A full-page advertisement in today’s Harvard Crimson asks, “Do some Harvard Professors only care about certain lives?” (View ad here and at the end of this post.)
The ad refers to a statement signed by 71 Harvard professors in the health, medical, and life sciences fields that opposed the international academic boycott of Israel.
Their statement was subsequently featured in a full-page Boston Globeadvertisement in May paid for by the New England Chapter of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
The AJC ad featured the headline “Could an academic boycott of Israel put a child’s life at risk?” accompanied by a photo of a small child in an oxygen mask. The AJC ad and professors’ statement opposed the boycott on the ground that it could interfere with potentially life-saving collaborative research and then indirectly lead to loss of life.
Today’s Crimson ad, placed by the nonprofit organization If Americans Knew, says that since the professors cared about potential loss of life, they expected that the professors would also be willing to sign a statement against the direct, ongoing loss of life caused by Israel.
Accordingly, If Americans Knew sent each professor who had signed the AJC statement a letter documenting the ongoing harm being done to Palestinian children by Israeli policies and asked them to sign a statement urging Israel “to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children.”
The letter to the professors included information with clickable links documenting Israeli actions harming children. The information is also included in today’s Crimson ad:
Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering severe psychological trauma, malnutrition, stunting, and depression due to Israel’s 10-year blockade and bombing attacks (UNICEF)
Palestinian children are being denied desperately needed medical care, with Israel at times preventing children in Gaza suffering excruciating and sometimes fatal health problems from traveling to outside hospitals (Physicians for Human Rights – Israel)
The Crimson ad names all 71 Harvard professors who signed the anti-boycott statement, and reports that none would sign the statement asking Israel to support the safety of Palestinian children.
The ad concludes:
In the 80s, many Harvard faculty members supported campus boycott and divestment initiatives aiming to pressure companies to cut ties with apartheid South Africa, so it’s disappointing that some can’t see the urgency of the boycott movement today.
We hope these professors will take the time to look into Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children and reconsider where they stand.
The ad refers readers to iakn.us/globe-ad to see citations for the statements regarding Israeli actions.
Text of the statement concerning Palestinian children that the professors declined to sign:
We, the undersigned, urge Israel to engage in active measures to support the safety of Palestinian children, including ending the practice of imprisoning and torturing Palestinian minors, allowing medical supplies and life necessities into Palestinian areas, permitting Palestinian children to leave those territories to seek necessary medical treatment, desisting from military invasions in which large numbers of children are killed and injured, and adhering to international conventions regarding the rights of children, noncombatants and populations under occupation.
We all know that the last of the JFK assassination records are due to be declassified in October. And we even know what the government says it’s hiding from us. But do you know the story that the CIA is trying to plant in the public consciousness about what is going to be “revealed” in these documents?
The original video was published in September 2013 on this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co… .
This is a shortened version of that video. It shows children being instructed by terrorists to act like they have been hit with Sarin gas, they convulse, they’re eyes blink and they froth at the mouth with fake foam applied to their faces by terrorists. A of children applaud. A man in a Mickey mouse costume tells them it’s all fun.
When politicians are feeling the heat, they start a war and their popularity goes up even if the war is unnecessary or completely ridiculous. Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who promised that he would not take the nation into another Middle Eastern war, did so when he launched a fifty-nine cruise missile barrage against a Syrian Air Base even before he knew for sure what had happened on the ground. It was totally stupid but proved to be popular, even among talking heads and Congressmen, some of whom described his action as “presidential” in the best sense of the word.
It’s the same in Israel. For those who have not been following developments there, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure due to an ongoing investigation for corruption. One of the truly great things about Israel is that while they have a lot of corrupt politicians, just like everywhere else, they actually investigate, indict, prosecute, convict and send them to jail. The betting is that Netanyahu will soon be in prison, so he has been responding in the time-honored fashion by threatening his neighbors and hinting at the possibility of increased military action and even war. If there is a war going on, he believes, probably correctly, that no one will want to remove him.
In an amicable recent meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu stressed that there are some red lines that Israel will not allow to be crossed, while also suggesting that some of them have already been violated, most notably through the alleged construction of an Iranian military base inside Syria. Netanyahu provided Putin with “top secret intelligence” to make his point and told the Russian premier that “Iran is making an accelerated effort to entrench itself militarily in Syria. This poses a danger to Israel, the Middle East and in my opinion the world itself.”
Netanyahu characteristically depicted himself as restrained in his responses, telling Putin that Israel had taken only limited action in Syria against Hezbollah supply lines, but that was a lie as Israel has also hit Syrian army positions. Netanyahu described an Iran that is largely a fantasy creation of his own Foreign Ministry, “We don’t for a second forget that Iran continues to threaten Israel’s destruction on a daily basis. It arms terrorist organizations and initiates terror itself. It is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with the intention to equip them with nuclear warheads.” He went on to claim that his strategic objective was to prevent the development of an Iranian controlled land bridge, described as “territorial continuity,” that would extend through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Sea.
The reality is, however, somewhat different, that Israel has long preferred chaos in Syria since it eliminates any threat from a unified and powerful government in Damascus. But just as nature abhors a vacuum that policy had a considerable downside with Iranian supported militias and Revolutionary Guard units increasingly become part of the conflict, picking up the slack where the Syrian Army has been too overstretched to operate. Iranian influence over Syria, both overtly and covertly, will continue after Damascus eliminates the last vestiges of al-Qaeda affiliates and ISIS, not to mention the rag-tag “moderate rebels.” And Iran will have standing behind it the Syrian Army, Iraqi Shi’a militias, and Russian firepower. This has meant that the Israeli plan to have a chronically weak state across its border has backfired, bringing into the fighting and post-war reconfiguration Iran, which Tel Aviv fears most as a regional adversary.
So Israel has two strong motives to begin a war with Iran, one political and the other ostensibly linked to national security. Ironically, however, it also knows, and has even admitted, that Iran does not actually pose any threat against a nuclear armed Israel that has complete air superiority over any or even all of its neighbors. The often-cited land bridge threat is also a bit of a chimera, as whether it could potentially exist or not depends on effective interaction with Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, all of which have their own political dynamics and are somewhat wary of Iranian involvement. If there is any actual threat against Israel it comes from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is an independent player even though it has strong ties to Tehran, but even in that case the threat is not as serious as fearmongering government leaders have claimed.
All of which is not to suggest that Iran is toothless if Israel were to get really aggressive. Hezbollah would undoubtedly unleash its missile arsenal against Israeli cities, some of which would get through, and any attack on Iran using aircraft would be confronted by formidable air defenses. Iran could also strike back against Israel using its ballistic missiles, all of which means that attacking Iran would be far from cost-free.
From Netanyahu’s point of view, it is far better to stage an incident that brings in Washington and then allows Uncle Sam to do the heavy lifting. The U.S. has strategic military capabilities that Israel lacks, including heavy bombers and armaments that could penetrate Iranian defenses, but it also has vulnerabilities in terms of military bases within striking range and ships at sea that could be attacked by swarms of small boats and land launched missiles.
Israel believes that bringing Washington into the conflict is doable given that the U.S. media has heavily propagandized against Tehran and that inside-the-beltway groupthink largely perceives Iran as an enemy. Recently Henry Kissinger spelled out the new line of strategic thinking which Israel is already exploiting to make its case. Per Kissinger, the impending defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq will create a power vacuum which will open the door to the creation of an “Iranian radical empire,” a more evocative version of the “land bridge” warning, which he refers to as a “territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut.” As Iran is also fighting ISIS, Kissinger warns against complacency, that “in the contemporary Middle East… the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy.”
Israel has been pushing hard on Washington, recently having sent a high-level combined intelligence and military delegation to confer with National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Special Mideast Envoy Jason Greenblatt to explain the alleged Iranian threat. And the neocon chorus is also signaling that it expects the Trump Administration to do something. Frederick Hof of the hardline Atlantic Council recently wrote that the fundamental mistake made by Washington consisted of not invading Syria and installing an acceptable government years ago, which would have kept Iran out.
Saudi Arabia, which is demonstrating some signs of political instability, would also welcome conflict with Iran, which means that there is an existing coming-together of parties who for various reasons would welcome the escape from other problems that war offers. Donald Trump himself was angry at the State Department in July because it had certified that Tehran was in compliance with the nuclear pact signed last year and Congress also vented its anger by initiating new sanctions against Iran. The next certification is due in October and the president would clearly like to have a good reason, contrived or actual, to break the agreement.
Speculation in Israel is that some kind of preemptive strike is being planned, possibly directed against an Iranian target inside Syria. The danger is that such a move could quickly escalate, with the U.S. Congress and White House quickly aligning themselves with Netanyahu. The United States has no real compelling interest to attack the Iranians and would again find itself in a conflict generated by feckless regional allies that are not allies at all. The results could prove catastrophic in practical terms as Iran is capable of striking back, and it could be devastating to actual American longer terms interests both regionally and worldwide. It is time to say “no” when Israel comes knocking.
Because I have no ambition either to be the next Chief Rabbi of Barcelona or to be subject to the whims of whoever is – as it is, I’m not even Spanish – it’s of very little direct importance to me that the current occupant of that position, one Meir Bar-Hen, is a blithering idiot.
On the other hand, I am a Jew – and a human being. And on both counts it does matter very much to me that Rabbi Bar-Hen, who claims in the wake of a car-ramming attack in Barcelona (for which the motive remains unclear) that “Europe is lost” so long as its governments allow Muslims to live side by side with other citizens, is not only a fool but a bigot of unspeakable effrontery. In fact, he’s exactly the sort of man who, with Goebbels, would have pointed to Herschel Grynszpan’s murder of a young German diplomat in 1938 as “proof” that Jews could not be tolerated in Germany.
And yet I confess that even the rabbi’s racism – essentially a declaration of war against every Muslim in Europe – is less infuriating to me than the silent complacency with which his remarks have been received throughout the Jewish world.
One might have hoped a few Jews, even today, would remember that being stigmatized as a collective threat to civilization was a familiar Jewish experience not so long ago. In the previous century, when the Reverend A.E. Patton complained of the danger of immigrant “hordes” who were “stealthy and furtive in manner… too filthy to adopt ideals of cleanliness from the start, too bigoted to surrender any racial traditions or to absorb any true Americanism,” he was writing about Jews, not Muslims, and if asked for evidence of the threat would have pointed to nothing less momentous than the gathering storm in Russia. (The Nazis used similar “evidence,” for that matter; so did some of their descendants at the recent violent hatefest in Charlottesville.) Quite apart from its moral reprehensibility, then, is Muslim-bashing a clever game for Jews to play, given our continuing minority status and a little knowledge of our own history?
And in Spain, of all places! Has a Spanish rabbi utterly forgotten what Jewish historians once dubbed the “Golden Age” of medieval Jewry – namely in Spain, under Muslim rule – and that anti-Semitic persecutions followed on the heels of the expulsion of Muslims from that country?
But bigots don’t speak the language of history, just as they don’t speak the language of contemporary fact. They speak the language of power – and Rabbi Bar-Hen provides a fine example of how that language can turn the truth inside out. Just look at how neatly his recent statements, though at odds with reality, dovetail with Western imperial propaganda.
“I tell my congregants,” Rabbi Bar-Hen told JTA after the attack that left 14 random victims dead in Barcelona, “this place is lost. Don’t repeat the mistake of Algerian Jews, of Venezuelan Jews. Better [get out] early than late.”
And anyway, what has Venezuela got to do with Spain?
Well, nothing – except that Chavez was on Washington’s enemies’ list long before ISIS was. And that’s the clue to unpacking Rabbi Bar-Hen’s ominous reference to Latin America: it means, “Jews shouldn’t want open societies where the U.S. doesn’t want them. We must stay on the side of Big Brother.”
The same goes for Bar-Hen’s weird juxtaposition of Spain – where, he claims, Jews can’t survive because “radical” Muslims are “living among you” and “it’s very difficult to get rid of them” – against Israel, where he explicitly encourages his congregants to immigrate.
Now, Rabbi Bar-Hen knows as well as anyone that Israel and its occupied territories have a Muslim population too (in fact, one that is proportionally larger than the Muslim community in Spain), and that this population is not altogether acquiescent. If Spain is a “hub of Islamist terror for all of Europe,” as the rabbi claims, what in the world makes Israel a safe haven?
Again, nothing – except that Israel, unlike Spain, is an American client state. And so what the rabbi is really saying to Jews is, “Go where American power goes. The U.S. is fighting a war against the Muslim world, and we want to be on the side of the powerful – never mind what’s right or wrong.”
And then there’s Bar-Hen’s flagship “proof” that Spain is soft on Muslim terrorism: the fact that the government wouldn’t suppress the free travel of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian refugee who nearly 50 years ago helped hijack an airplane (hurting no one) and who wanted, to the horror of people like Rabbi Bar-Hen, to attend a book festival in Spain this year. This showed that Spanish authorities “do not understand the nature of terrorism, if they treat it as an action by the disenfranchised,” the rabbi told JTA.
Got it? In Bar-Hen’s world, a Palestinian woman who was driven out of her native Haifa at the age of 4 can’t possibly be “disenfranchised.” And any country that would dream of allowing a small-time Palestinian resistance fighter to set foot in it, five decades after her last illegal act – the same country having already welcomed the likes of Shimon Peres, the butcher of Qana and eager backer of apartheid South Africa – should be ashamed of itself. That is, if its moral standard is all about what’s good for the Empire.
Which, in a word, is Bar-Hen’s standard.
Taken separately, each one of Bar-Hen’s remarks amounts to pure stupidity. But their sum total is something rather more sinister. Bar-Hen may be a blithering idiot, as I called him a moment ago, but what am I to call a man who scorns the mayor of Barcelona for saying, after the tragic car-ramming deaths in her city, that “Barcelona is a city of peace,” and that “[t]error will not make us stop being who we are: a brave city open to the world”?
Bar-Hen thought so little of that fine statement that he said he might not attend the public solidarity rally called by the mayor, claiming security officials instructed him to avoid public areas in the coming days – because he is recognizably Jewish.
Rabbi, I doubt you’ll read this column. But if you do, I’m calling your bluff. I want to know which “security officials” told you it’s not safe for a Jew with a skullcap to be seen in the streets of Barcelona, though it’s apparently quite safe for Muslims to show themselves, even immediately after a terrible crime has been blamed on someone in their community, and even with the likes of you whipping up public hysteria against them all. I want to know what entitles you to claim victimhood at the same time you incite violence against roughly a billion people worldwide. I want to know why Leila Khaled’s 50-year-old violence is reprehensible to you, while Israel’s continuing brutality is not.
And I want to tell you something, Rabbi. You’re not losing “Europe.” What you’re losing is your mind – your ability to reason, to ground your opinions in fact, to guide your congregants with truth rather than propaganda.
And you’re losing something else, too: your common decency. Because behind your stupidity is, as I’ve shown, a corrupt agenda every Jew, let alone a rabbi, should repudiate. Because when you sell out to imperial power, you cease to be a religious leader and become one more toady to the powers that be. Because inciting hatred against an already demonized people puts you squarely, and exclusively, in the ranks of vulgar propagandists.
And this is one Jew who isn’t going to let rabbis like you forget how utterly, in a moment of crisis, you morally betrayed and abandoned us all.
Former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, Bhadrakumar Melkulangara, underscored the need for a peaceful, rather than military, solution to the crisis in Afghanistan, while London is reportedly mulling covert operations in the country.
Mr. Melkulangara said that now that all Western attempts to defeat the Taliban have failed, the conflicting sides should start looking for a negotiated end to the 16-year-old conflict.
“What have the US and Britain really achieved by fighting this war for 16 years? I believe that what we need are inter-Afghan negotiations to end the conflict now that the Western powers have completely failed even to explain what they are going to do,” Bhadrakumar Melkulangara wondered.
“In his speech on Washington’s new Afghan strategy, President Trump said that special operations were needed [to fight Daesh terrorists] and I believe that, in a sense, they could be quite effective,” Bhadrakumar Melkulangara said.
He added that the British would clearly fall in line with Washington’s new strategy.
“However, I think that it would be extremely relevant for the British to explain how Daesh figures in the US strategy in the light of the experience of Iraq and Syria. This is what the region is mostly concerned about and there is total silence about this,” Melkulangara pointed out.
The British move comes amid concerns that Afghanistan could be lost to the Taliban if the US troops pull out.
When asked how justified these concerns really are, Bhadrakumar Melkulangara said that it was essentially a propagandistic stunt.
“The Americans want to show that they are irreplaceable, that they have done a marvelous job and that they should continue doing this. Trump didn’t say why the US military bases in Afghanistan should stay on.”
When queried about how the UK special operations could help improve the situation in Afghanistan, Bhadrakumar Melkulangara said that with the 120,000-strong US military contingent still in place in Afghanistan, the several hundred troops London is going to send there will only be playing a secondary role assisting US military and CIA operations.
Regarding widespread fears that British special operations in Afghanistan could result in human rights abuses by Special Air Service (SAS) commandos, Bhadrakumar Melkulangara said that “this is going to be an extremely violent period.” He also mentioned the likelihood of military contractors coming in.
“This is exactly what former Afghan President Hamid Karzai had in mind when he said that there is a very dangerous situation arising because once again we’ll see landing parties, bombings, etc.,” Melkulangara warned.
He added that there would be no lasting peace in Afghanistan unless some of the Taliban’s demands are met and that the terms and conditions of the Taliban’s integration is something everyone should now focus on.
“The thesis that the Taliban would eventually be degraded and brought to the negotiating table is an old tale we have heard under President Barack Obama. The problem is, however, that the Taliban adamantly insists that there must be an end to the country’s foreign occupation.”
Bhadrakumar Melkulangara added that US military bases are the main stumbling block on the way to a peaceful resolution of the Afghan conflict because, with the exception of those in Afghanistan who have vested interests in the continued Western presence in the country, the majority of the Afghan people want the US military bases to leave.
“I think that regional powers should speak up and insist that there is no military solution to this conflict,” he concluded.
The UK is expected to deploy Special Air Service and Special Boat Service operatives to assess what kinds of troops are needed for a new Afghan deployment.
The intentions to introduce special operations in Afghanistan come as UK intelligence agencies warn that the Central Asian country could be lost to the Taliban if the US were to withdraw its troops.
According to The Sunday Times, intelligence agencies have played a crucial role in convincing President Trump to increase the military presence in Afghanistan. There are 500 British troops currently stationed in the country.
The ongoing war has cost UK taxpayers over 40 billion pounds. Nearly 500 military personnel have died in the conflict.
The Deep State manufacturing of an elaborately engineered clash of civilizations at Charlottesville is a text book example of a divide-and-conquer psychological operation. The commonalities of the 99% are far greater than our differences. We all want economic security and jobs with dignity. We all want a single payer health care system. We all want free education. We all want an end to the permanent wars and orwellian surveillance. We all want a clean environment. We all want virtuous leaders.
The oligarchal marionetteers stoke our differences to distract us from looking up and seeing how they infiltrate both the left and the right with informants, agents provocateurs, and thought police. Sadly, on knee-jerk cue, we all keep falling for the same old playscripts over and over again.
Instead of the Southern Poverty Law Center looking in every nook and cranny for divisiveness and hate (if not fomenting it themselves), we need organizations dedicated to bringing us together as a united front opposed to the lies, corruption, wars, and inequality. The 1% and their politician/NGO puppets are the actual hate groups, not ragtag outliers whose miniscule numbers don’t demographically represent America — or the world! — at all.
Due to the increasingly heavy-handed censorship by the mainstream media and internet gatekeepers, one can excuse the average person for not knowing there are vibrant alternative ideas afoot.
“America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo subject for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.” – Paul Craig Roberts, HowAmerica Was Lost
David Ray Griffin is an international treasure and truth teller, who, while being ignored by the mainstream corporate media (MSM) for his extraordinary series of books exposing the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, will someday be lauded as a modern prophet. To those who know and have studied his work, he is an inspiration for his persistent insistence in a dozen books since 2004 that the truth about the US treachery of that infamous day is essential for understanding the violence, planned by neo-conservatives and embraced by neo-liberals, that the United States has subsequently inflicted on the world. He has consistently argued that to believe in the government’s explanation for 9/11, one has to reject logic, scholarship, and the basic laws of modern science.
Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World is Griffin’s latest, and probably last, effort to reach those people who, out of fear, ignorance, or laziness, have walled themselves into a cyclopean labyrinth of denial about the defining event of our time. Without the clarifying truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001, there will be no exit from the continuing nightmare the world is experiencing.
If you are reading this review, you are probably not one of those people Griffin is trying to reach. Ay, there’s the rub! As the title of his book suggests, he is using reverse logic to try and reach those who have accepted the official fiction that is the 9/11 Commission Report (No doubt without having read it. Outside of serious researchers, I have never met a person who has, except for some of my students) and all the antecedent and subsequent government and MSM propaganda.
To this end, the first three-quarters of the book is devoted to the “destructive transformations of America and the world as a whole” that were initiated and justified by 9/11, many of which have been accepted by innumerable people as being based on government lies, most notably the war against Iraq. Griffin’s hope is that if he can convince skeptical readers that the government would lie about Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, etc., resulting in the deaths and maiming of millions of innocent people and the destruction of their countries, it would also lie about the attacks of September 11 that “legitimized” such carnage and the ongoing shredding of the US Constitution.
The Will to Examine Miracles?
It’s an ingenuous and compelling method, culminating with his concluding section on “15 major miracles” of 9/11, by which he means “violations of the laws of nature” in the strictest scientific sense. Astutely logical, deeply sourced, and scientifically compelling, the book’s conclusion can only be rejected by one adamantly closed to accepting the ugly truth about the US government and its media accomplices.
But getting skeptical people to read the book is the trick. I think that is very hard but much easier than to get the MSM to do so and give it a fair shake. People have friends whom they trust, and sometimes friends can convince friends to at least take a look. Speaking of the MSM, Griffin puts it thus:
“However, while granting that the Bush-Cheney administration told big and
disastrous lies, which led to millions of deaths, most mainstream commentators
have considered the idea that this administration engineered the 9/11 attack
to be so absurd that they can render judgment without checking the evidence.”
“Judging without checking the evidence” is the job of the MSM, who are stenographers for the government, but regular people might be persuaded to check the evidence before reaching a conclusion, if they can be led to that assessment one logical step after another. One can even hope that left-wing alternative media critics of the government, many of whom avoid this issue like the plague, might find the courage to reassess their anti-scientific denials in light of Griffin’s work. After all, “the laws of physics don’t lie,” and logical reasoning has generally been a strength of many dissenters, especially those well-skilled in the art of disputation.
The Birth of the Tangled Web
Griffin is a master logician, so he begins with the obvious fact that the Bush-Cheney administration failed to prevent 9/11 and therefore failed to keep America safe that day, as Donald Trump said in a 2016 election debate, for which he was castigated by his opponents and the media. But he was right; it is a fact, whatever Bush-Cheney’s deceptive excuses. As a result of those attacks, the US attacked Afghanistan, claiming that was because Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attacks from that country. No evidence of bin Laden’s guilt was ever presented, though Colin Powell initially said it would be shortly forthcoming (he quickly reneged on the promise). The invasion of Afghanistan, planned well in advance of 9/11, was the start of the war on terror that’s been going on for 16 years with no end in sight. A 16-year-old war based on no evidence, just lies. Griffin shows how the alleged “evidence” that was eventually produced – the bin Laden videos – were fraudulent; that they were indeed “produced,” and not by bin Laden; they were “bogus” according to Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, the leading academic expert on bin Laden. And the FBI reported that it had “no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” But the administration and the media sang of bin Laden’s guilt in unison. The public, beaten down in fear and trembling, accepted the claim as a fact, as they were further traumatized by additional lies about the anthrax attacks that are a key component of the entire propaganda campaign of fear and intimidation that resulted in The Patriot Act. (Graeme MacQueen’s masterful analysis, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, should be required reading; for he shows how the often forgotten anthrax attacks are intimately linked to those of September 11 and when studied closely, prove that 9/11 was an inside job.)
So Griffin begins with the lie about bin Laden that led to the lie about Afghanistan that led to the illegal and immoral and ongoing war against Afghanistan and all the millions of deaths and destruction that have ensued.
So knowing how lie leads on to lie, let us count some of the lies that followed. Griffin documents these in deeply sourced details, but I will list them concisely:
US Government Lies Subsequent to the 9/11 Attacks:
That the 9/11 attacks were surprises, a “New Pearl Harbor.”
That there was solid evidence for bin Laden’s guilt.
That the invasion of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) was therefore justified.
That the “war on terror” and therefore The Patriot Act were necessary.
That Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, was developing nuclear weapons, and had weapons of mass destruction
That the attacks on Muslim countries were not based on Islamophobia
That the chaos and destruction unleashed throughout the Middle East were not pre-planned and intentional.
That the Obama administration’s attack on Libya was a humanitarian response to the “madman” Gaddafi, who adopted a rape policy fueled by Viagra drugged troops ready to unleash a blood bath.
That the war against Syria was not a CIA-instigated plan to overthrow Assad under the guise of “liberating” the Syrian people.
That the jihadists in Syria, including ISIS, were not armed and supported by the US, with many of those arms being shipped out of Benghazi, Libya, under the direction of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, General David Petraeus, and Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya.
That the Syrian “White Helmets” are independent volunteer do-gooders, not a propaganda outfit funded by the US and UK governments.
That the wars against Muslim countries throughout the Greater Middle East are not connected to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and serve as American support for Israel’s agenda in the region.
That drone killings are legal and morally justified.
That the US Constitution has not been shredded.
That the coup d’état in Ukraine was not a US operation as part of a continuing US aggression toward Russia and a growing threat of a nuclear annihilation.
That the US buildup of military forces along Russia’s western borders and the massive transfer of US Naval forces to China’s east are not US acts of aggression making nuclear war more likely, but are acts of self-defense.
That the threat of ecological holocaust is not connected to a 770 billion dollar “defense” budget, a trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization program, and US wars against countries containing vast amounts of fossil fuels and rare minerals.
That is only a sample of the lies that Griffin uses to lead the reader back to 9/11, the alleged reason for the death and destruction justified by such lies. If the US government would lie in all these ways, he is saying, why would they not have lied with the Big Lie that started this string of destructive deceptions.
September 11, 2001
Thus the last section of the book (a little more than 25%) is devoted to “9/11: A Miraculous Day.” Herein he explains why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should not be trusted on 9/11. They did not want an investigation into the September 11 attacks; wanted the public to just trust them. They were eventually forced into an investigation by public pressure; originally named Henry Kissinger to head it (don’t laugh – ha! ha!); rigged its makeup and had Philip Zelikow, arch neo-con and Bush insider, appointed its Executive Director. In short, they did everything possible to prevent an honest investigation. And we know that the result was The 9/11 Commission Report that is a piece of legerdemain on a par with The Warren CommissionReport. In other words, a cover-up
Griffin shows that “Bush and Cheney lied about their activities on 9/11” and that their relationship to the subsequent anthrax attacks, a key motivator for The Patriot Act and “the war on terror,” suggest that their administration was the source of those attacks and therefore the 9/11 attacks. (see Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception). Griffin further notes how declassified official accounts refute “central features of the Bush-Cheney account of 9/11.”
And then – the coup de grace – he shows how the official account of 9/11 depends on “miracle stories.” Yet, “a look at the evidence shows that many people who accept science on tobacco, evolution, and global warming, accept miracles, implicitly, on the subject of 9/11, especially in relationship to the World Trade Center (WTC).” Herein lies the great stumbling block to convincing people of the truth of 9/11. Science, logic, careful reasoning, evidence, documentation, what you can observe with your own eyes, etc. – none of this matters when you are intent on being deceived (or pretending to be) because of the implications of examining the evidence and reaching conclusions that are deeply disturbing to your world view, ideology, or sense of self. To admit that you have believed a pack of lies for years is very difficult to accept. But regular people of good will can do so. These are the people Griffin is trying to reach. To convince those who have for years publicly and professionally dismissed those who have questioned the official version of 9/11 as conspiracy nuts is probably an impossible task. To convince the MSM that have worked hand-in-glove with the government to conceal the truth is preposterous. To convince those fine people who are devoted to truth in other areas to reconsider their positions on this core issue is conceivable. Surely the world is full of weird events that logic and science cannot explain. But when the defining event of recent history that has resulted in the world teetering on the edge of final destruction is explained by at least the following 15 miracles that Griffin lists, only a delusional person or one whose will to untruth is set in stone would not be moved to ask how these could be possible, and draw the obvious conclusions.
A Miraculous Precedent: The Assassination of JFK
I am reminded of that other foundational case in modern American history: the CIA-directed assassination of JFK. Dan Rather, the famous CBS news anchor, was in Dallas that day, and after seeing the Zapruder film (which was then kept from the American public for a decade), went on television to say that when the president was shot in the head he violently lurched forward, clearly implying that the shot came from Oswald from the rear. Of course once the public was able to see the film, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that he was violently thrown back and to his left, therefore having been shot from his front right, not by Oswald. Bingo: a conspiracy. Then in 2012, another famous TV personality, Bill O’Reilly wrote a book called Killing Kennedy in which he claims that he and his co-author watched the Zapruder film “time after time to understand the sequence of events,” but still concluded that The Warren Commission was correct and that Oswald shot Kennedy from behind despite the obvious visual evidence to the contrary. Miracles then, miracles now – they seem to define the two key events of modern American history for those wanting to obfuscate the truth.
Do you believe in miracles?
Here is a Summation of Griffin’s 15 Major Miracles:
The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires.
WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires.
These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds.
Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies.
In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical
The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair.
This 30 floor block then disintegrated in midair.
With regard to the North Tower, some of its steel columns were ejected out horizontally for at least 500 feet.
The fires in the debris from the WTC buildings could not be extinguished for many months.
Although the WTC fires, based on ordinary building fires, could not have produced temperatures above 1,800℉, the fires inexplicably melted metals with much higher melting points, such as iron (2,800℉) and even molybdenum (4,753℉).
Some of the steel in the debris had been sulfidized, resulting in Swiss-cheese-appearing steel, even though ordinary building fires could not have resulted in the sulfidation.
As a passenger on AA Flight 77, Barbara Olson called her husband, telling him about hijackers on her plane, even though this plane had no onboard phones and its altitude was too high for a cell phone call to get through.
Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour could not possibly have flown the trajectory of AA 77 to strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, and yet he did.
Besides going through an unbelievable personal transformation, ringleader Mohamed Atta also underwent an impossible physical transformation.
Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour could not possibly have flown the trajectory of AA 77 to strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, and yet he did.
Besides going through an unbelievable personal transformation, ringleader Mohamed Atta also underwent an impossible physical transformation.
Griffin examines each of these “miracles” in detail. Taken together, they reduce the official explanation of 9/11 to a story told to credulous children who are afraid of the dark. One can only hope that Americans are ready to grow up and accept that the bogeyman is real and that he is out to devour them and the rest of the world if they don’t awaken from their hypnotic sleep.
The Overwhelming Consensus of Experts
It is important to note that David Ray Griffin is not alone in his assessment that 9/11 was an inside job done to legitimize disastrous policies at home and abroad. There are thousands of scholars, religious leaders, scientists, engineers, airline pilots, firefighters and countless others who agree with him after studying the evidence. Griffin names many of these experts in his conclusion. And they are not afraid of the absurd way the government and media accuse them of being “conspiracy theorists,” since they know “as Lance deHaven-Smith explained in his book Conspiracy Theory in America, [that] the CIA started using ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative term in 1964 to ridicule the growing belief, contrary to the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by people within the US government, including the CIA itself.” Thoughtful people know, and the evidence has long proven, that the US government is guilty of an extensive list of conspiracies, ranging from the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack to its conspiracy to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and extending back through many CIA-engineered coup d’états, the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, etc. The name calling has lost its sting when the documentary records confirm that the name callers are the conspirators.
So if you care about truth, your country, and the world; if you hate to be lied to; if you care about the victims of American violence everywhere – you should read Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World. It is a brave and brilliant book. Look at the evidence. Show others. Pass the book on. Give it as a gift.
And tip your hat to David Ray Griffin, a truth teller extraordinaire, who for thirteen years has been asking us to wake out of the hypnotic state of denial that has allowed the liars to bring the world to the edge of destruction. Griffin’s persistence is the sign of hope we all need to join him in the fight against these unspeakable forces of evil.
The oldest political party in the world has died. It doesn’t know it yet, it isn’t acting like it yet, but it is dead. By successfully getting the DNC fraud lawsuit dismissed by Judge William J. Zloch today, the Democratic party has succeeded in killing any argument for its continued existence as a legitimate political party.
The premise of the DNC fraud lawsuit was simple: the Democratic National Committee promised voters an impartial party primary, and in 2016 it did not deliver them what it promised. By taking donations from people who believed its promise of impartiality, it committed fraud, in the same way a company selling a product labeled “sugar free” would be committing fraud if its product was loaded with maple syrup.
“the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.”
Documents released by WikiLeaks such as the conversations in the more egregious DNC emails, the Podesta emails showing that the DNC and the Clinton camp were colluding as early as 2014 to schedule debates and primaries in a way that favored her, then-DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile acting as a mole against the Sanders campaign and passing Clinton questions in advance to prep her for debates with Sanders all demonstrate a clear and undeniable violation of the Impartiality Clause.
The DNC Charter was revised with this promise to the American people in order to prevent a DemExit after the 1968 fiasco in Chicago, and in 2016 they undeniably broke this promise.
Bruce Spiva, the defense attorney for the DNC, argued successfully that this fraud lawsuit should be dismissed on the grounds that the Committee is under no legal obligation to provide real party primaries at all, saying:
“But here, where you have a party that’s saying, We’re gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we’re gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we’re gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That’s not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right.”
and
“[T]here is no right to — just by virtue of making a donation, to enforce the parties’ internal rules. And there’s no right to not have your candidate disadvantaged or have another candidate advantaged. There’s no contractual obligation here.”
If you are American, whether Democrat, Republican or otherwise, you should read through Judge Zloch’s Order of Dismissal in its entirety when you have time, because this is a historic moment in your nation’s history and this ruling affects you personally. Had the case been allowed to proceed, it could have seen the DNC suffer tremendous consequences for its blatant Charter violation with the promise of more penalties should they repeat the behavior again. Former DNC leaders could have been forced to testify under oath about their behavior, and people who donated to the Sanders campaign could have been refunded their money. The DNC would have been forced into a situation where it could no longer actively sabotage progressive candidates without expecting severe consequences for that behavior.
Instead, the DNC has elected a virulently pro-establishment replacement for Debbie Wasserman Schultz in its new Chairman Tom Perez, and has to this day admitted no wrongdoing nor given any indication that it will make the massive, sweeping changes that would need to be made to prevent Impartiality Clause violations from happening in the future. There is no reason to believe that 2016 was the only time the DNC weighted its scales for a prefered candidate just because 2016 was the year it got caught, and there is now no reason to believe it won’t do so again, since it has no incentive not to.
When Jon Jones tested positive for steroids after reclaiming the UFC Light Heavyweight title from Daniel Cormier via devastating knockout, there was no question in official circles about whether or not he would have won without cheating. If Jones’ B test comes up positive, he will be stripped of his title, suspended from fighting for two to four years, and his win will be officially ruled a ‘No Contest’ by the California State Athletic Commission. There will be no debate among CSAC or USADA officials about whether or not Jones would have beaten Cormier without the help of anabolic steroids. If he cheated, he will be penalized, as would anyone else in any sport or in virtually any other institution outside of the political system in an unfathomably corrupt government.
The DNC violated its Charter, and it will not be penalized for doing so. It will march right into 2018 and 2020 using its same dirty tactics and its same fake primaries to sabotage progressive candidates and make sure that America remains dominated by not one but two right-wing parties. It therefore deserves to die.
And die it will. People like myself and countless other voices in US political commentary will forevermore be able to legitimately say that the Democrats run a novelty joke party which does not feel any obligation to hold real party elections. The Dems now have as much party legitimacy as Vermin Supreme or the Rent Is Too Damn High party. Stop taking these people seriously. DemExit and do not look back, because it’s only going to get worse from here.
You are right back where you were in 1968, America. Don’t let them fool you again.
Despite the chaos and ugliness of the past seven months, President Trump has finally begun to turn U.S. foreign policy away from the neoconservative approach of endless war against an ever-expanding roster of enemies.
This change has occurred largely behind the scenes and has been obscured by Trump’s own bellicose language, such as his vow to “win” in Afghanistan, and his occasional lashing out with violence, such as his lethal Tomahawk missile strike on a Syrian airfield.
Some Trump advisers also have downplayed the current shift because it may fuel the Democrats’ obsession with Russia-gate as a much-desired excuse to impeach Trump. Every peaceful move that Trump makes is called a sop to Russia and thus an excuse to reprise the dubious allegations about Russia somehow helping to elect him.
Yet, despite these external obstacles and Trump’s own erratic behavior, he has remained open to unconventional alternatives to what President Obama once criticized as the Washington “playbook,” i.e. favoring military solutions to international problems.
In this sense, Trump’s shallow understanding of the world has been a partial benefit in that he is not locked into the usual Washington groupthinks – and he personally despises the prominent politicians and news executives who have sought to neuter him since his election. But his ignorance also prevents him from seeing how global crises often intersect and thus stops him from developing a cohesive or coherent doctrine.
Though little noted, arguably the most important foreign policy decision of Trump’s presidency was his termination of the CIA’s covert support for Syrian rebels and his cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin to expand partial ceasefire zones in Syria.
By these actions, Trump has contributed to a sharp drop-off in the Syrian bloodshed. It now appears that the relatively secular Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad is regaining control and that some Syrian refugees are returning to their homes. Syria is starting the difficult job of rebuilding shattered cities, such as Aleppo.
But Trump’s aversion to any new military adventures in Syria is being tested again by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is threatening to attack Iranian and Hezbollah forces inside Syria.
Last week, according to Israeli press reports, a high-level delegation led by Mossad chief Yossi Cohen carried Netanyahu’s threat to the U.S. government. The Israeli leader surely has raised the same point directly in phone calls with Trump.
Tiring of Bibi
I was told that Trump, who appears to be growing weary of Netanyahu’s frequent demands and threats, flatly objected to an Israeli attack and brushed aside Israel’s alarm by noting that Netanyahu’s policies in supporting the rebels in Syria contributed to Israel’s current predicament by drawing in Iran and Hezbollah.
This week, Netanyahu personally traveled to Sochi, Russia, to confront Putin with the same blunt warning about Israel’s intention to attack targets inside Syria if Iran does not remove its forces.
A source familiar with the meeting told me that Putin responded with a sarcastic “good luck!” and that the Russians thought the swaggering Netanyahu appeared “unhinged.”
Still, a major Israeli attack on Iranian positions inside Syria would test Trump’s political toughness, since he would come under enormous pressure from Congress and the mainstream news media to intervene on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, realistically, Netanyahu must be counting on his ability to drag Trump into the conflict since Israel could not alone handle a potential Russian counterstrike.
But Netanyahu may be on somewhat thin ice since Trump apparently blames Israel’s top American supporters, the neocons, for much of his political troubles. They opposed him in the Republican primaries, tilted toward Hillary Clinton in the general election, and have pushed the Russia-gate affair to weaken him.
President Obama faced similar political pressures to fall in line behind Israel’s regional interests. That’s why Obama authorized the covert CIA program in Syria and other aid to the rebels though he was never an enthusiastic supporter – and also grew sick and tired of Netanyahu’s endless hectoring.
Obama acquiesced to the demands of Official Washington’s neocons and his own administration’s hawks – the likes of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus, his successor John Brennan, and United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power.
The Syrian conflict was part of a broader strategy favored by Washington’s neocons to overthrow or cripple regimes that were deemed troublesome to Israel. Originally, the neocons had envisioned removing the Assad dynasty soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with Iran also on the “regime change” menu. But the disastrous Iraq War threw off the neocons’ timetable.
‘Regime Change’ Chaos
The Democratic Party’s liberal interventionists, who are closely allied with the Republican neocons, also tossed in Libya with the overthrow and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Then, weapons from Gaddafi’s stockpiles were shipped to Syria where they strengthened rebel fighters allied with Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other Islamist groups.
Faced with this troubling reality – that the U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” were operating side by side with Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and its allies – Washington’s neocons/liberal-hawks responded with sophisticated propaganda and devised clever talking points to justify what amounted to indirect assistance to terrorists.
The “regime change” advocates portrayed a black-and-white situation in Syria with Assad’s side wearing the black hats and various anti-Assad “activists” wearing the white hats (or literally White Helmets). The State Department and a complicit mainstream media disseminated horror stories about Assad and – when the reality about Al Qaeda’s role could no longer be hidden – that was spun in the rebels’ favor, too, by labeling Assad “a magnet for terrorists” (or later in cahoots with the Islamic State). For years, such arguments were much beloved in Official Washington.
But the human consequences of the Syrian conflict and other U.S.-driven “regime change” wars were horrific, spreading death and destruction across the already volatile Middle East and driving desperate refugees into Europe, where their presence provoked political instability.
By fall 2015, rebel advances in Syria – aided by a supply of powerful U.S. anti-tank missiles – forced Russia’s hand with Putin accepting Assad’s invitation to deploy Russian air power in support of the Syrian army and Iranian and Hezbollah militias. The course of the war soon turned to Assad’s advantage.
It’s unclear what Hillary Clinton might have done if she had won the White House in November 2016. Along with much of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, she called repeatedly for imposing a “no-fly zone” in Syria to stop operations by the Syrian air force and Russia, a move that could have escalated the conflict into World War III.
But Trump – lacking Official Washington’s “sophistication” – couldn’t understand how eliminating Assad, who was leading the fight against the terrorist groups, would contribute to their eventual defeat. Trump also looked at the failure of similar arguments in Iraq and Libya, where “regime change” produced more chaos and generated more terrorism.
Pandering to Saudis/Israelis
However, in the early days of his presidency, the unsophisticated Trump lurched from one Middle East approach to another, initially following his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s grandiose thinking about recruiting Saudi Arabia to an “outside-in” strategy to settle the Israel-Palestine conflict, i.e., enlisting the Saudis to pressure the Palestinians into, more or less, letting Israel dictate a solution.
Kushner’s “outside-in” scheme was symbolically acted out with Trump making his first overseas visit to Saudi Arabia and then to Israel in May. But I’m told that Trump eventually cooled to Kushner’s thinking and has come to see the Israeli-Saudi tandem as part of the region’s troubles, especially what he views as Saudi Arabia’s longstanding support for Al Qaeda and other terror groups.
Perhaps most significantly in that regard, Trump in July quietly abandoned the CIA’s covert war in Syria. In the U.S., some “regime change” advocates have complained about this “betrayal” of the rebel cause and some Democrats have tried to link Trump’s decision to their faltering Russia-gate “scandal,” i.e., by claiming that Trump was rewarding Putin for alleged election help.
But the bottom line is that Trump’s policy has contributed to the Syrian slaughter abating and the prospect of a victory by Al Qaeda and/or its Islamic State spinoff fading.
So, there has been a gradual education of Donald Trump, interrupted occasionally by his volatile temper and his succumbing to political pressure, such as when he rushed to judgment on April 4 and blamed the Syrian government for a chemical incident in the remote Al Qaeda-controlled village of Khan Sheikhoun.
Despite strong doubts in the U.S. intelligence community about Syria’s guilt – some evidence suggested one more staged “atrocity” by the rebels and their supporters – Trump on April 6 ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at a Syrian air base, reportedly killing several soldiers and some civilians, including four children.
Trump boasted about his decision, contrasting it with Obama’s alleged wimpiness. And, naturally, Official Washington and the U.S. mainstream media not only accepted the claim of Syrian government guilt but praised Trump for pulling the trigger. Later, Hillary Clinton said if she were president, she would have been inclined to go further militarily by intervening with her “no-fly zone.”
As reckless and brutal as Trump’s missile strike was, it did provide him some cover for his July 7 meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany, which focused heavily on Syria, and also for his decision to pull the plug on the CIA’s covert war.
Saudi-backed Terror
I’m told Trump also has returned to his pre-election attitude about Saudi Arabia as a leading supporter of terror groups and a key provocateur in the region’s disorders, particularly because of its rivalry with Iran, a factor in both the Syrian and Yemeni wars.
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Though Trump has recited Washington’s bipartisan (and benighted) mantra about Iran being the principal sponsor of terrorism, he appears to be moving toward a more honest view, recognizing the falsity of the neocon-driven propaganda about Iran.
Trump’s new coolness toward Saudi Arabia may have contributed to the recent warming of relations between the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and the Shiites of Iran, a sectarian conflict dating back 1,400 years. In a surprising move announced this week, the two countries plan an exchange of diplomatic visits.
Even in areas where Trump has engaged in reckless rhetoric, such as his “fire and fury” warning to North Korea, his behind-the-scenes policy appears more open to compromise and even accommodation. In the past week or so, the tensions with North Korea have eased amid backchannel outreach that may include the provision of food as an incentive for Pyongyang to halt its missile development and even open political talks with South Korea, according to a source close to these developments.
On Afghanistan, too, Trump may be playing a double game, giving a hawkish speech on Monday seeming to endorse an open-ended commitment to the near-16-year-old conflict, while quietly signaling a willingness to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban.
One alternative might be to accept a coalition government, involving the Taliban, with a U.S. withdrawal to a military base near enough to launch counterterrorism strikes if Al Qaeda or other international terror groups again locate in Afghanistan [likely an air base from which to threaten Iran – Aletho News ].
Many of Trump’s latest foreign policy initiatives reflect former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s hostility toward neoconservative interventionism. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon-Mobil chief executive, also shares a more pragmatic approach to foreign affairs than some of his more ideological predecessors.
Albeit still in their infancy, these policies represent a new realism in U.S. foreign policy that, in many ways, paralleled what President Obama favored but was often unwilling or unable to see through to its logical conclusions, given his fear of Netanyahu and the power of the neocons and their liberal-hawk allies.
Still, some of Obama’s most important decisions – not to launch a major military strike against Syria in August 2013 and to negotiate an agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear program in 2013-15 – followed a similar path away from war, thus drawing condemnation from the Israeli-Saudi tandem and American neocons.
As a Republican who rose politically by pandering to the GOP “base” and its hatred of Obama, Trump rhetorically attacked Obama on both Syria and Iran, but may now be shifting toward similar positions. Gradually, Trump has come to recognize that the neocons and his other political enemies are trying to hobble and humiliate him – and ultimately to remove him from office.
The question is whether Trump’s instinct for survival finally will lead him to policies that blunt his enemies’ strategies or will cause him to succumb to their demands.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
US President Donald Trump appeared to adopt two very different public persona this week, when first he delivered a stern speech announcing a new military strategy toward Afghanistan; and then the next day he regaled supporters at a rally in Arizona with his characteristic blustering style.
American news channel CNN called the differing styles the «Two Trumps». In the first one, there was «teleprompter Trump» in which the president outlined a «sobering» plan for renewed military intervention in Afghanistan. By contrast, in the second appearance, there was «free-wheelin’ Trump», when he fired up his support base at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, with verbal broadsides against the «sick» US media, illegal immigration, and a vow to build the border wall with Mexico – even if that meant shutting down the federal government in Washington.
CNN didn’t proffer an explanation for its observation of diverging Trump behavior. The implication was hinted that the president was simply being erratic, perhaps with some kind of personality disorder.
But here is a possible explanation for the «Two Trumps». On the issue of Afghanistan, Trump was indeed delivering a serious message on behalf of the US military and foreign policy establishment. His adherence to the teleprompter text was a sign that the president is taking orders from the Deep State when it comes to matters of paramount imperialist objective.
At the other event, when Trump reverted to his barnstorming form, it was just the president throwing his voter base a bit of rhetorical meat to keep them happy. In that rambling, impromptu-style, Trump hit all the populist buttons to the delight of the crowd. That demagogic bravura performance was required because the day before Trump had executed a startling U-turn on his campaign promises, when he declared that US forces would return to Afghanistan.
All during his election campaign for the presidency last year, Trump had whipped up support among blue-collar workers by slamming the wasteful overseas wars of the Bush and Obama administrations. He condemned his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton for fueling these wars as Secretary of State for Obama.
What a staggering U-turn! It’s hard to believe Trump has the chutzpah to do it.
On Monday, addressing troops at Fort Meyer, Arlington, Virginia, President Trump gave notice that the US military would be returning in large numbers to Afghanistan. That 16-year American war – the longest US war in history – was henceforth going to continue for an indefinite number of years. Trump made a cringing attempt to excuse the shameless U-turn as an informed decision made with the responsibility of president on his shoulders as opposed to the callow views of a campaigning candidate.
However, there was no disguising the fact that President Trump was taking orders from the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and numerous other US generals – three of whom are now in senior positions in Trump’s White House – have been pushing for a re-escalation of American military involvement in Afghanistan.
Trump got elected on the back of electoral promises to shut down overseas wars and vowing instead to focus economic resources on reviving the blue-collar Rust Belt states, which have been struggling with industrial decline for decades. His sudden embrace of the Pentagon’s designs on Afghanistan are a stark repudiation of his own «America First» manifesto. In short, a betrayal of voters.
It is no coincidence that Trump’s about-turn on Afghanistan came on the heels of the ouster of his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon last Friday. Bannon had been vehemently against the policy of foreign military adventurism. In particular, he was reportedly against any resumption of large-scale deployment in Afghanistan. According to media reports, it was the military top brass who prevailed on Trump to get rid of Bannon. The White House Chief of Staff, former Marine General John Kelly, and Trump’s National Security Advisor, General HR McMaster were the two main voices calling for Bannon’s exit. That Trump would dump Bannon – supposedly a close ally – with such alacrity shows that the generals are the real power behind the desk in the Oval Office.
So, the «Two Trumps» phenomenon is thus explained: On one hand, the president is being ordered by the Pentagon and the generals in his White House on what the all-important foreign policy agenda is. Afghanistan is a priority. But note also, the increased US military intervention in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Ukraine, and towards North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia – the latter under the auspices of NATO’s eastwards expansion. All of this blatantly contradicts what candidate Trump had been wooing voters with.
The American business of military imperialism is serious. Hence President Trump is told in no uncertain terms by the military-industrial complex to stick to the teleprompter text. No winging it. No deviation from the plan. Just do it.
The debasement of Trump to being a stooge of the Deep State thereby necessitates that Trump, the supposed maverick populist, must go out on occasion to rally the base with barnstorming tirades to let off some steam. (The irony here is that Trump is accused by the Deep State of being a stooge for Russia, when in much more realistic ways he is evidently a stooge for the American Deep State.)
If ordinary Americans were permitted to focus on their betrayal by Trump to the criminal overseas adventurism of the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, then that could be a cause of dangerous social revolt at home. It is imperative therefore to keep the masses riled up over chauvinistic populist issues like slamming illegal immigration, «sick» news media, and «liberals» trying to erase American history and heritage by removing Civil War statues.
Like a quack doctor, Trump is prescribing nostrums to conceal the real disease, which is that American democracy has now been supplanted by a military cabal in league with Wall Street and Big Business. Trump is nothing but a puppet who – at least so far – is being allowed to «play at being president». Who knows how much longer he will be allowed to sit in the Oval Office.
So degenerated is American politics that even prominent news media like the New York Times are actually welcoming with editorials on the control exerted over an elected president by the military generals «to stop him going off the rails».
Why Afghanistan is such a priority for the American ruling cabal is no doubt manifold. Recent reports highlight the vast but untapped mineral wealth of the country. Another reason is to secure the lucrative heroin drug trade that financially underpins so much of American covert CIA operations around the world. Also, Afghanistan’s war gives Washington cover for pursuing its strategy of engendering conflict and chaos in a vital region. Contrary to official US assertions, Washington doesn’t want the war to end. It wants war-without-end so that it can destabilize Russia on its southern flank, as well as Iran, and to prevent China from galvanizing Eurasian economic integration.
As American political analyst Randy Martin points out: «Afghanistan is a redux of covert US strategy that has been used in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. The United States claims to be fighting terrorism when in actual fact it is covertly sponsoring terror groups to incite sectarian conflict. In that way, Washington gives itself a license to wreak havoc in order to thwart geopolitical rivals».
President Trump is simply following the imperative orders assigned to him by the Deep State. Outrageous as it might seem, we are witnessing a soft military coup against Trump and his earlier vows to promote America First in the interests of ordinary citizens. In other words, American democracy has been subverted in an audacious assertion of the perennial needs of US imperialism – the profiteering lust of the military industrial complex, Wall Street and Big Business.
Of course, the broader context of «Russia-gate» should be mentioned here. For nearly eight months since his presidential inauguration, Trump has been subjected to a relentless media campaign orchestrated by the Deep State vilifying him as a Russian agent and a beneficiary of alleged Russian meddling in the US election. That pressure over a baseless narrative has inevitably led to Trump capitulating to the Deep State to become a willing tool for its strategic objectives. Trump’s capitulation is nevertheless a coup against an elected president, enforcing the Deep State’s geopolitical agenda.
Analyst Randy Martin puts it succinctly with an oblique reference to the CIA’s assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963. «This time, they didn’t need a bullet».
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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The Deep State manufacturing of an elaborately engineered clash of civilizations at Charlottesville is a text book example of a divide-and-conquer psychological operation. The commonalities of the 99% are far greater than our differences. We all want economic security and jobs with dignity. We all want a single payer health care system. We all want free education. We all want an end to the permanent wars and orwellian surveillance. We all want a clean environment. We all want virtuous leaders.
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