American Conspiracies & Cover-ups
By Douglas Cirignano | OffGuardian | November 3, 2019
In today’s world, the phrase “conspiracy theory” is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.
History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don’t sometimes cooperate in covert, secretive ways. Following are five instances when it’s been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.
THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION
On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.
Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War—which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand Americans and two million Asians—was underway.
Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,
… once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War.”
In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA’s Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara lied and said no.
Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to the White House and Pentagon that “in all likelihood” an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox’s own propellers.
Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested “complete reevaluation before any action is taken.”
McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that North Vietnam had engaged in “unprovoked aggression” and, so, the US military was retaliating.
A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”
Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately “distorted intelligence” andand “altered documents” to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.
When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship, and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion of Cuba.
The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.
Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring war on that country.
The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.
The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on Castro to “create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility” and “put the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances.”
One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID’s; an exact duplicate plane—an empty military drone aircraft—would take off at the same exact time.
The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean, supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. “Casualty lists in US newspapers” and conducting “fake funerals for mock-victims” would cause “a helpful wave of national indignation” in America.
The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: “We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba.” Whether the ship was to be empty or full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: “Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.”
Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American civilians. The plan suggests:
We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated).”
And:
We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized…We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots.”
Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval Base in Cuba. The plans were:
- “Start riots near the entrance to the base”
- “lob mortar shells from outside the base to inside the base”
- “blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires”
- “burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)”
- “sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napalm.”
When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods “right away, within a few months.”
Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens, knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.
FBI AND THE MAFIA
In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters, Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan’s blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.
Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza’s testimony, Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau began using members of the mafia—criminals and murderers—to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn’t want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.
The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.
The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.
On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza’s trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza to get a light sentence.
Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati’s innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.
Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati’s innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted Salvati’s release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the crime.
Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government. (Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men—men who were also not guilty—had participated in Deegan’s murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)
Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.
Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation. The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman.
When asked by CBS’s 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace “Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this?” Burton replied:
“Yes . . . It’s one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice…J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent. He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building.”
Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House refused to release them.
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.
In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.
The program existed from 1942–1946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000 workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the “Greatest Secret Ever Kept.”
The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America’s other enemies found out about it and built—more quickly—a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was kept quiet.
In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing “atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials” or anything else that could expose the project. The press kept mum. The government didn’t talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn’t report on it, and the public knew nothing about it.
Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.
In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, “probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.”
The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren’t told what the job was, and didn’t understand the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project’s secrets was punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.
Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn’t know they were helping to build nuclear bombs.
The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.
When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America’s enemies, from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION
In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named after the Committee’s chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.
The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had been engaging in “unlawful or improper conduct” and “intelligence excesses, at home and abroad” since the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The report added that “intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens” and “checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” a report that detailed the CIA’s misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA’s SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.
The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the bureau’s program to covertly destroy and disrupt any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.
The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.
The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William Colby presented to the Committee a special “heart attack gun” that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim’s death from the poison would appear to be a heart attack, so no foul play would be suspected.
In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.
In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.
Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate suspected terrorists.
Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn’t get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA director were lying to the congressional committee.
Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert and improper conduct.
When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that’s a government conspiracy.
***
If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true—and they have been—isn’t it logical to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.
The phrase “conspiracy theory” shouldn’t have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events of American history.
A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said, “I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, ‘There is no conspiracy.’ I bet you would look up and say, ‘So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.’”
Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don’t act in secretive, covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.
But when the evidence indicates otherwise….
Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.
But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about “conspiracy realities” that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.
If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?
If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.
American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.
Or don’t work.
This is an extract from American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, by Douglas Cirignano published by Simon&Schuster. It can be purchased in hard copy, digital and audio-book form through Amazon and other booksellers.
American Monster: Chris Kyle, the American Sniper
Are Americans who lap up Chris Kyle’s blood-specked vomit suffering from hybristophilia—groupie-like fanboy adulation of psychopathic serial killers? Danish author and criminologist Soren Korsgaard has edited the peer-reviewed criminology journal Radians and Inches: The Journal of Crime. and currently posts at CrimeAndPower.com. I recently interviewed him about this article. — Kevin Barrett
By Soren Korsgaard | Veterans Today
When one delves into the subject of perpetrators of extreme violence, it is very rare for experts and writers to discuss legalized killers, much less study them; instead, they take aim at politically neutral cases, that being non-legalized killers, and consequently the literature in this regard has been based on an incomplete spectrum.
If researchers were able to bypass political undertones and the complexities involved with determining which legalized killers to include and which to discard in their analyses, they would quickly be able to establish that one of the most remorseless and prolific US serial killers of all time is neither named John Wayne Gacy nor Gary Ridgway but Christopher Scott Kyle, the American Sniper.
Chris Kyle, who has been branded an “American Hero [1],” never expressed any regrets for his many victims but stated that he wished he could have murdered more. Even Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and occasionally indulged in necrophilia and decapitations, expressed that he deeply regretted his actions and reckoned that society deserved to be protected from him.
Chris Kyle was a United States Navy SEAL sniper and served several tours in the Iraq War. After his discharge from the U.S. Navy, he went on to publish his bestselling autobiography American Sniper in 2012 [2]. In his book, he claimed to be the most prolific sniper of all time, and it is generally agreed upon that he has killed more than 160 and possibly over 300 people, mostly Iraqis. After the publication of his book, he told the Sunday People that “There are no kills that I regret. None at all. The public is very soft. I either killed them, or they killed other Americans [3].”
In this article, we integrate the case into a broader framework that encompasses a discussion of the legal justification for the war. As we shall see, the Iraq War had been planned years in advance and violated international law. Killings committed during an illegal invasion are obviously illegal and this puts Chris Kyle‘s justification into a whole different perspective; that is, if the USA had never invaded Iraq, none of his colleagues would have ever been in any alleged danger.
From his own words, we will see that Kyle was able to kill like clockwork, without remorse, and even claimed to have continued to murder people when he returned from service. To gain a better comprehension of such behavior, his actions are analyzed from the perspective of psychiatry. This article furthermore analyses the possible root causes of why Kyle gained pervasive popularity and support despite information pertaining to his murders being in plain sight. It is argued that successfully implemented war propaganda and a disorder, known as hybristophilia, account for the observed behavior.
International Law and the Iraq War
In March 2003, just before the Iraq War commenced, a group of 31 Canadian professors of international law declared in an open letter that an attack on Iraq “would be a fundamental breach of international law and would seriously threaten the integrity of the international legal order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War [4].”
They furthermore condemned the scheduled war “in the strongest terms” and underlined that an invasion would have imperialist and colonial overtones: “Illegal action by the US and its allies would simply return us to an international order based on imperial ambition and coercive force [4].”
The group was backed by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva who expressed “deep dismay that a small number of states are poised to launch an outright illegal invasion of Iraq, which amounts to a war of aggression [5].”
Under international law, a state is only allowed to use force against a sovereign nation if it has attacked first. Before any actions are undertaken, the consent of the United Nations Security Council is a necessity. The US never got the Security Council‘s approval for the Iraq War.
In 2002, well before the initiation of the war, a group of 317 law teachers from 87 law schools located in the US declared in an open statement that a war against Iraq would not only be a breach of international law, but also violate the American constitution; they, in the strongest terms, protested “the Bush administration‘s illegal plan to conduct a war against Iraq,” and argued that “President Bush maintains that Iraq‘s ‘decade of defiance‘ of United Nations resolutions justifies a war against Iraq. But the President ignores the fact that a US war, unleashed without the approval of the UN Security Council, against a country that has not attacked the United States, would itself be an unlawful act, in defiance of America‘s treaty obligations, and a violation of US and international law [6].”
Importantly, they also stated that “The dangerous path America is treading will only lead to more suffering by Americans, as well as by others. The international rule of law is not a soft luxury to be discarded whenever leaders find it convenient or popular to resort to savage violence. The international rule of law is a bulwark against the horrors of warfare that we Americans have so recently felt firsthand [6].”
They also made the essential historical reference which is that “every nation that has ever committed aggression against another claimed to be ‘defending‘ itself. The United States helped establish the United Nations precisely in order to impose the rule of law on such claims, to make it unlawful for nations to strike against others unless they were themselves under armed attack. The United States is not under armed attack by Iraq [6].”
In 2004, Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General, spoke about the U.S. led invasion of Iraq:
“I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it was illegal [7].”
Kofi Annan‘s statement was echoed in a 2005 paper published in the British Journal of Criminology, professors Kramer and Michalowski, concluded that the “invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies is a violation of international law, and as such constitutes a state crime [8].”
Even UN‘s former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has stated that “all in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction,” and “I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war [9].”
Former chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, Benjamin Ferencz, has declared that the Iraq War was illegal, and it constituted the “supreme international crime [10],” which was defined under the Nuremberg trials as a war of aggression without any justification. He has also stated, “Crimes against humanity, destruction beyond the needs of military necessity, rape of civilians, plunder – that always happens in wartime. So my answer personally, after working for 60 years on this problem and [as someone] who hates to see all these young people get killed no matter what their nationality, is that you‘ve got to stop using warfare as a means of settling your disputes [10].”
In a different interview, he briefly described the proceedings that led to the war:
“The United Nations charter has a provision which was agreed to by the United States, formulated by the United States, in fact, after World War II. It says that from now on, no nation can use armed force without the permission of the U.N. Security Council. They can use force in connection with self-defense, but a country can‘t use force in anticipation of self-defense. Regarding Iraq, the last Security Council resolution essentially said, ‘Look, send the weapons inspectors out to Iraq, have them come back and tell us what they’ve found – then we‘ll figure out what we‘re going to do.’ The U.S. was impatient, and decided to invade Iraq – which was all prearranged of course. So, the United States went to war, in violation of the charter [11, 12].”
Even a political inquiry into the Iraq War has affirmed that it was illegal; the Dutch inquiry concluded, among others, that the “military action had no sound mandate in international law [13].” Philippe Sands QC, a professor of international law at University College London, who gave evidence to the inquiry, later told the media that:
“There has been no other independent assessment on the legality of the war in Iraq and the findings of this inquiry are unambiguous [13].”
The British inquiry into the war, which became known as the Chilcot Inquiry, concluded that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat, military action was unnecessary, and it was also concluded that the UK government had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council [14].
Extensive evidence of systematic deception, fraud, manipulation, and criminality by the Bush administration was also put forth in the book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, by former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi highlighted that Bush had warned in a speech on October 7, 2002, that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US, capable of striking them at any time with weapons of mass destruction. However, Bush had, less than a week before the speech, received the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in which it was concluded by 16 US intelligence agencies that Iraq would only pose a threat if the US attacked it first, i.e. self-defense. When the Bush administration put out a declassified version of the NIE just before Congress were to vote on whether or not it authorized an invasion, the conclusion that Iraq was not an imminent threat was completely deleted from the document. Bugliosi also pointed his finger to the so-called Manning Memo that detailed how Bush had told Tony Blair about three possible ways for the US to provoke Saddam Hussein into a war. Bush elaborated on one of these provocations and stated that they could fly “U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, [falsely] painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of UN resolutions and that would justify war [15]. If Bush honestly believed that Iraq was an imminent threat, the thought of provoking the country would never have entered his mind—the last person you want to provoke is the one you are deadly afraid of.
General Wesley Clark, a retired four-star general who was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War, revealed in 2007 that the Iraq War as well as several others had been planned years in advance. General Clark said:
“About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, ‘Sir, you‘ve got to come in and talk to me a second.’ … He says, ‘We‘ve made the decision we‘re going to war with Iraq.’ This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, ‘We‘re going to war with Iraq? Why?’ He said, ‘I don‘t know.’ He said, ‘I guess they don‘t know what else to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He says, ‘There‘s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.’ …. So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it‘s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, ‘I just got this down from upstairs’ — meaning the Secretary of Defense‘s office — ‘today.’ And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we‘re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran [16].’”
The illegality of the Iraq War has been thoroughly well documented, perhaps better than any other illegal war in history, but as it often is with state crimes: those who planned it and those who implemented the violence will rarely be held accountable.
Death Toll of the Iraq War
In addition to the killings carried out by Chris Kyle, the Iraqi people suffered greatly from the U.S. led war of aggression. Independent studies, such as those published in the Lancet, a top medical journal, have shown that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the war (first study covered the first 17 months of the war and found that 100,000 people had died due to the war. A follow up study from 2006 showed that the death toll had increased to 654,965) [17].
Subsequent to the publication of the 2006 study, “the war-declaring governments could not simply let these explosive figures go unchallenged [18],” and Bush and British prime-minister Blair immediately dismissed them as not credible, but in March 2007, BBC revealed that the British government‘s own scientists had confirmed the robustness and accuracy of the study. “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to best practice in this area [18],” said chief scientific adviser of the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson. Several scientists employed by the UK‘s Department for International Development even stated that “the Lancet study actually underestimated the mortality rates because of the methods it applied [18].”
Numerous other experts have confirmed that the reports are scientifically sound and provide the best data on the number of deaths. Shortly after the publication of the 2006 study, a large group of leading experts in medical epidemiology, population health, and biostatistics issued a statement which affirmed that the study was “valid and correct,” and “we can be confident that the excess deaths were above 390,000 and may in fact be as high as 940,000. The vast majority (92 per cent) of the excess deaths were due to direct violence. The cross-sectional household cluster sample survey method used is a standard, robust, well-established method for gathering health data [19].”
The independent Just Foreign Policy estimates that the current total death toll is approximately 1.5 million based upon extrapolation of the data from the Lancet studies [20].
In 2007 and 2008, the independent polling agency “Opinion Research Business” published two studies on the Iraq War mortality, and they ultimately estimated “that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000 [21].”
The Nobel Prize winning Physicians for Social Responsibility echoed these findings in 2015 when they released their detailed study in which they conservatively estimated that one million people had died due to the war. In their report, they furthermore scolded the often-cited Iraq Body Count Project (IBC) for grossly misrepresenting data and underestimating the actual death toll. [18]. An investigative report had furthermore exposed IBC as being “deeply embedded in the Western foreign policy establishment. IBC‘s key advisers and researchers have received direct and indirect funding from US government propaganda agencies and Pentagon contractors. It is no surprise, then, that IBC-affiliated scholars promote narratives of conflict that serve violent US client-regimes and promote NATO counter-insurgency doctrines [22].” Moreover, the investigative report concluded that “IBC has not only systematically underrepresented the Iraqi death toll, it has done so on the basis of demonstrably fraudulent attacks on standard scientific procedures. IBC affiliated scholars are actively applying sophisticated techniques of statistical manipulation to whitewash US complicity in violence… [22].”
Professor Gideon Polya, an expert in thanatology (the scientific study of the cause of death) and author of Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950, has estimated that the absolute Iraqi death toll of the war is in excess of 2.7 million. This figure encompasses 1.5 million who died as a result of violence and 1.2 million who died due to war-induced deprivation. The latter includes under-5 infant deaths of 0.6 million [23].
The Confessions
People ordered to kill by their governments or superiors, in particular soldiers, are not exempt from punishment by conveniently shifting the responsibility to their superiors if a moral choice was available. Such is explicitly declared by Nuremberg Principle IV, which states that “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him [24].” Chris Kyle ignored the Nuremberg Principles and the illegality of the war, and he asserted that his victims would have killed his colleagues if he had not acted first [3].
His arguments would, in all probability, have fallen short if he had been prosecuted in the International Criminal Court in Hague for war crimes. His charges may have included systematic extermination of Iraqis, i.e. crimes against humanity.
Judging from his own words, he enjoyed killing the Iraqi people as well as others. In his memoir, he described killing as “fun [2].” He also stated that “I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them [2],” and “on the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in. I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I‘d been fighting. I always will [2],” and remarked, “they‘ve taken so much from me [2].”
Later in the book, he reiterated his standpoint on the Iraqis:
“Savage, despicable evil. That‘s what we were fighting in Iraq. That‘s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’ There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there [2].”
Regarding how many people he had killed, he stated:
“People ask me all the time, ‘How many people have you killed?’ My standard response is, ‘Does the answer make me less, or more, of a man?’ The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more [2].” Kyle admitted, however, that “we were slaughtering the enemy … our kill total becoming astronomical…;” he also said: “It got to the point where I had so many kills that I stepped back to let the other guys have a few … Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die [2].”
It is important to remember that Kyle murdered dozens of people in an illegal war, and he invariably pulled the trigger within seconds of an Iraqi coming into view of his rifle scope, hardly amounting to a fair and impartial trial. Furthermore, possible survivors and relatives have not been tracked down by the media and others, although a challenging task it would have been important in order to balance his account of events.
Despite the fact that Kyle had plenty of opportunity and incentive to embellish, omit, and distort the facts related to his killings, one gets the impression that sensory gratification frequently motivated him to kill, rather than alleged protection of fellow soldiers. In one of these incidents, Kyle, lying on a roof top, claimed to have observed a group of 16 armed men trying to pass a body of water, they had used beach balls to keep themselves afloat. He then allegedly shot the beach balls one by one and watched in enjoyment as the men kept fighting for their lives, several of them drowned. In his book, he uttered that “hell—it was a lot of fun [2].”
After many completed operations, he would smoke Cuban cigars with other military men.
Glorifying in Murder
The literature on non-legalized killers has shown that serial killers find it hard to stop killing. Apparently, the power associated with taking lives can result in a pathological addiction. Chris Kyle was no exception by his own admission. He has reportedly claimed that, upon his return from service, he teamed up with a friend and shot and murdered over 30 alleged looters after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina [25].
He also told Michael Mooney, a writer for D Magazine, that in 2009, he had murdered two alleged would-be carjackers, but Kyle was allegedly “released by police without questioning due to the intercession of the Department of Defense [26].” Mooney would later be unable to verify the story indicating it was a concoction, yet he would say this about Kyle: He was incredible and “he was a hero. He was the most celebrated war hero of our time,” and “people will tell stories about Chris Kyle for generations to come. Tales of his feats in battle, and of his antics and noble deeds, will probably swell [27].”
Many mainstream media outlets have promulgated the indefensible notion that Kyle was a noble man and a hero. For example, a CNN article about Kyle glorifies his actions and remarks that “he touched and inspired so many people [27].”
Having been branded an American hero, Hollywood, a couple of years after the publication of the autobiography, decided to release a film adaptation, titled after the book, American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood.
In a response to the movie‘s one-sided nature, Professor Chris Hedges stated that “American Sniper, like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire [28].”
Chris Kyle profited immensely from the movie and book, and he was the subject of numerous interviews on major news stations and on radio shows. He clearly relished getting national attention and being in the presence of actors and directors, including Clint Eastwood.
Fame and enjoyment would, nevertheless, soon come to an end. In a twist of irony, he was himself killed on a shooting range by an American who was reportedly suffering from war-induced post-traumatic-stress syndrome. His funeral procession stretched from Midlothian, Texas, to Austin. Thousands stood jammed together praising and praying for him as his coffin was escorted by dozens of buses, bikers, policemen, and others. People flocked to his funeral and thousands watched the memorial at the Cowboys Stadium. The minister said during the memorial:
“Chris would tell us if he was with us in person today, that we must love others and continue to do good [29].”
Clearly a large group had adopted a distorted view of Chris Kyle and his killings. Undoubtedly, many were persuaded by propaganda, which can be defined as misleading information presented as objective to influence and further an agenda, e.g. gain support for the Iraq War, construct an illusion about snipers being humanitarians, et cetera. However, while many may have adopted an uncritical fascination due to the highly subjective Clint Eastwood movie as well as propaganda from other sources, it is, nevertheless, evident that many had read his book and were apparently not appalled as indicated by a quick check on Amazon.com, which shows that Kyle‘s book has amassed over 15,000 reviews of which 89% are four- or five-star reviews. Across all formats, his book has sold millions of copies and made Kyle one of the most successful serial killers of all time in terms of profiting from his killings. It is perhaps revealing that a perusal of the negative reviews on Amazon.com indicates that many fault the book for poor writing rather than the immorality of murdering over 100 people in an illegal war.
One interpretation, other than successfully implemented war propaganda as a source of the manifest attraction to Chris Kyle, is that a large group became affected with a subset of a recently documented disorder, called hybristophilia. The attraction to serial killers and other violent predators is a well-documented phenomenon. Ted Bundy, one of the most savage and notorious women killers of the 1970s, married Carole Ann Boone and fathered a child while being behind bars. Richard Ramirez, a serial killer who indulged in pedophilia, rape, sadism, satanic rituals, and murder, received hundreds of fan-letters while on trial, and on death row he became married to Doreen Lioy.
Hybristophilia, which has not been researched well nor thoroughly defined via empirical studies, is a psychiatric disorder that addresses this obsession with people who have committed atrocities, such as rape, murder, and cannibalism. The affected will be infatuated and/or obsessed with the killer [30]. It has been proposed, thus far, that at least two subgroups exist, namely passive and aggressive hybristophiles, while those who suffer from the aggressive form will be propelled to assist with murders, the passive ones will instead be primarily physically and mentally attracted to those who commit vile acts [31].
At this point, it has been assumed that hybristophilia, for the most part, affects women; however, the Chris Kyle case indicates otherwise. Some researchers have theorized that perpetrators of extremely brutal crimes may convey an ultra-masculine image, and this image is ultimately what drives the hybristophiliac on an unconscious level. However, these theories remain untested empirically, and the causes remain unknown [32].
The pathological admiration and attraction to Chris Kyle are best exemplified by Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, who declared February 2 to be Chris Kyle Day in Texas, and by the pictures of thousands of people who mourned at his funeral procession, perhaps indicating a collective mental state of hybristophilia.
It has been argued that the central component of the disorder is the obsession or unhealthy attraction, while a secondary symptom may be rationalization of antisocial acts, which is the apparent tendency of the hybristophiliac to excuse the acts of the criminal whom they are infatuated with. Such rationalizations are evident in statements from journalists and people at his funeral procession who frequently referred to Kyle‘s acts as noble deeds or somehow else glorified them, entirely ignoring the moral and legal dilemmas.
An online search on YouTube and Google for “Chris Kyle Tribute” reveals dozens of tribute videos, songs, and other material dedicated to Kyle; very similar in content to what can easily be found glorifying non-legalized killers, especially school shooters and serial killers. For example, a Google search for “Ted Bundy Tribute” shows numerous videos dedicated to him, painting an image consistent with hybristophilia; one viewer commented, “R.I.P Teddy Bundy, you will be missed on this planet buddy,” while another stated, “One of the all-time greatest persons ever;” and one even proclaimed that “I understand the love for Ted…however I love Jeff Dahmer. If you loved Ted more power to you. We have the right to love whomsoever we want!! [33].” In view of the immense bloodthirst of Ted Bundy, these comments appear delusional but entirely consistent with hybristophilia. If we pay heed to Chris Kyle‘s tribute videos, their content and related comments are highly suggestive of hybristophilia. Dr. Chris Cowley, a forensic psychologist, has documented that “in the most pronounced form, the illness has an attention-seeking pathology a little like Munchausen‘s syndrome,” and the affected may attempt to “become semi-famous by association [34].” A surprisingly high number of the comments to his tribute videos revolve around an alleged association with Kyle. Here is just a very short segment of the comments to one of his tribute videos, notice the attention seeking quality to some of them:
“A HERO and a patriot. God. Country. Family. Honored to know him, and call him a friend. Humble, courageous, kind. Immortal warrior. Legend. Amazing man. Period,” “He sits next to the gates of heaven where he stands guard forever. God bless Chris and his family,” “LOL 57 people didn’t like this.. they are from Iraq,” “I read his book just a couple months ago and that was the first ive heard of him. I honor this man, in my mind he was a true hero to this country. Its not about his kills that’s just a number …. This man really is my hero, i look up to him and i wish i knew of him before his death so i can shake his hand and say thank you,” “Whoever hit dislike you don’t deserve to be an American!,” “The guys he killed were dirtbags,” “I cry so much, what a beautiful man-soul. Rip,” and “I spent time with this guy he was a true hero [35].”
These comments are consistent with the characteristics of hybristophilia outlined earlier in this article. It needs, also, to be stated that comments questioning the morality and legality of his killings were generally countered with hostile replies, indicating that information conflicting their current belief about Kyle produced cognitive dissonance as a psychological coping mechanism.
The major characteristics of hybristophilia are met by the observed behavior of many of Kyle‘s adherents, although, we cannot know with certainty without an extensive empirical analysis. At this point, it appears to be a valid hypothesis.
American Liar
Chris Kyle‘s legacy encompasses numerous immoral acts including outright deception. It has been shown that he deceived his readers about the numbers of awards he had received for military deeds. Mooney was unable to verify the carjacker story, and other researchers have been unable to document the factual basis for his claim regarding the sniper killings after Hurricane Katrina. Considering Kyle‘s moral track record it is reasonable to assume that both stories were lies. However, without a thorough investigation by objective experts, his assertions cannot be dismissed completely.
Furthermore, on radio and television, he alleged that he had punched out former governor Jesse Ventura at a bar in 2006. Ventura promptly sued Kyle for defamation. Despite Kyle dying during the trial, Ventura continued the law suit, and a jury awarded him over $1.8 million. In 2006, the judgment was overturned. While preparing for a new trial, he reached an agreement with the opposing side. Due to the agreement, he was unable to comment on how much money he had received but remarked that “the settlement is confidential, but I can smile [36].” Ventura has denounced Chris Kyle an “American Liar [37].”
Reflections upon the Psychology of Chris Kyle
If we loosely utilize the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, which was created by Robert D. Hare as a diagnostic tool, as a guide to assess the psychological dynamics of Chris Kyle, it remains clear that he was most likely a psychopath, possibly scoring a high total rating (maximum = 40) [38].
As we shall see, the major constituents of psychopathy correlate very well with his statements and documented behavior.
Unlike most cases with non-legalized serial killers who often are ashamed of their deeds, Kyle glorified in them and often vividly described them to interested bystanders and openly admitted his love for murder and violence. Indeed, the Chris Kyle case represents a near unique glimpse into the mind of a serial killer since many captured killers ostensibly embellish, withhold, manipulate, and distort their case for obvious reasons, e.g. getting out of prison, legal issues, embarrassment, manipulating public perception, et cetera. Few killers have openly admitted their love for killing and lack of remorse. One such exception though is the spree killer Charles Starkweather, who was questioned if he would change anything if he had the ability. He answered: “No, not really” and added, “I know I‘m a monster [39].” During the same interview, he admitted, “If I could go back into time, I would kill as many more people as I could because I hate people. I know they are gonna kill me in the electric chair. I don‘t really care because I‘m gonna be famous for all time [39].”
Among others, psychopaths are characterized by shallow emotions, diminished or non-existent conscience, and they lack empathy or are able to switch it off at will. Kyle repeatedly stated in interviews that he had no remorse and only regretted he had not murdered more people, clearly evidencing limited capacity for empathy and remorse, e.g. he rhetorically asked himself:
“Did it bother you killing so many people in Iraq? I tell them, ‘No.’ And I mean it [2].”
Regarding the depth of his emotions and empathy, the following quote from Kyle is also relevant:
“The first time you shoot someone, you get a little nervous. You think, can I really shoot this guy? Is it really okay? But after you kill your enemy, you see it‘s okay. You say, Great. You do it again. And again. …. I loved what I did. I still do. If circumstances were different I‘d be back in a heartbeat. I‘m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun [2].”
The statement is clear evidence of limited capacity for sympathy and empathy, emotional poverty.
Based upon the above statement and others mentioned in the article, he conceived of the world as consisting of good and bad people, but he only killed bad ones. This simplification by Kyle comes as no surprise as a key trait in psychopathy is the ability to rationalize and justify actions regardless of how atrocious they may have been; they fail to take responsibility. In his book, he even proclaimed that “I have a strong sense of justice [2],” a statement which again underlines that he rationalized his murders by simply categorizing his victims as evil, and in his own mind, he most likely regarded himself as a savior and hero.
Rationalizations and moral shortcuts are common to most prolific murderers, including Herbert Mullin, who claimed that he killed people in order to prevent a massive earthquake from happening in California, and therefore, he was not really evil [40].
His reaction to shooting and killing a human being is reflective of a state of low anxiety, which also is commonly found among psychopaths who often exhibit a fearless mental state in situations where it would be expected that the individual would be gripped with fear and anxiety [41].
Chris Kyle also appears to have indulged in compulsive narcissistic deception. Judging by his statements, he apparently had a persistent need to elevate his self-worth: he lied about the number of military rewards he had received, probably about his murderous achievements, and about his fight with Jesse Ventura, all in all indicating grandiosity and a compulsive need for self-entitlement, suggesting a core of narcissism in his personality.
Pathological narcissism is a fundamental component of psychopathy; the condition is, among others, characterized by self-centeredness, status-seeking, distrust, arrogance, and a sense of entitlement.
It has long been observed that narcissists want to be the center of attention, and they often have a deep desire to get known, even nationwide. The publication of his murderous deeds may very well have been motivated by a narcissistic desire to attain nationwide appreciation and recognition for his perceived heroism.
While the majority of Kyle‘s kills were relatively fast, some of his acts suggest that he took pleasure in sadistic behavior. Sadists, of course, take great pleasure in causing and observing physical and/or psychological pain and anguish in others. Specifically, the previously mentioned beach ball incident, where he admittedly experienced great exhilaration from causing the drowning of multiple men, indicates that his psyche translated their pain into a greatly positive experience, perhaps even sexually.
Regarding his own psyche, Kyle had surprisingly little to say in his book, except that he briefly described that his psyche had built up defenses, and that is why he would “laugh at gruesome things like heads being blown apart, and worse [2].”
Importantly, he admitted in the book that killing and murder were already on his mind as he was growing up as he had “wondered, how would I feel about killing someone? Now I know. It‘s no big deal [2].” Numerous cases attest to the notion that the roots of repetitive killers can be traced to their upbringing as many serial killers have admitted to torturing animals in their childhood or have fantasized about killing people.
Although operating within the framework of US government approved violence, Chris Kyle appears similar in many respects to non-legalized serial killers.
Final Words
Unlike imprisoned killers, Kyle had no qualms about asserting his love for killing Iraqis – presumably due to a combination of factors that includes government approval, backing by military institutions, and encomiums celebrating his work as wonders of the first order. The multilayered saga of Chris Kyle represents a dangerous example of how institutions can shape and mold the underlying morality of a large group, and effectively make them celebrate acts and personalities that under normal conditions would cause an outrage. Undoubtedly, the military industrial complex had a vested interest in promoting the demonstrably false narrative surrounding Chris Kyle, to further their agenda.
References
- “Ex-Navy sniper, another military vet killed at Texas gun range” https://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/03/justice/texas-sniper-killed/index.html
- American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (William Morrow and Company 2012). Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice.
- “The REAL American Sniper: ‘There are no kills that I regret. None at all’” https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/real-american-sniper-there-no-5036121
- “Canadian law professors declare US-led war illegal” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/lawy-m22.html
- “Iraq – ICJ Deplores Moves To-ward a War of Aggression on Iraq” https://web.archive.org/web/20051015040809/http://www.icj.org:80/news.php3?id_article=2770&lang=en
- “Law Professors For the Rule of Law” https://web.archive.org/web/20040214101825/http:/www.the-rule-of-law.com:80/index.html
- “Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq
- “War, Aggression, and State Crime: A Criminological Analysis of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.” Ronald C. Kramer. Western Michigan University. Raymond J. Michalowski. Northern Arizona University. Revised for the British Journal of Criminology, October 2004.
- “Iraq inquiry: Former UN inspector Blix says war illegal” http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-10770239
- “Bush and Saddam Should Both Stand Trial, Says Nuremberg Prosecutor” https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/167/35806.html
- “Nuremberg set a valid precedent for trials of war-crime suspects in Iraq‘s destruction‖ https:// http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ opinion/2009/05/26/commentary/ nuremberg-set-a-valid-precedent-for-trials-of-war-crime-suspects-in-iraqs-destruction/
- “Could Bush Be Prosecuted for War Crimes?” https://www.alternet.org/story/38604/could_bush_be_prosecuted_for_war_crimes
- “Iraq war was illegal, Dutch panel rules” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/12/iraq-war-illegal-dutch-tribunal
- “Chilcot report: key points from the Iraq inquiry” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/iraq-inquiry-key-points-from-the-chilcot-report
Also see: The Iraq Inquiry: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/
Also see: “Chilcot report: Findings at a glance” http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36721645 - “The prosecution of George W. Bush for murder” Vincent Bugliosi (New York: Vanguard Press, 2008.)
- “General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned – Seven Countries In Five Years” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw
- “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey.” Burnham, Gilbert et al. The Lancet, Volume 368, Issue 9545, 1421 – 1428.
Also see: “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey.” Roberts, Les et al. The Lancet, Volume 364, Issue 9448, 1857– 1864. - Washington, D.C. Physicians for Social Responsibility: Body count: casualty figures after 10 years of the “War on Terror”: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan
- “The Iraq deaths study was valid and correct” https://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/the-iraq-deaths-study-was-valid-and-correct/2006/10/20/1160851135985.html?page=fullpage
- “Death Counter Explanation Page” http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/deathcount/explanation
- “January 2008 – Update on Iraqi Casualty Data” https://web.archive.org/web/20110220142121/http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=120
- “How the Pentagon is hiding the dead. The secret campaign to under-count the ‘war on terror’ death toll in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America” https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-pentagon-is-hiding-the-dead-862a7b45ce57
- “An Iraqi Holocaust: 2.7 Million Iraqi Dead From Violence Or War-imposed Deprivation” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41378.htm
- “Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal” legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/draft_articles/7_1_1950.pdf
- “In the Crosshairs: Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper, tried to help a troubled veteran. The result was tragic” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/03/in-the-crosshairs
- “Chris Kyle and ‘American Sniper’” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kyle-file/
- “’Legend’ of American sniper Chris Kyle looms over murder trial” https://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/09/us/chris-kyle-american-sniper/index.html.
Also see: “The Legend of Chris Kyle: The deadliest sniper in U.S. history performed near miracles on the battle-field. Then he had to come home” https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2013/april/the-legend-of-chris-kyle-01/?single=1 - “Killing Ragheads for Jesus” https://www.truthdig.com/articles/killing-ragheads-for-jesus/
- “Chris Kyle’s Memorial at Cowboys Stadium (FULL)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmWZ7Fafhso
- “Passion Victim: A brief look at hybristophilia” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201310/passion-victim
- “Hybristophilia: When a Woman Is Sexually Attracted to Horrifying, Psychopathic Criminals” https://www.vagabomb.com/Hybristophilia/
- “3 Experts Explain Why Some People Are Attracted to Serial Killers” https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a17804534/sexual-attraction-to-serial-killers
- “Tribute to Ted Bundy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhZG6trFdsE
- Cowley, Chris. “Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady” (2011 Metro Publishing), p. 116 & 118.
- “A Tribute to Chris Kyle ‘Devil of Ramadi’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLvSuAznnks
- “Ventura settles defamation suit but won’t say for how much” http://www.startribune.com/jesse-ventura-to-discuss-settlement-of-defamation-law-suit-at-monday-afternoon-news-conference/461863413/
- “Jesse Ventura Slams ‘American Liar’ Chris Kyle After Settling Lawsuit”
http://www.insider.foxnews.com/2017/12/05/jesse-ventura-slams-american-liar-chris-kyle-after-settling-lawsuit - “Hare Psychopathy Checklist” http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare -Psychopathy-Checklist.html
- Korsgaard, Søren. “America‘s Jack the Ripper: The Crimes and Psychology of the Zodiac Killer” (2017), p. 273.
- “He Thought His Murders Could Stop Earthquakes: The Crimes of Herbert Mullin” https://didyouknowfacts.com/thought-murders-stop-earthquakes-crimes-herbert-mullin/
- “Inside the mind of a PSYCHOPATH: Researchers find they do feel fear – but don’t recognise danger” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ article-3767545/Inside-mind-PSYCHOPATH-Researchers-feel-fear -don-t-recognise-danger.html
- Alv A. Dahl, Aud Dalsegg, ”Chamør og Tyran” (Munksgaard 2002).
Robert McNamara’s Infamous “Project 100,000” and the Vietnam War
A Premeditated Crime against Humanity
By Larry Romanoff | Global Research | October 30, 2019
In the very long list of shocking and abominable atrocities committed by the US, there is one that stands out as especially obscene for the appalling and hypocritical inhumanity of US Government leaders. This was “Project 100,000”, a US military program enacted by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to recruit 100,000 new soldiers per year during a time of great public opposition to the Vietnam war, and which was promoted as part of President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’. In McNamara’s own words, it was “a program to salvage the poverty-scarred youth of our society”, to give them two years of military service, then insert them into “a lifetime of productive activity in American civilian society”.
He further stated,
“Poverty in America pockmarks its victims inwardly. If unchecked and unreversed, that inner ghetto of the poverty-scarred personality of these men can fester into explosive frustrations of bitterness and violence. Chronic failures in school throughout their childhood, they are destined to a downward spiral of defeat and decay … If nothing were done to give them a strong sense of their own worth and potential, they, their wives and their children would almost inevitably be the unproductive recipients of some form of the dole ten years from now. Hundreds of thousands of men can be salvaged from the blight of poverty, and the Defense Department – with no detriment whatever to its primary role – is particularly well equipped to salvage them.” (1) (2)
That sounds good, except that this program was initiated during a time when the US was realising extremely high casualties in Vietnam, had already admitted the war was “unwinnable”, with most suitable recruits either taking student deferments or evading the draft by fleeing to Canada. McNamara’s solution was to run a sieve through the ghettos of America, an ingenious and diabolical solution to “rid the nation” of its surplus black and poor, in a program he may have hatched with the advice of Margaret Sanger, she of Planned Parenthood. In executing this program, McNamara lowered the standards to the point where these recruits were in the bottom quartile of intelligence and ability, a great many of them with an IQ of 60 or 65, and none above 80.
These new “soldiers” were functionally illiterate, able to read only at a Grade 3 level or lower. They were so severely (educationally) deficient that the military had to create little comic books to replace the training manuals, and many had to be taught even how to tie the laces on their boots. As other authors have noted, these men often failed their much-simplified basic training several times, with most being repeatedly “recycled” until they finally reached a deplorable minimum standard of readiness. None had the mental ability to appreciate what was happening to them.
The program ran for five years and recruited in total about 500,000 mentally retarded young men and gave them a one-way ticket to Vietnam, these helpless young men dying at many times the rate of regular soldiers. Many researchers have claimed that an overwhelming majority of these men, especially blacks, received combat assignments, and “comprised an overwhelming majority of … battle deaths”, and were also generally posted to “what were considered dangerous military occupations”. These men were provided with special ‘dog tags’ that began with “US67…” so they could be quickly identified by other soldiers. By all accounts, the regular troops did not want to be associated with these men, certainly not in a battle situation, believing their lack of intelligence and training simply jeopardised the lives of all around them. Many have reported that when battlefield decisions were being made, given that these men were unable to learn anything much more complicated than pulling a trigger, they were just sent to their deaths, “ending up on the Vietnam Memorial Wall at an alarming rate much higher than the average”. One young Vietnam veteran reported that a common order issued to these young men ‘salvaged from the blight of poverty’ was to “Go over there and see if there’s a sniper in that tree”.
US casualty figures mushroomed after the introduction of this program, the victims of which were simply cannon-fodder and, for this and other reasons, I remain convinced there is a high probability American deaths in Vietnam were grossly under-reported and that a great many of these nearly 500,000 simply never returned and whose records no longer exist. It is not only possible, but probable, that American deaths in Vietnam were in fact ten times the stated 50,000. Several organisations in the US have attempted to produce accurate Vietnam casualty statistics, but with little apparent success.
As one such organisation states,
“The Vietnam War presents multiple challenges to historians due to official discrepancies with draft numbers, contention over official number of soldiers deployed, and a general lack of transparency from the US government during the war leading to possible misinformation in historical records.”
In other words, the official sources of basic statistics as to the actual number of men recruited, the number sent to Vietnam and the number who died there, are often missing, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes wildly inaccurate, and the US military exercises only obstruction to those interested in remedying the situation. Moreover, without an Internet or mobile phones, and no social networking capability, the parents of these men would have no way of knowing the huge number of casualties from within their group.
On May 30, 2002, Salon Magazine published an article by Myra MacPherson on the HBO movie “Path to War” in which she discusses Hollywood’s attempt to “humanise” McNamara “while entirely overlooking … one of his most heinous acts” and ignoring his “arrogance and duplicity”. She notes that the HBO movie omits “some of the most shameful brainstorms of the Vietnam War’s masterminds – including a little-known recruitment program that turned the mentally and physically deficient into cannon fodder.”
She details how military recruiters “swept through urban ghettos and Southern rural back roads”, offering hundreds of thousands of the retarded poor – with IQs as low as the 60s – “a one-way ticket to Vietnam”, and that “McNamara’s Moron Corps, as they were pathetically nicknamed by other soldiers, entered combat in disproportionate numbers”, noting that they received combat assignments at 250% of the rate of general servicemen. MacPherson tells us that few today are aware of what she calls “this particularly shameful chapter” of American history, and that her stories of this episode were “generally met with disbelief”. This entire project had been so well buried by the government that almost no one was aware of its existence and few could believe it would be possible for the American government to perpetrate such an obvious genocidal travesty against its own population, especially after the military had already admitted the war “could not be won”.
In a 2006 article in the New York Times (3), this Project was dismissed as “a failed experiment” that was “of little benefit to the men it was created to help”, but my research leads me to conclude that, contrary to being a failed experiment, this program was a “success”, a truly ingenious and criminal method of applying eugenics to eliminate poverty (especially black poverty) and idiocy in America by using the mentally-deficient as cannon fodder in a trumped-up war, far from the first time a nation’s surplus poor discovered themselves in similar conditions. In recognition of his success, McNamara was rewarded by being given the post of President of the World Bank.
Notes
(1) McNamara’s Folly: Lowering the Standards to Fill the Ranks
(3) Don’t Dumb Down the Army – The New York Times, February 17, 2006
Is it climate socialism – or eco-fascism?
Green New Deal climate alarm socialism is really intolerant, totalitarian eco-fascism
By Paul Driessen | Watts Up With That? | October 28, 2019
Green New Dealers have convinced themselves that our planet faces an imminent, existential, manmade climate cataclysm – that can be prevented solely and simply by government edicts replacing fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery energy. They achieve this state of absolute certainty largely by propagating constant scare stories, while ignoring and suppressing contradictory evidence and viewpoints.
They deliberately and deceptively talk about “carbon pollution.” Carbon is soot – what our cars, factories and power plants now emit in very small quantities. The honest, accurate term is carbon dioxide: the colorless, odorless, invisible gas that we exhale and plants need to grow, by using the tiny but growing 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere that is CO2 to grow faster, better and with greater resistance to droughts.
They are climate change deniers, who say Earth’s climate is stable and can be kept stable by controlling minor factors (human carbon dioxide and methane emissions) and ignoring water vapor (the dominant greenhouse gas) and fluctuations in solar energy, cosmic rays, clouds, oceanic circulation, volcanoes, planetary orbits and other powerful natural forces that have brought climate changes throughout history.
They insist that even another half-degree increase in planetary temperatures since Earth emerged from the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) would be cataclysmic. That’s absurd. They also rely on computer models that project rapidly soaring temperatures – but already claim average global temperatures should be 0.9 degrees F higher than they actually are, according to satellite and weather balloon measurements.
Climate Crisis True Believers say tornadoes and hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense. In reality, from 1950-1984, the US averaged 55 violent (F4 to F5) tornadoes every year; but over the next 33 years (1985-2018) only 35 per year. And in 2018, for the first time in recorded history, not one F4-F5 tornado touched down anywhere in the United States. (Is this due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels?)
Similarly, from 1920 through 2005, fifty-two Category 3 to 5 hurricanes made US landfall (1.6/year on average). And then, from October 2005 until August 2017 – a record twelve years – not one Category 3 to 5 ’cane struck the US mainland. Harvey and Irma ended that hurricane drought in 2017, but were hardly unprecedented in their intensity or rainfall. (Was that drought due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels?)
The Washington Post reported that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up … and in some places seals are finding the water too hot.” That was in 1922, and explorers wrote about Arctic ice cycles long before that. “We were astonished by the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait,” Sir Francis McClintock wrote in 1860, whereas at this time in 1854 it was “still frozen up.” As to continental USA weather, a commentator said “Snows are less frequent and less deep, and the rivers scarcely ever [freeze over] now.” That was Thomas Jefferson, in 1799. The 1970s manmade global cooling scare was replaced by today’s warming crisis.
After rising some 400 feet since the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago, oceans are rising at 7 to 10 inches per century. That’s a minimal threat to coastal communities, some of which are more seriously threatened by land subsidence – including Chesapeake Bay lands (Maryland), Hampton Roads (Virginia), Houston and Miami. There has been no increase in the rate of sea level rise in more than a century.
Seawaters cannot become “more acidic.” They are slightly alkaline. They may be getting slightly less alkaline, depending on where and when pH levels are measured. But they are not becoming acidic.
Coral bleaching can result from pollution but is mostly natural, caused by coral animals ejecting their symbiotic zooxanthellae single-celled dinoflagellates, when seawaters become warmer or colder. Corals replace them with new species better adapted to the new temperatures – and then recover their former color and glory, as they have in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii’s reefs and elsewhere. Corals also grow as seas rise, just as they have since the last Pleistocene Ice Age, creating today’s splendid reefs.
Polar bears are at their highest population levels in memory: as many as 31,000 of them. They’ve survived multiple ice ages, interglacial periods and warming episodes. They are hardly endangered.
We face no climate crisis, no unprecedented warming, climate or extreme weather threat – manmade or natural. Equally important, proposals to replace fossil fuels with biofuel, wind, solar and battery power would be far more ecologically destructive than their climate crisis – and would severely harm food supplies, nutrition, jobs, living standards, health and life spans, in rich and poor countries alike.
For the United States alone, replacing 100% of US gasoline and petrochemical feed stocks with ethanol would require some 700 million acres of biotech corn. That’s four times the land area of Texas turned into biofuel corn plantations – or soy/canola farms for biodiesel – leaving little land for food and wildlife.
Let’s suppose we’re going to use wind power to replace: the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours of electricity that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline-powered vehicles. We’ll also use wind turbines to generate enough extra electricity, every windy day, to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days.
We’ll also account for electricity loss along lengthy transmission lines, and every time we charge and discharge batteries. As we erect turbines in steadily lower quality wind locations, instead of generating full nameplate power maybe 33% of the year, on average, they will do so only 16% of the year.
Instead of the 58,000 we have now, the United States would need some 14 million 400-foot-tall turbines, each one capable of generating 1.8 megawatts at full capacity, when the wind is blowing at the proper speed. Each turbine would need about 120 acres of open space and access roads, as at BP’s 50,000-acre Fowler Ridge wind energy factory in Indiana. That would total 1.7 billion acres – ten times the area of Texas … or most of the Lower 48 United States! Plus thousands of miles of new transmission lines!
Their bird-butchering blades would wipe out raptors, other birds and bats across much of America. Would Extinction Rebellion go apoplectic? or not give a spotted owl hoot, since wind turbines are “eco-friendly”?
Manufacturing those wind turbines would require something on the order of 15 billion tons of steel, copper, rare earth metals, concrete, petroleum-based composites, gravel and other raw materials. Extracting them would require a hundredfold increase in global mining: removing hundreds of billions of tons of earth and rock overburden, and crushing and processing tens of billions of tons of ore.
Imagine the cumulative land use, eminent domain, property rights, environmental and wildlife impacts.
Using batteries to replace coal and gas-fired backup power plants for intermittent, weather-dependent wind facilities would require some one billion 100-kilowatt-hour, 1,000-pound lithium and cobalt-based Tesla battery packs – and still more mining and raw materials. And that doesn’t include extra battery storage for the cars, trucks and buses that Green New Dealers want to replace with electric vehicles.
Climate Crisis True Believers proudly proclaim themselves environmental socialists, while obstinately ignoring and suppressing these climate and energy realities. They certainly promote a political-economic system under which central government controls the means of production, while limiting private property rights or replacing them with communal ownership. That’s classic socialism.
But what they really want is eco-fascism: an even more extreme and intolerant system under which an authoritarian national or international government does not own businesses and industries outright, but dictates what they can make, do, sell and say – while redistributing wealth and property, employing laws, intimidation, and Antifa-style violence to control people’s thinking, speech and access to information.
Along with Google, Face Book, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, universities and the “mainstream” media – they try to censor, marginalize, ostracize, disinvite, shadow-ban, electronic book burn, and algorithm-eradicate differing, alternative, contrarian evidence, analyses and viewpoints on energy and climate.
They got Dr. Peter Ridd fired for exposing fabrications about the Great Barrier Reef’s demise – and Dr. Susan Crockford cashiered for daring to challenge bogus claims about polar bears. Robert Kennedy Jr., Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others even want climate and energy dissenters prosecuted and jailed.
We must keep speaking truth to power – to ensure that our future is not compromised by climate lies.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many books, reports and articles on energy, climate and environmental issues.
FIGURE 1. This graph compares the average temperature predictions of 102 climate models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) versus actual temperature measurements by satellites and weather balloons, and reanalyses of those measurements. Based on John Christy and Roy Spencer; updated September 2019.
![clip_image002[4]](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/clip_image0024.png?resize=616%2C348&ssl=1 "clip_image002[4]")
FIGURE 2. America’s unexpected 12-year reprieve from Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall, by far the longest such “hurricane drought” in US history. Based on official government hurricane records.
![clip_image004[4]](https://i1.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/clip_image0044.png?resize=616%2C348&ssl=1 "clip_image004[4]")
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From the Archives
US Also Destroyed Iraqi Water Supply During First Gulf War
International Humanitarian Law prohibits the attack, destruction, or rendering useless of objects indispensable to civilian survival.
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | June 10, 2026
… During the first Gulf War, the United States “deliberately bombed Iraq’s water system,” Thomas J. Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, wrote in September, 2001. The Bush administration, “with malice aforethought,” “destroyed, removed, or rendered useless” Iraq’s ‘drinking water installations and supplies’… They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA’s own words, ‘fully degrade’ Iraq’s water sources.”
Nagy found declassified documents at the website of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses that detailed the effort to degrade Iraq’s water supply and commit a serious violation of humanitarian law. The documents included “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerability,” “Disease Information,” “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq,” “Medical Problems in Iraq,” “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” “Health Conditions in Iraq,” and “Iraq: Assessment of Current Health Threats and Capabilities.”
Then Representative Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia (subsequently removed from Congress), referred to the Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities document, and said, “Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations.” … Read full article
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- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
- Real-World Observations Do Not Support The Position That Climate Change Is Human-Caused
- Germany’s AfD Party Calls Debunked Climate Scenarios “Greatest Fraud In Human History”
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