurgents. They’re not doing anything to threaten us. They are children, and children anywhere are like children everywhere: they’re children like our own.
Sadly, more and more of us in America are getting used to the idea of child poverty – and even child labor – as our own economy sinks further under the burden of our latest nine years of war, of two billion dollars per week we spend creating poverty abroad that we can then emulate at home. Things are getting bad here, but in Afghanistan, children are bombed. Their bodies are casually dismembered and strewn by machines already lost in the horizon as the limbs settle. They lie in pools of blood until family members realize, one by one, that their children are not late in returning home but in fact never will.
In October and again in December of 2010, our small delegation of Voices for Creative Nonviolence activists met with a large family living in a wretched refugee camp. They had fled their homes in the San Gin district of the Helmand Province after a drone attack killed a mother there and her five children. The woman’s husband showed us photos of his children’s bloodied corpses. His niece, Juma Gul, age 9, had survived the attack. She and I huddled next to each other inside a hut made of mud on a chilly December morning. Juma Gul’s father stooped in front of us and gently unzipped her jacket, showing me that his daughter’s arm had been amputated by shrapnel when the U.S. missile hit their home in San Gin.
Next to Juma Gul was her brother, whose leg had been mangled in the attack. He apparently has no access to adequate medical care and experiences constant pain. The pilot of the attacking drone, perhaps controlling it from as far away as Creech Air Force Base here in the United States, knows nothing of this family or of the pain that he or she helped inflict. Nor do the commanders, the people who set up the base, the people who pay for it with their taxes, and the people who persist in electing candidates intent on indefinitely prolonging the war.
But sometimes the war is like it was this past Tuesday March 1st. Sometimes the issue is right in front of us – as it was to those helicopter crews – it’s up close so there can be no mistake as to what we are doing. According to the election polls we see the cost of war, dimly, but, as with the helicopter crews, it doesn’t affect – or prevent – our decisions. Afterward we deplore the tragedy; we make a pretense of acknowledging the cost of war, but it is incalculable. We can’t hope to count it. We actually, finally, have to stop making people like the nine children who died on March 1st, pay it.
With the U.S. economy in the tank and governments at all levels facing massive budget shortfalls, politicians left and right are seeking ways to curb spending. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants to eliminate collective bargaining rights and the decent pay that goes with them. President Barack Obama’s budget includes halving the home-heating oil subsidy poor households depend on.
As Republicans and Democrats propose cuts in programs that actually benefit their increasingly impoverished constituents, though, they agree there’s one area of the budget that’s not to be touched: the annual $3 billion subsidy U.S. taxpayers provide to the Israeli military.
One of the biggest defenders of the handout is House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. “There will be no cuts to security assistance to the Jewish State of Israel,” her chief of staff declared in a recent letter to House Republicans. The rest of the U.S. foreign aid budget, including assistance for Iraqi refugees and food aid to the world’s poorest people, is fair game. But the Florida congresswoman insists we must help Israel maintain its “Qualitative Military Edge.”
And congressional Democrats have her back.
Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, for instance – a leading member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – has drafted a letter, cosigned by California Democrat Anna Eshoo, warning that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia “have the potential to add to the very real security challenges faced by Israel.” Reducing or “otherwise endangering aid to our ally” would be “unproductive,” she adds, encouraging her colleagues to tell Obama they “strongly support … providing $3.075 billion in assistance to Israel.” (For those shivering at home, that’s more assistance than Obama is proposing to offer Americans trying to keep their houses warm.)
This liberal appeal for Israeli military aid, meanwhile, is being sent out under the auspices of J Street, a group that positions itself as a left-leaning answer to AIPAC. But J Street staff we spoke with at their recent conference were hard-pressed to explain why U.S. taxpayers should fund a right-wing Israeli government that continues to build settlements and maintains an inhumane siege of Gaza.
So it’s left to folks like libertarian Congressman Ron Paul and his son, Kentucky Senator and Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, to call for ending aid to Israel. In a February 4 interview with ABC News, Rand Paul said of Israel, “I think that their per capita income is greater than probably three-fourths of the rest of the world. Should we be giving free money or welfare to a wealthy nation? I don’t think so.”
Indeed, Israel has the 24th largest economy in the world, and ranks 15th among 169 nations on the UN Human Development Index, which makes it a “very highly developed” nation.
Yet what thanks did Senator Paul get for his call to save the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars? A torrent of criticism, even from J Street, which called on Republicans – and their donors – “to repudiate his comments and ensure American leadership around the world is not threatened by this irresponsible proposal.”
Paul’s fellow Tea Partiers aren’t any better. Of the 87 freshmen House Republicans elected on platforms of cut-baby-cut, at least three-fourths have now signed a letter declaring that, “As Israel faces threats from escalating instability in Egypt” – where have we heard that line of argument before? – “security assistance to Israel … has never been more important.” Subsidies are for militaries, you see, not poor people.
But even without U.S. funding, Israel would still spend $11 billion-plus on its military, more than all but 20 other nations in the world spend on their armed forces – and hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite having just 1/10th the population. Throw in a couple – as in, couple hundred – little things called nuclear weapons, and, for better or worse, the Jewish state’s “Qualitative Military Advantage” isn’t going anywhere.
But you wouldn’t know that listening to the folks at J Street or to liberals like Jan Schakowsky, who hysterically cite the specter of Arab democracy to advocate billions in subsidies for a government that openly flouts international law. So much for their concern about human rights. And so much for being progressive. Indeed, with liberals like these, the Netanyahu government and its allies at AIPAC are likely asking themselves: who needs the Tea Party?
“This is a massacre,” the frantic Libyan woman, speaking by telephone while cowering in her apartment in Tripoli, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“I hope you know that people around the world are watching and praying and wanting to do something,” Anderson told her, as if he were a stage prompter hinting at a performer’s next line. Whether or not she had been given a copy of the script, the caller performed as expected: “[T]he first step [is to] make Libya a no-fly zone. If you make Libya a no-fly zone, no more mercenaries can come in…. There needs to be action. How much more waiting, how much more watching, how much more people dying?”
It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the subject of Cooper’s interview was simply a terrified but resolute woman who risked her life to describe the violence devouring her country amid the death throes of Khadaffy’s police state.
It’s likewise possible that her call for international action to impose a no-fly zone was a desperate plea from a victim, rather than an act of media ventriloquism in which an anonymous figure endorsed the first plank of a military campaign proposed by the same neo-conservative kriegsbund that manipulated us into Iraq.
Surely it was a coincidence that the “Cry in the Night” from Libya was echoed on the same network a few nights later by Iraq war architect, former World Bank president, and accused war criminal Paul Wolfowitz, who several days prior to Cooper’s dramatic broadcast called for a NATO-enforced “no fly zone” over Libya.
In fact, the day following that interview, an ad hoc group calling itself the Foreign Policy Initiative, which coalesced from the remnants of the Project for a New American Century, published an “open letter” to Mr. Obama demanding military intervention – beginning with a no-fly zone – in Libya. The neo-con framework for managing the Libyan crisis would create a regional protectorate administered by NATO on behalf of the “international community.” This would nullify any effort on the part of Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, and others to achieve true independence.
On previous experience with media campaigns on behalf of humanitarian conquest, my incurable cynicism leads me to hear in Cooper’s “Cry in the Night” a faint but unmistakable echo of the tearful, palpably earnest testimony of “Nayirah” – the wide-eyed Kuwaiti girl who, using an assumed name to “protect her family,” described what had befallen her country in the wake of the Iraqi invasion.
Bravely composing herself as she recounted horrors no human eyes should behold, the precociously self-possessed 15-year-old volunteer nurse related to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus how Iraqi soldiers stormed into the al-Addan Hospital, tore newborn infants from incubators, and hurled them to the floor. A short time later this testimony was “confirmed” by others who offered similarly anguished testimony before the UN Security Council.
During the three-month build-up to the January 1991 attack on Baghdad, the image of Kuwaiti “incubator babies” was endlessly recycled as a talking point in media interviews, presidential speeches, and debates in Congress and the UN. A post-war opinion survey found that the story of the “incubator babies” was the single most potent weapon deployed by the Bush administration in its campaign to build public support for the attack on Iraq.
This atrocity account was particularly effective in overcoming the skepticism of people espousing a progressive point of view.
“A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day,” recalled Christian Science Monitor columnist Tom Regan, describing his sibling’s reaction to “Nayirah’s” testimony. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein – now,” Regan’s brother insisted.
“I completely understood his feelings,” Regan pointed out. After all, “who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident. Too bad it never happened.”
“Nayirah” was not a traumatized ingénue who had witnessed an act of barbarism worthy of the Einsatzgruppen; she was actually the daughter of Saud Nasi al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States (and a member of the emirate’s royal family). Her script had been written by the Washington-based PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which – under the supervision of former Bush administration Chief of Staff Craig Fuller – had put together a campaign to build public support for the impending war.
It wasn’t difficult to convince the public that Saddam was a hideous thug. Selling the idea of a major war in the Middle East was a more daunting proposition. In late 1990, Hal Steward, a retired Army propaganda officer, defined the problem for the administration: “If and when the shooting starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks. The U.S. military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answers the public can accept.”
The image of newborn Kuwaiti infants being ripped from incubators was an updated riff on a classic war propaganda theme performed by British intelligence – and its American fellow travelers – in their efforts to provoke U.S. intervention in World War I.
The WWI-era equivalent of the Kuwaiti “incubator babies” were the Belgian infants who were supposedly spitted on bayonets by hairy-knuckled Huns in Pickelhaube helmets. German soldiers did this to amuse themselves once they could no longer sate their prurient interests by raping Belgian women and then amputating their breasts. So the American public was told, in all seriousness, by people working on behalf of a secretive British propaganda committee headed by Charles Masterman.
In 1915, an official Commission headed by Viscount James Bryce, a notable British historian, “verified” those atrocity stories without naming a specific witness or victim. This didn’t satisfy Clarence Darrow, who offered a reward of $1,000 to anyone who could produce a Belgian or French victim who had been mutilated by German troops. That bounty went unclaimed.
“After the war,” recounts Thomas Fleming in his book Illusion of Victory, “historians who sought to examine the documentation for Bryce’s stories were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared. This blatant evasion prompted most historians to dismiss 99 percent of Bryce’s atrocities as fabrications.”
War emancipates every base and repulsive impulse to which fallen man is susceptible. So it’s certain that some German troops (like their French, Belgian, British, and American counterparts) exploited opportunities to commit individual acts of depraved cruelty. But the purpose of the war propaganda peddled by the Anglo-American elite, as Fleming observes, was to create a widespread public image of Germans as “monsters capable of appalling sadism” – thereby coating an appeal to murderous collective hatred with a lacquer of sanctimony.
The trick is to leave the target audience at once shivering in horror at a spectacle of sub-human depravity, panting with a visceral desire for vengeance, and rapturously self-righteous about the purity of its humane motives. People who succumb to it are easily subsumed into a hive mind of officially sanctioned hatred, and prepared to perpetrate crimes even more hideous than those that they believe typify the enemy.
Rhetoric of that kind abounded during the French Revolution, particularly the Jacobin regime’s war to annihilate the rebellious Vendee. It also figured prominently in the Lincoln regime’s war to conquer the newly independent southern states. However, it’s difficult to find a better expression of that mindset than the one offered in an editorial published in 1920 by Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet Cheka secret police:
“Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute, because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles … Blood? Let blood flow like water … for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever.” (Emphasis added.)
In pursuing his Grand Crusade for Democracy, Woodrow Wilson was squarely in that tradition, extolling the supposed virtue of “Force without stint or limit … the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion in the dust.” To fortify the American “war will” through a steady diet of atrocity porn, the Wilson administration created a Department of Public Information that liaised with its British equivalent, as well as quasi-private British propaganda fronts such as the Navy League. That organization, Fleming points out, included “dozens of major bankers and corporate executives, from J.P. Morgan Jr. to Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
Through absolutely no fault of his own, Anderson Cooper is a great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Of considerably greater interest is the fact that as a student at Yale, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at Langley in a CIA program designed to cultivate future intelligence operatives.
When asked about Cooper’s background with the CIA, a CNN spokeswoman insisted that he chose not to pursue a job with the Agency after graduating from Yale. The same can be said, however, of many of the CIA’s most valuable media assets.
As Carl Bernstein documented decades ago, the CIA “ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were ‘taught how to make noises like reporters,’ explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. ‘These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, ‘You’re going to be a journalist,’ the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some [media] relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.”
By way of an initiative called “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA built a large seraglio of paid media courtesans. This was carried out through the Office of Policy Coordination, which was created by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner – the latter being the official who went on to organize coups (and the attendant propaganda campaigns) against governments in Iran and Guatemala. (Wisner’s son and namesake, incidentally, was a vice chairman at AIG – the CIA’s favorite global insurance conglomerate – until 2009; more recently he was tapped by the Obama administration to serve as a back-channel contact with Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.)
The tendrils of “Operation Mockingbird” extended through every significant national media organ, from the Washington Post and Newsweek to the Time-Life conglomerate, from the New York Times to CBS. As a result, according to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the Fourth Estate “has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus.” It is, in everything but name, an appendage of the Regime. This is clearly seen every time the Regime decides the time has come to mount another campaign of humanitarian bloodshed abroad.
Having “learned nothing from the horrors that they cheer-led like excitable teenage girls over the past 15 years, these bohemian bombers, these latte-sipping lieutenants, these iPad imperialists are back,” sighs a wearily disgusted Brendan O’Neill in the London Telegraph. “This time they’re demanding the invasion of Libya.”
On O’Neill’s side of the Atlantic, the Fleet Street Samurai are peddling “rumors of systematic male rape” in Libya. Others insist that the prospective war in Libya would in no way resemble “the foolishness of the Iraq invasion” – just as similar self-appointed sages promised that the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, each of which has lasted at least as long as the Vietnam War, would not be “another Vietnam.”
For some reason, this brings to mind the image of Bullwinkle repeatedly trying to pull a rabbit from his hat, blithely batting aside Rocky’s complaint that the trick “never works” by exclaiming, “This time for sure!” This time, we’re supposed to believe – or at least, pretend to believe – that the atrocity accounts are true, that military action sanctified by the “international community” is a moral obligation, that warlust and hatred are virtuous, and that the impending bloodshed will be a cleansing stream.
As is the case, one supposes, with any other variety, war pornography is nothing if not predictable. However, unlike Bullwinkle’s inept attempts at thaumaturgy, war porn is a trick that seems to work every time.
~
“All war is based on Deception” – “in war, the first casualty is truth“; Sun Tzu’s Art of War
The reports of Libya mobilizing its air force against its own people spread quickly around the world. However, Russia’s military chiefs say they have been monitoring from space — and the pictures tell a different story. According to Al Jazeera and BBC, on February 22 the Libyan government inflicted airstrikes on Benghazi — the country’s largest city — and on the capital Tripoli. However, the Russian military, monitoring the unrest via satellite from the very beginning, says nothing of the sort was going on on the ground:
What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.
Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range — close to $700 billion for 2012 — but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.
Take that in for a moment. It’s true; you won’t find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it’s no misprint. It may even be an underestimate. In any case, it’s the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for “security” is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up.
So, here we go. Buckle your seat belt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Fortunately for us, on February 14th the Obama administration officially released its Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget request. Of course, it hasn’t been passed by Congress — even the 2011 budget hasn’t made it through that august body yet — but at least we have the most recent figures available for our calculations.
For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual “base” budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg.
To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.
Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category — a kind of department of chump change — that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds.
So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of:
$703.1 billion dollars.
Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy.
For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual “war-related fighting” costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what’s called “International Affairs” in two: that is, into an annual “base” budget as well as funding for “Overseas Contingency Operations” related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department’s contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to:
$711.8 billion.
The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called “homeland security” — of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding which brings our total to:
$765.3 billion.
The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP).
This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of “covert operations” such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won’t have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There’s little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let’s be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on “intelligence.” Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon’s 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don’t know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In anycase, add that $53.1 billion and we’re at:
$818.4 billion.
Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans’ hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we’ve reached:
$947.7 billion.
If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for “international peacekeeping” operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at:
$965.7 billion.
As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit:
$1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!)
When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.
Add it all together and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is:
$1,219.2 billion. (That’s more than $1.2 trillion.)
A country with a gross domestic product of $1.2 trillion would have the 15th largest economy in the world, ranking between Canada and Indonesia, and ahead of Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Still, don’t for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world’s “known unknowns.” Explaining the phrase this way: “That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know.” It’s a concept that couldn’t apply better to the budget he once oversaw. When it comes to U.S. national security spending, there are some relevant numbers we know are out there, even if we simply can’t calculate them.
To take one example, how much of NASA’s proposed $18.7 billion budget falls under national security spending? We know that the agency works closely with the Pentagon. NASA satellite launches often occur from the Air Force’s facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Air Force has its own satellite launch capability, but how much of that comes as a result of NASA technology and support? In dollars terms, we just don’t know.
Other “known unknowns” would include portions of the State Department budget. One assumes that at least some of its diplomatic initiatives promote our security interests. Similarly, we have no figure for the pensions of non-Pentagon federal retirees who worked on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, or the Departments of Justice and Treasury. Nor do we have figures for the interest on moneys borrowed to fund veterans’ benefits, among other national security-related matters. The bill for such known unknowns could easily run into the tens of billions of dollars annually, putting the full national security budget over the $1.3 trillion mark or even higher.
There’s a simple principle here. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for. In a restaurant, a customer would be outraged to receive a check almost twice as high as the menu promised. We have no idea whether the same would be true in the world of national security spending, because Americans are never told what national security actually means at the cash register.
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Christopher Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was previously a military policy analyst for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Defense Information, and spent 10 years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staffer working on national security and foreign policy issues. He is a TomDispatch regular and a frequent media commentator on military planning, policy, and budgetary issues. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Hellman explains how he arrived at his staggering numbers, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
[Note on Sources: The press release from the Office of The Director of National Intelligence disclosing the Fiscal Year 2010 $53 billion intelligence budget consists of 138 words and no details, other than that the office will disclose no details. It can be found by clicking here (.pdf file). An October 2010 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office entitled “Potential Costs of Veterans’ Health Care” projects rapid cost growth for Veterans Administration services over the next decade as a result of spiraling health care costs. To read the full report, click here (.pdf file). To see all the federal agencies that contribute to homeland security funding, click here (.pdf file)]
Bahrain–Eyewitnesses have reported seeing an estimated 30 tanks being transported into Bahrain from Saudi Arabia on Monday night at around 6:45pm local time. The tanks were sighted along the King Fahd causeway, which links the small island-nation of Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.
Commuters traveling along the 25-km causeway were held up due to the presence of “15 tank carriers carrying two tanks each heading towards Bahrain.” Civilian eyewitnesses could not, however, confirm whether the tanks belonged to the Saudi military.
The presence of Saudi military hardware in Bahrain is considered highly unusual.
The development comes on the eve of yet another scheduled anti-government demonstration organized by the Bahraini opposition and protesters in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout.
Fears of Saudi intervention in the ongoing Bahraini uprising first came to the fore last week when unconfirmed reports emerged on Wednesday that Saudi officials had told US authorities that they were “prepared to intervene” in Bahrain should such a move prove necessary to protect Bahrain’s embattled government.
Tomorrow’s mass protest will be the first to take place since the arrival to the country of controversial Shia opposition leader Hassan Mosheima from self-imposed exile.
Mosheima arrived on Saturday, using his first speech to call for national unity and to urge protesters to step up demands for the ouster of Bahrain’s prime minister of 40 years, Sheikh Khalifa Al Khalifa.
US State Department Spokesman Philip Crowley has defended Washington’s military aid to Yemen despite the use of the American weaponry by Sana’a regime in brutal crushing of pro-democracy uprisings.
In response to a question by a Press TV reporter at a Thursday news briefing for the foreign press, Crowley defended continued lethal US military aid to Yemen’s autocratic government as a necessary measure to combat ‘terrorism.’
“That itself justifies the ongoing cooperation that we have,” he said.
Crowley said the US has no plans to sever its military ties to Yemen even though US military aid is being used to suppress the pro-democracy uprising there.
The majority of Yemenis are unhappy with the expanding US military ties with their despotic government, especially in view of its harsh crackdown on protesters in recent days.
This has led to an uneasy alliance between the two governments, facing an uncertain future.
In recent days, thousands of Yemeni protesters have taken to the streets across the country, calling for the ouster of President Abdullah Saleh.
The Yemeni president has described the pro-democracy protesters as “elements of a coup.”
Saleh, in power for 33 years, said that he would leave power after his term expires in 2013. He has also promised not to hand power to his son.
The Yemeni incumbent president has also pledged to raise wages of government employees and to provide 60,000 job opportunities for university graduates.
The Yemeni government crackdown on protesters, inspired by revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, has so far left at least 24 people dead.
The US also occasionally carries out drone attacks in Yemen. Despite such extraordinary measures, the country has grown increasingly unstable.
President Obama and the Congress have taken 66% of discretionary spending in the federal budget off the table – the Security Budget – while proposing a freeze to the rest of the budget and deep cuts to some programs that provide necessities for the American people. His budget crystalizes a choice that U.S. presidents have been making since President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex – investment in the military vs. investment in the civilian economy.
The bloated and sacrosanct security budget – the military, domestic security and intelligence budgets –all saw rapid growth under President Bush when the DoD doubled its budget. Under President Obama the trend has continued with record military, intelligence and domestic security budgets. And, while the so-called recovery has only been a recovery for Wall Street and big business, the administration and congress are focused more on the deficit than on re-starting the economy for the rest of us. But there is more talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare than cutting the security budget. In fact, these two items are called entitlements because they are a contract with working Americans who pay for them in every paycheck. For this reason they should not even be considered part of the deficit. Payroll taxes fund these two programs that are essential for older Americans in their retirement years. Both face budget challenges but can be fixed, indeed Social Security has more than $2.5 trillion in Treasury Notes in reserve.
President Obama has proposed the largest DoD budget since World War II, $553 billion (not including war funding or nuclear weapons funding in the Department of Energy). Much attention has been shined on Secretary of Defense Gates’ proposal to “cut” $78 billion in the Pentagon budget. Those “cuts” take place over five years with reductions taking place after the 2012 election in 2014 and 2015. And, the “cuts” do not include the cost of wars. The Afghanistan war alone could eat up projected “savings” and if the CIA’s war in Pakistan escalates that will be an even bigger budget item. Further, we have not seen what the continuing U.S. military footprint in Iraq will cost. These projected cuts are more image than reality.
How does military spending impact Americans? President Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb describes the military budget as “an annual tax of more than $7,000 on every household in the country.” While increasing the security budget, Obama and the Democrats have proposed widespread cuts to critical programs from a 50% cut in low-income heating assistance to nearly a 30% cut to the clean drinking water fund. They have also proposed a 25% cut ($1.3 billion) to the community development block grants used to fund local community development including affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development. These are essential services needed for Americans health, safety and economic security. Of course, Republican cuts in the House budget are even more extreme but Obama set the table for them by making the debate about deficits and both parties will not touch the security budget. Military analyst, William Hartung, writes “These cuts will be painful, and they will be felt in every middle- and lower-income household in America.”
Cities and states are cutting essential services to balance their budgets. U.S. taxpayers will spend $737 billion for Pentagon spending for FY2011 including war funding). To get a sense of what this means, for the same amount of money tax payers could provide funding for 11.3 million elementary school teachers for one year or 93.5 million scholarships for university students for one year… Instead all these programs face cutbacks, while military spending grows. […]
Cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget is the goal of the Obama administration deficit plan. All of these cuts could come from military spending and still leave the U.S. militarily dominant. In fact, since the administration has projected an increase in spending of $6.5 trillion from 2011 to 2020, even a trillion would be a slowing of growth more than a real cut. Lawrence Korb lays out a five point plan to reduce military spending by $1 trillion without jeopardizing national security and thereby protecting U.S. economic security.
He is not alone, the Sustainable Defense Task Force provides specific cuts without harming U.S. national security including:
•The $238 billion Joint Strike Fighter program: Canceling the program and relying instead on upgraded versions of current aircraft would save almost $50 billion over ten years.
•The MV-22 Osprey: Replacing this dangerous, overpriced, and under-performing aircraft with cheaper alternatives would save over $10 billion over ten years.
•Reducing the number of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia to 100,000 from current levels of 150,000 would save $80 billion over a decade.
•Reforming Pentagon health care systems so that retirees pay modest, reasonable premiums could save $60 billion over a decade.
•Scaling back missile defense and space weapons programs could save over $50 billion over a decade.
•Further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including deployment of fewer ballistic-missile launching submarines, could save over $100 billion in a ten year period, much of it in operating costs
•Reducing the size of the Navy from 286 to 230 ships would save over $125 billion over ten years.
If you combine these recommendations of the five point plan of Lawrence Korb, which includes items like bringing home 50,000 of the 150,000 troops stationed in Asia and Europe, reducing the size of the Army and Marine Corps to their pre-Iraq invasion level and reducing nuclear weapons from 1,968 to the 311 the Military War College says is needed for defense, the U.S. would save another $200 billion.
For many, these would only be the starting points of correctly prioritizing military spending. President Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex 50 year ago. During that time, U.S. spending on the military adjusted for inflation has more than doubled and we have moved to a permanent war state. Columbia University’s Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering, pointed out that “Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.” In fact, we have seen – as we see in the Obama budget – a constant conflict between the military economy and the civilian economy. The civilian economy is losing that battle.
Thomas Woods, Jr. recently wrote in the American Conservative that military spending is parasitic as it feeds off the economy rather than grows it. The scale of resources used by the military is exorbitant, Woods writes: “To train a single combat pilot, for instance, costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world’s use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is consumed by the U.S. military, as is about 6 percent of the world’s consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon’s energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.”
To get a sense of the competition between the civilian and military economy, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital stock) at just over $7.29 trillion in 1985; and from 1947 to 1987 the military spent the equivalent, $7.62 trillion in capital resources.
With the long record of the ascendency of military spending it is not surprising to see the U.S. economy in collapse, industry disappearing and the infrastructure crumbling. Not only has the U.S. failed to win a major war since World War II, but the cost of the standing army has become a burden on all of us and a drag on the economy. Some describe the U.S. Empire in decline and others see a collapse as possible at any moment.
The failure of President Obama to confront military spending in this time of economic collapse and perceived deficit crisis, when tax dollars are needed to restart the domestic economy, is not only a short term budget failure but does not face up to the long-term damaging economic impact of the American military empire.
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Kevin Zeese is executive director of Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US) and Voters for Peace (www.VotersForPeace.US) and an editor of the book ComeHomeAmerica.US (visit ComeHomeAmerica.US for more information and to purchase the book).
The Futenma air base is in an urbanized area on Okinawa island
Japanese activists have gathered in front of the US embassy in Tokyo to protest against a planned heliport near the village of Takae, northern Okinawa.
The demonstrators shouted slogans against the American military base on Okinawa, demanding the removal of the base from the island, The Japan Times reported on Sunday.
They tried to submit a letter to Washington’s Ambassador in Japan John Victor Roos, but they were prevented from reaching the embassy by a wall of Japanese police.
Futenma airbase, hosting about half the US troops in Japan, is extremely unpopular with locals who associate it with crime and pollution.
Futenma has provoked a wave of anger in the country, urging Tokyo to remove US military installations from the country.
Tens of thousands of people have held several rallies against the American military engagement in the country over the past months.
The relocation of the air station is not the only unbearable issue for Okinawans, as Tokyo has agreed to construct six helipads (each 75 meters in diameter) for the US Marine Corps’ Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospreys around the village.
Noise pollution from Ospreys is said to be beyond human tolerance. The citizens of Brewton, Alabama, also staged a protest against Osprey maneuvers in the region last month.
Earlier this week, Japanese people staged another street protest against the trans-Pacific free trade pact, which broadens relationships with the United States.
People from political left and right gave speeches and rallied in the streets on Wednesday, saying that the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is aimed at strengthening the US-Japan military alliance and has political purposes.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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