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».
1984 is probably one of the worst books of the 20th century because of its mis-interpretation!
a) Although Orwell was writing about ENGLAND, in fact, and not as allegory, the exigencies of anti-Soviet propaganda required that the story be defined as a dystopia about the world under Soviet control. Whatever Orwell may have thought about Stalin, 1984 was a story directly attacking the Labour Party and the policies that would become enshrined in Labour governments dominated by graduates from Oxford and to a lesser extent Cambridge. Anyone outside of Britain might be forgiven at the time for missing this but today the oversight is simply rooted in ignorance — willful or unwitting.
b) Orwell, who served in the colonial police in Burma, was well acquainted with the methods of social control used in Britain’s colonies — including torture and surveillance. He had no reason to draw on reports from the Soviet Union, true or false. He also worked in the British government’s propaganda department. The BBC was created in 1922 as a radio monopoly in part to improve the government’s campaign against organised labour. There the fabrication of “news” was daily routine, as it is today.
c) Post-war Britain was — in comparison to the US esp. — a disaster area. After two world wars, Britain was bankrupt. The empire which had subsidised the metropolitan standard of living was collapsing. Indian independence alone would mean an initial massive balance of payments deficit to the Union, not to mention debt to the US. The economy was more or less in ruins. The standard of living had sunk drastically for all but the very rich. It did not take any imagination to invent “Victory Gin” — Britain was nominally on the side of the winners but had lost everything. For someone like Orwell this was very obvious.
d) Too little attention is paid to the actual structures that Orwell describes. The Party and the Thought Police are most frequently mentioned. This focus distorts Orwell’s depiction of a complex mechanism of social control. Ironically many people who have read Noam Chomsky’s essays do not grasp the point which Orwell makes and Chomsky reiterates — albeit avoiding too much attention to this embarrassing point.
Orwell distinguished between the “inner party”, the “outer party” and the “prols”. This classification is very important for comprehending the whole process. Propaganda — that is the constant manipulation of data in forms to create what counts on any one day as “true” — is directed primarily at the “outer party”. The “inner party” is not concerned with what is actually true, this virtually invisible group is interested only in power. The “outer party” is governed by rigorous ideas of truth and virtue which have to be policed — precisely because the very idea of “truth” is a policing tool — not unlike sexual purity. The “truth” is of no material importance to the mass — the “prols” in Orwell’s depiction. But the “outer party” — the intellectuals, the bureaucrats, middle managers, functionaries of all types whether in the state or private sector, in short those who claim citizenship based on supposed intelligence and virtue/merit — need constant policing.
They must be told not only what is fashionable but what counts as true or as the acceptable/polite consensus. These people cannot be left in abject ignorance since they are needed to maintain the system. They are in short the “Gene Sharp factor” — the percentage of the population with which one moves the whole. (Ironically the first edition (1993) of Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy was published in Burma — where Orwell began his police career.) They are too numerous in comparison to the “inner party” to be ignored but not as disorganized as the “prols” so that they cannot be beaten down physically as a mass.
Perhaps Noam Chomsky does not focus too much on his observation that it is the middle class intellectual/managerial class that is the target of most regime propaganda (most heavily propagandised) because he belongs precisely to that class. In fact, on some issues he might be confused with an asset of the Thought Police — coming too as he does from a central US Thought Police institution — MIT.
Orwell was an Old Etonian. Eton College is the pinnacle of the “outer party” cadre institutions in Britain. It is run for the “inner party” and many of the “inner party” are also Old Etonians but the English public school is notorious for enforcing class distinctions even among those of the same college. All Etonians are equal too, some are more equal than others.
e) Who is “Big Brother”? Big Brother is always supposed to be a kind of Stalin allegory. However, unlike the US, Britain has a constant figure who constitutes the focus of all loyalty and affection — the reigning monarch. The British royal family changed their name when war was declared against Germany in 1914. It became inappropriate to have a German king ordering illiterate British peasants and workers into war against another German king who was directly related for reasons that could not be admitted openly and still cannot. So the name “Windsor” was adopted. Edward VIII both before and after his abdication maintained a healthy relationship with blatant fascists of the old style.
This does not mean that the British royal family ever renounced its affinity for fascism (e.g. Franco and Salazar). Moreover it is almost impossible to criticise the monarchy substantively in the United Kingdom. The actions of its members, singularly or collectively, are beyond review or public reproach — except in matters trivial like taste or polite speech. The pretense that the most wealthy private individual in the country (and one of the world’s wealthiest), the reigning monarch, has no personal interest in the policies of the British government and has no practical influence over the government in defense of those interests is about as great a self-deception as one can demand of any person, let alone an entire country.
God save the King/Queen…
f) It is even arguable that Orwell was more concerned about the US because this was the country which switched sides and manipulated the war aims the most — without any cost to itself. During WWII it was clear that the Soviet Union was fighting a vicious war just to survive in the face of the Western onslaught. However, sober people also saw that the US stood to be the only beneficiary of the war. In 1945, this was obvious. No sooner had the war ended but the US proclaimed a war against the Soviet Union. Britain could not have afforded such a position — even if Churchill would have liked. He gave his deceptive “iron curtain” speech for Truman because of dependence on the US not because Britain could have afforded an anti-Soviet policy on its own.1 Orwell could certainly see the absurdity of an impoverished Britain having been on the side of the Soviet Union against Hitler now aligned with the US against the Soviet Union.
In fact, it could be argued that Orwell’s novel is very coherent with Roger Waters’ The Wall (and its sequel The Final Cut) in their specifically BRITISH views of mass culture and pseudo-democracy concealing party dictatorship. It has little, if anything, to do with Russian society, let alone politics. That is only natural. Orwell never lived in Russia and would not have been able to explain Russian society. For that one has to turn to Russians themselves; e.g., Tolstoy or Sholokhov or Pasternak. On the other hand many Americans believe that they understand British society — this is due largely to saturation with BBC programming. However similar Britain may appear to the US, it is actually a very different country and culture (except perhaps for the highest strata of the Anglo-American ruling class). The illusion that Britons are only more quaint Americans has done much to promote the mis-understanding of Orwell.
One of the great intellectual travesty’s of the 20th century is the ascendency of US liberal ideology — in its broadest sense.2
There is probably not a country in the world today with so much influence on intellectual and cultural activity from such a depraved and obscene level of general ignorance and stupidity. The capacity to saturate the world with this structural mendacity and almost genetic stupidity is probably worse than any other weapons system the country’s psychopaths have produced — because it is the basis for acceptance of all those weapons in the first place.
Churchill, unlike Truman, had attended the meetings with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta where it was agreed that the Soviet Union would occupy the Eastern European territories that had been absorbed into the German Empire, in part as a basis for war reparations due to the enormous destruction suffered by the Soviet Union — almost all of the European part of the country was razed to the ground. He knew that the Soviet occupation had been agreed by all the Allies. He also knew that the Allies were attempting to deprive the Soviet Union of the reparations due from Germany. In short he knew that it was the West that was hanging an “iron curtain” in front of the Soviet Union in the hope that it would collapse after WWII. Britain could not have afforded such a policy. Among other things the collapse of the empire would deprive it of its cheap access to all sorts of raw materials making it vulnerable to world market fluctuations.
A more precise clarification of what might otherwise be called the ideology of the North Atlantic Establishment would exceed the scope of this brief note. Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment provides a fairly useful summary of its principles and the way it has been expressed through the 20th century. It should be noted that one of the key cadre institutions for academics according to Quigley is the All Souls College of Oxford University– where Gene Sharp also completed his doctorate.
“Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom . . . are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him . . . with rare exceptions, you can’t believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race.”
–Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory, p. 114
The author of the above quotation, Lerone Bennett, Jr., was the executive editor of Ebony magazine for several decades, beginning in 1958. He is a distinguished African-American author of numerous books, including a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. He spent twenty years researching and writing his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, from which he drew the above conclusion about the so-called Lincoln scholars and how they have lied about Lincoln for generations. For obvious reasons, Mr. Bennett is incensed over how so many lies have been told about Lincoln and race.
Few Americans have ever been taught the truth about Lincoln and race, but it is all right there in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CW), and in his actions and behavior throughout his life. For example, he said the following:
“Free them [i.e. the slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot then make them equals” (CW, vol. II, p. 256.
“What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races” (CW, vol. II, p. 521).
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary” (CW, vol. III, p, 16). (Has there ever been a clearer definition of “white supremacist”?).
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people” (CW, vol. III, pp. 145-146).
“I will to the very last stand by the law of this state [Illinois], which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes” (CW, vol. III, p. 146).
“Senator Douglas remarked . . . that . . . this government was made for the white people and not for the negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too” (CW, vol. II, p. 281)
Lincoln was also a lifelong advocate of “colonization,” or the deportation of black people from America. He was a “manager” of the Illinois Colonization Society, which procured tax funding to deport the small number of free blacks residing in the state. He also supported the Illinois constitution, which in 1848 was amended to prohibit the immigration of black people into the state. He made numerous speeches about “colonization.” “I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation . . . . such separation must be effected by colonization” (CW, vol. II, p. 409). And, “Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and . . . favorable to . . . our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime” (CW, vol. II, p. 409). Note how Lincoln referred to black people as “the African,” as though they were alien creatures. “The place I am thinking about having for a colony,” he said, “is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia” (CW, vol. V, pp. 373-374).
Bennett also documents how Lincoln so habitually used the N word that his cabinet members – and many others – were shocked by his crudeness, even during a time of pervasive white supremacy, North and South. He was also a very big fan of “black face” minstrel shows, writes Bennett.
For generations, the so-called Lincoln scholars claimed without any documentation that Lincoln suddenly gave up on his “dream” of deporting all the black people sometime in the middle of the war, even though he allocated millions of dollars for a “colonization” program in Liberia during his administration. But the book Colonization After Emancipation by Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page, drawing on documents from the British and American national archives, proved that Lincoln was hard at work until his dying day plotting with Secretary of State William Seward the deportation of all the freed slaves. The documents produced in this book show Lincoln’s negotiations with European governments to purchase land in Central America and elsewhere for “colonization.” They were even counting how many ships it would take to complete the task.
Lincoln’s Slavery-Forever Speech: The First Inaugural
Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, is probably the most powerful defense of slavery ever made by an American politician. In the speech Lincoln denies having any intention to interfere with Southern slavery; supports the federal Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution, which compelled citizens of non-slave states to capture runaway slaves; and also supported a constitutional amendment known as the Corwin Amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering in Southern slavery, thereby enshrining it explicitly in the text of the U.S. Constitution.
Lincoln stated at the outset of his first inaugural address that “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Furthermore, “Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the [Republican Party] platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read: Resolved, that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to the balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend . . .” By “domestic institutions” Lincoln meant slavery.
Lincoln also strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Clause and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in his first inaugural address by reminding his audience that the Clause is a part of the Constitution that he, and all members of Congress, swore to defend. In fact, the Fugitive Slave Act was strongly enforced all during the Lincoln administration, as documented by the scholarly book, The Slave Catchers, by historian Stanley Campbell (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). “The Fugitive Slave Law remained in force and was executed by federal marshals” all during the Lincoln regime, writes Campbell. For example, he writes that “the docket for the [Superior] Court [of the District of Columbia] listed the claims of twenty-eight different slave owners for 101 runaway slaves. In the two months following the court’s decision [that the law was applicable to the District], 26 fugitive slaves were returned to their owners . . .” This was in Washington, D.C., Lincoln’s own residence.
Near the end of his first inaugural address (seven paragraphs from the end) Lincoln makes his most powerful defense of slavery by saying: “I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service [i.e., slaves]. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable” (emphasis added).
The Corwin Amendment, named for Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, said:
“No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which shall authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor [i.e., slaves] or service by the laws of said State.”
After all the Southern members of Congress had left, the exclusively-Northern U.S. Congress voted in favor of the Corwin Amendment by a vote of 133-65 in the House of Representatives on February 28, 1861, and by a vote of 24-12 in the U.S. Senate on March 2, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration.
Lincoln lied in his first inaugural address when he said that he had not seen the Corwin Amendment. Not only did he support the amendment in his speech; it was his idea, as documented by Doris Kearns-Goodwin in her worshipful book on Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals. Based on primary sources, Goodwin writes on page 296 that after he was elected and before he was inaugurated Lincoln “instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield.” “These proposals” were 1) the Corwin Amendment; and 2) a federal law to nullify personal liberty laws created by several states to allow them to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act.
In 1860-61 Lincoln and the Republican Party fiercely defended Southern slavery while only opposing the extension of slavery into the new territories. They gave three reasons for this:
(1) “Many northern whites . . . wanted to keep slaves out of the [new territories] in order to keep blacks out. The North was a pervasively racist society . . . . Bigots, they sought to bar African-American slaves from the West,” wrote University of Virginia historian Michael Holt in his book, The Fate of Their Country (p. 27).
(2) Northerners did not want to have to compete for jobs with black people, free or slave. Lincoln himself said that “we” want to preserve the territories for “free white labor”.
(3) If slaves were brought into the territories it could inflate the congressional representation of the Democratic Party once a territory became a state because of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that counted five slaves as three persons for purposes of determining how many congressional representatives each state would have. The Republican Party feared that this might further block their economic policy agenda of high protectionist tariffs to protect Northern manufacturers from competition; corporate welfare for road, canal, and railroad-building corporations; a national bank; and a giving away, rather than selling, of federal land (mostly to mining, timber, and railroad corporations). Professor Holt quotes Ohio Congressman Joshua Giddings explaining: “To give the south the preponderance of political power would be itself to surrender our tariff, our internal improvements [a.k.a. corporate welfare], our distribution of proceeds of public lands . . .” (p. 28).
Lincoln called the Emancipation Proclamation a “war measure,” which meant that if the war ended the next day, it would become null and void. It only applied to “rebel territory” and specifically exempted by name areas of the South that were under Union Army control at the time, such as most of the parishes of Louisiana; and entire states like West Virginia, the last slave state to enter the union, having been created during the war by the Republican Party. That is why historian James Randall wrote that it “freed no one.” The apparent purpose was to incite slave rebellions, which it failed to do. Slavery was finally ended in 1866 by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with virtually no assistance from Lincoln, as described by Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald in his book, Lincoln. On page 545 of his magnum opus David Donald writes of how Lincoln refused to lift a finger to help the genuine abolitionists accumulate votes in Congress for the Thirteenth Amendment. Stories that he did help, such as the false tale told in Steven Spielberg’s movie about Lincoln, are based on pure “gossip,” not documented history, wrote Donald.
Lincoln Promises War Over Tax Collection
In contrast to his compromising stance on slavery, Lincoln was totally and completely uncompromising on the issue of tax collection in his first inaugural address, literally threatening war over it. For decades, Northerners had been attempting to plunder Southerners (and others) with high protectionist tariffs. There was almost a war of secession in the late 1820s over the “Tariff of Abominations” of 1828 that increased the average tariff rate (essentially a sales tax in imports) to 45%. The agricultural South would have been forced to pay higher prices for clothing, farm tools, shoes, and myriad other manufactured products that they purchased mostly from Northern businesses. South Carolina nullified the tariff, refusing to collect it, and a compromise was eventually reached to reduce the tariff rate over a ten-year period.
By 1857 the average tariff rate had declined to about 15%, and tariff revenues accounted for at least 90% of all federal tax revenue. This was the high water mark of free trade in the nineteenth century. Then, with the Republican Party in control of Congress and the White House, the average tariff rate was increased, by 1863, back up to 47%, starting with the Morrill Tariff, which was signed into law on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration by Pennsylvania steel industry protectionist President James Buchanan. (It had first passed in the House of Representatives during the 1859-60 session).
Understanding that the Southern states that had seceded and had no intention of continuing to send tariff revenues to Washington, D.C., Lincoln threatened war over it. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” he said in his first inaugural address, “and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the national authority.”
And what could “force” the “national authority” to commit acts of “violence” and “bloodshed”? Lincoln explained in the next sentence: “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” “Pay up or die; the American union is no longer voluntary” was his principal message. In Lincoln’s mind, the union was more like what would become the Soviet union than the original, voluntary union of the founding fathers. He kept his promise by invading the Southern states with an initial 75,000 troops after duping South Carolinians into firing upon Fort Sumter (where no one was harmed, let alone killed).
The Stated Purpose of the War
The U.S. Senate issued a War Aims Resolution that said: “[T]his war is not waged . . . in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [Southern] states, but to defend . . . the Constitution, and to preserve the Union . . .” By “established institutions” of the Southern states they meant slavery.
Like the U.S. Senate, Lincoln also clearly stated that the purpose of the war was to “save the union” and not to interfere with Southern slavery. In a famous August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, he wrote that:
“My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Of course, Lincoln’s war destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with an involuntary union held together by threat of invasion, bloodshed, conquest, and subjugation.
The Very Definition of Treason
Treason is defined by Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution as follows: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” The most important word here is “them.” As in all the founding documents, “United States” is always in the plural, signifying that the “free and independent states,” as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, are united in forming a compact or confederacy with other states. Levying war against “them” means levying war against individual states, not something called “the United States government.” Therefore, Lincoln’s invasion and levying of war upon the Southern states is the very definition of treason in the Constitution.
Lincoln took it upon himself to arbitrarily redefine treason, not by amending the Constitution, but by using brute military force. His new definition was any criticism of himself, his administration, and his policies. He illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus (illegal according to this own attorney general, Robert Bates) and had the military arrest and imprison without due process tens of thousands of Northern-state citizens, including newspaper editors, the Maryland legislature, the mayor of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key who was a Baltimore newspaper editor, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, his chief critic in the U.S. Congress, and essentially anyone overheard criticizing the government. (See Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James Randall).
More than 300 Northern newspapers were shut down for criticizing the Lincoln regime as documented by James Randall, the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the twentieth century.
Lincoln’s Real Agenda: A Mercantilist Empire
Lincoln began his political career in 1832 as a Whig. Northern Whigs like Lincoln were the party of the corporate plutocracy who wanted to use the coercive powers of government to line the pockets of their big business benefactors (and of themselves). They proclaimed to stand for what their political predecessor, Alexander Hamilton, called the “American System.” This was really an Americanized version of the rotten, corrupt system of British “mercantilism” that the colonists had rebelled against. Its planks included protectionist tariffs to benefit Northern manufacturers and their banking and insurance industry business associates; a government-run national bank to provide cheap credit to politically-connected businesses; and “internal improvement subsidies,” which we today would call “corporate welfare,” for canal-, road-, and railroad-building corporations. So when Lincoln first ran for political office in Illinois in 1832 he announced: “I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.” He would devote his entire political career for the next twenty-nine years on that agenda.
The major opposition to Lincoln’s agenda of a mercantilist empire modeled after the British empire had always been from the South, as Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Tyler, among others, vetoed or obstructed Whig and later, Republican, legislation. There were Southern supporters of this agenda, and Northern, Jeffersonian opponents of it, but it is nevertheless true that the overwhelming opposition to this Northern, Hamiltonian scheme came from the Jeffersonian South.
Henry Clay was the leader of the Whigs until his death in 1852, and Lincoln once claimed that he got all of his political ideas from Clay, who he eulogized as “the beau ideal of a statesman.” In reality, the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln “American System” was best described by Edgar Lee Masters, who was Clarence Darrow’s law partner and a renowned playwright (author of The Spoon River Anthology). In his book, Lincoln the Man (p. 27), Masters wrote that:
“Henry clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises . . . He was the beloved son of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had not platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.”
This was the agenda that Abraham Lincoln devoted his entire political life to. The “American System” was finally fully enacted with Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad Bill, which led to historic corruption during the Grant administration with its gargantuan subsidies to railroad corporations and others; fifty years of high, protectionist tariffs that continued to plunder Agricultural America, especially the South and the Mid-West, for the benefit of the industrial North; the nationalization of the money supply with the National Currency Acts and Legal Tender Acts; and the beginnings of a welfare state with veterans’ pensions. Most importantly, the system of federalism that was established by the founding fathers was all but destroyed with a massive shift in political power to Washington, D.C. and away from the people, due to the abolition (at gunpoint) of the rights of nullification and secession.
Lincoln’ Biggest Failure
Slavery was ended peacefully everywhere else in the world during the nineteenth century. This includes Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York, where slaves were once used to build slave ships that sailed out of New York, Providence, Hartford, Providence, and Boston harbors. There were still slaves in New York City as late as 1853.
Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Fogel and co-author Stanley Engerman, in their book, Time on the Cross, describe how the British, Spanish, and French empires, as well as the Swedes, Danes, and Dutch, ended slavery peacefully during the nineteenth century. Whenever slaves did participate in wars in Central America and elsewhere, it was because they were promised freedom by one side in the war; the purpose of the wars, however, was never to free the slaves.
The British simply used tax dollars to purchase the freedom of the slaves and then legally ended the practice. The cost of the “Civil War” to Northern taxpayers alone would have been sufficient to achieve the same thing in the U.S. Instead, the slaves were used as political pawns in a war that ended with the death of as many as 850,000 Americans according to the latest research (the number was 620,000 for the past 100 years or so), with more than double that amount maimed for life, physically and psychologically. (Lincoln did make a speech in favor of “compensated emancipation” in the border states but insisted that it be accompanied by deportation of any emancipated slaves. He never used his “legendary” political skills, however, to achieve any such outcome, as a real statesman would have done – minus the deportation).
The Glory of the Coming of the Lord?
By the mid nineteenth century the world had evolved such that international law and the laws of war condemned the waging of war on civilians. It was widely recognized that civilians would always become casualties in any war, but to intentionally target them was a war crime.
The Lincoln regime reversed that progress and paved the way for all the gross wartime atrocities of the twentieth century by waging war on Southern civilians for four long years. Rape, pillage, plunder, the bombing and burning of entire cities populated only by civilians was the Lincolnian way of waging war – not on foreign invaders but on his own fellow American citizens. (Lincoln did not consider secession to be legal; therefore, he thought of all citizens of the Southern states to be American citizens, not citizens of the Confederate government).
General Sherman said in a letter to his wife that his purpose was “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people” (Letter from Sherman to Mrs. Sherman, July 31, 1862). Two years later, he would order his artillery officers to use the homes of Atlanta occupied by women and children as target practice for four days, while much of the rest of the city was a conflagration. The remaining residents were then kicked out of their homes – in November with the onset of winter. Ninety percent of Atlanta was demolished after the Confederate army had left the city.
General Philip Sheridan similarly terrorized the civilians of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. All of this led historian Lee Kennett, in his biography of Sherman, to honestly state that “had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign, p. 286).
About All Those Statues
Professor Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was perhaps the most famous academic libertarian in the world during the last half of the twentieth century. A renowned Austrian School economist, he also wrote widely on historical topics, especially war and foreign policy. In a 1994 essay entitled “Just War” (online at https://mises.org/library/just-war), Rothbard argued that the only two American wars that would qualify as just wars (defined as wars to ward off a threat of coercive domination) were the American Revolution and the South’s side in the American “Civil War.” Without getting into his detailed explanation of this, his conclusion is especially relevant and worth quoting at length:
“[I]n this War Between the States, the South may have fought for its sacred honor, but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. We remember the care with which the civilized nations had developed classical international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms, and broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s famous march through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century. . . . As Lord Acton, the great libertarian historian, put it, the historian, in the last analysis, must be a moral judge. The muse of the historian, he wrote, is not Clio but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood. In that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.
Perhaps, some day, their statues will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flag will be desecrated, and their war songs tossed into the fire.
Perhaps, some day. But in the meantime, and for the past 150 years, the mountain of lies that has concocted the Lincoln Myth has been invoked over and over again to “justify” war after war, all disguised as some great moral crusade, but in reality merely a tool to enrich the already wealthy-beyond-their-wildest-dreams military/industrial complex and its political promoter class. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his 1960 book, The Legacy of the Civil War, the Lincoln Myth, painstakingly fabricated by the Republican Party, long ago created a “psychological heritage” that contends that “the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue” caused by his victory in the “Civil War,” feels as though he has “an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.” This “indulgence,” wrote Warren, “is the justification for our crusades of 1917-1918 and 1941-1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal rehabilitation for others” (emphasis added). Robert Penn Warren believed that most Americans were content with all of these lies about their own history, the work of what he called “the manipulations of propaganda specialists,” referring to those who describe themselves as “Lincoln scholars.”
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor at Loyola University in Maryland. Among his books are: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe; Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch-Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution and What It Means for Americans Today.
For Netanyahu and other Israeli officials the chief concern was never the black clad death cult which filmed itself beheading Americans and burning people alive. “Let the Sunni evil prevail,” they say.
Israel is threatening to escalate military action in Syria against perceived Iranian interests. This week Netanyahu declared, “we will act when necessary according to our red lines” while hinting he prefers ISIS presence in Syria as opposed to Iran aligned fighters at his border. This comes as ISIS is now crumbling, and at a time when most world leaders of nations driving the external proxy war in Syria have toned down their rhetoric regarding the future fate of the Assad government.
After years of a regular drumbeat of bellicose statements emanating from the West and repeat talk of “Assad must go”, “red lines”, and years of constantly failed predictions that “regime demise is imminent,” there now seems a general acceptance that the Syrian government has emerged victorious in the 6-year long conflict. Not only did Trump this summer order the closure of the CIA’s regime change program which targeted Assad, but it appears even Gulf nations – lately embroiled in their own inter-GCC political civil war and airing of dirty laundry – have been forced to temper their rhetoric. Turkey also has reluctantly shifted its priorities in Syria after its well-known and documented regime change machinations – which included facilitating the transfer of tens of thousands of foreign jihadists (the core of which joined ISIS) across its southern border – have largely backfired. International media too, generally reflecting undeniable geopolitical realities, have bluntly headlined stories with “And the winner is: Assad” and “We have to accept that Assad will win in Syria” and “How Assad is Winning”.
But it appears Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t get the memo. On Wednesday the Israeli Prime Minister told Russian President Putin that Israel would not tolerate an Iranian presence in Syria and further signaled willingness to go to war in Syria to curtail Iranian influence. “Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon,” Netanyahu told Putin, adding further that, “We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel. Israel opposes Iran’s continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat.”
Image source: Sputnik International
The two leaders met for three hours in the Black Sea resort of Sochi – their sixth such meeting since September 2015. Putin did not respond publicly to the provocative words on Syria during the portion of the meeting open to reporters. Netanyahu later told Israeli reporters covering the meeting that:
Bringing Shi’ites into the Sunni sphere will surely have many serious implications both in regard to refugees and to new terrorist acts. We want to prevent a war and that’s why it’s better to raise the alarm early in order to stop deterioration.
Netanyahu’s reference to “the Sunni sphere” came after he summarized the closed door part of the discussion as dealing with “Iran’s attempt to establish a foothold in Syria in the places where ISIS was defeated and is leaving.” Netanyahu’s comments are a reflection of an extremely disturbing view which has become so prominent within Israeli defense circles as to be considered establishment: that ISIS is ultimately preferable to Iran and Assad. This is to say that continued ISIS presence in Syria and Iraq is a viable option and possibly better than pro-Iranian or even Russian spheres of influence in the Israeli prime minister’s mind. Of course, this “lesser evil is ISIS” view is nothing new. In Israel, for example, there are even “respected” think tanks tied in with major public universities which openly call for allowing ISIS to thrive in Syria.
The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, for example, which is one of Israel’s most internationally visible and influential think tanks (and located on the campus of Israel’s second largest university), published a policy paper last year which made a direct appeal to Israel’s Western partners with the unambiguous message contained in the essay’s title: “The Destruction of Islamic State is a Strategic Mistake.” Author and Director of the Begin-Sadat Centre, Efraim Inbar, argued against a Western military campaign to destroy ISIS while envisioning the group as an effective tool in sowing terror and chaos in Iran and Syria, with the added benefit of keeping Russia bogged down in defense of the Assad government. Inbar spelled this out clearly:
The continuing existence of IS [Islamic State] serves a strategic purpose. The American administration does not appear capable of recognizing the fact that IS can be a useful tool in undermining Tehran’s ambitious plan for domination of the Middle East.
While acknowledging the Islamic State’s utter genocidal brutality, the paper concluded:
The Western distaste for IS brutality and immorality should not obfuscate strategic clarity.
A policy paper published by an influential Israeli think tank which contracts with NATO argues that ISIS is a “useful tool” for Israel’s strategic defense.
Various current and former Israeli defense officials have echoed this point of view over the years, including former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren, who in 2014 surprised the audience at Colorado’s Aspen Ideas Festival when he said in comments related to ISIS that, “the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shias.” Oren, while articulating Israeli defense policy, fully acknowledged he thought ISIS was “the lesser evil”. Likewise, for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials the chief concern was never the black clad death cult which filmed itself beheading Americans and burning people alive, but the possibility of, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “a Shia and pro-Iran territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut” and establishment of “an Iranian radical empire.”
Former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren: “Let the Sunni evil prevail.”
Of course, such a perspective also tends to assume that Syrian and Iraqi sovereignty is non-existent (but instead seen as a mere extension of Iran and Russia), even as both countries now stand in better position in terms of operational sovereignty with Syria having liberated Aleppo and Iraq having regained Mosul. And that’s perhaps why there’s increasingly uninhibited truth-telling in Israel, the Gulf, and D.C. these days: the party is over in terms of the hoped for regime change in Syria. Perhaps now there’s simply more blunt and open talk wherein assumptions are laid bare as introspective strategists realign their talking points while still eyeing the ultimate neocon prize of regime change in Iran.
Though still rarely acknowledged in international reports, Israel has engaged in overt acts of war in Syria since at least 2012 and 2013, when it launched a massive missile attack against a Syrian defense technology facility in Jamraya outside of Damascus. In 2016 Israel went so far as to target Damascus International Airport, killing a well-known Hezbollah commander. In a significant admission last week, the head of Israel’s air force acknowledged nearly one hundred IDF attacks on convoys inside Syria over the course of the past 5 years. Earlier this summer Netanyahu himself was caught on a hot mic bragging that Israel had struck Syrian targets at least “a dozen times”. And this is to say nothing of Israel’s covert support to al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria’s south, which has reportedly involved weapons transfers and treatment of wounded jihadists in Israeli hospitals, the latter which was widely promoted in photo ops involving Netanyahu himself. As even former Acting Director of the CIA Michael Morell once directly told the Israeli public, Israel’s “dangerous game” in Syria consists in getting in bed with al-Qaeda in order to fight Shia Iran.
Perhaps the biggest blow to Israeli plans for rolling back Iranian presence in Syria came mid-summer of this year, when Trump agreed to a southwest Syria ‘de-escalation zone’ with Russia, which would necessarily involve Iranian cooperation. The agreement implicitly acknowledges Iran’s troop presence in Syria as legitimate, and as reported at the time further “ignored Israel’s positions almost completely.” But analysts are in general agreement that the US-Russia brokered deal has been relatively successful and a step in the right direction. Even the Reuters report on this week’s Netanyahu-Putin meeting seemed to acknowledge the deal’s effectiveness:
Russia has so far shown forbearance toward Israel, setting up a military hotline to prevent their warplanes or anti-aircraft units clashing accidentally over Syria.
But given that Israel has already invested itself so heavily in the push to remove Assad while routinely launching attacks on Hezbollah with impunity, it is unlikely to disengage from Syria anytime soon, even as close Western allies publicly change their tune. Netanyahu’s brazen words to Putin that ‘preventative’ escalation in Syria to destroy what Israeli defense officials commonly call the “Iranian land bridge” (or the so-called ‘Shia crescent’) may in reality be empty diplomatic posturing, yet it does reveal increased Israeli desperation as even the West is seeming to ignore Netanyahu’s repeatedly declared “red lines”.
Regardless, Netanyahu remains the Syria regime change lobby’s best hope. Already, within less than 24 hours of Netanyahu’s Russia visit, neocon columnists are calling for him to unilaterally “take action”:
If he really expects others , especially Putin, that he means business this time, he will have to go beyond words and into actions, as clearly Israel could not and should not allow Iran to turn South Syria into another South Lebanon.
With ISIS folding, refugees returning to their homes, stability taking root over large swathes of Syria, and successful de-escalation zones holding over parts of the country, it appears that only Netanyahu (along with terror groups like ISIS) is left unhappy in the region. Yet Syria continues on its current hopeful trajectory and path to recovery.
An Israeli delegation will be received at the White House this week. The agenda: Syria.
The three members of the Israeli delegation are:
• Yossi Cohen (photo), Head of Mossad (Foreign Intelligence);
• General Herzl Halevi, Head of Aman (Military Intelligence); and
• Colonel Zohar Palti, Head of Military and Political Affairs at the Ministry of Defense.
This delegation will meet with the following US representatives:
• General H.R. McMaster, National Security Advisor;
• Dina Powell, Vice National Security Advisor; and
• Jason Greenblatt, The President’s representative for international negotiations.
Israël, which has already secured a prohibition on Iranian troops or troops from the Hezbollah being present in Southern Syria, intends to use this visit as an opportunity to present compelling grounds for closing down the Silk Route. Israel’s justification? Teheran could use this route to supply arms to the Hezbollah.
The three members of the Israeli delegation and Trump’s representative (Jason Greenblatt), all four of them are Jewish Orthodox. As for Dina Powell, she was involved in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri and planning the “Arab Springs”.
Next month, hundreds across the country will participate in “Out of the Darkness” walks to raise awareness about suicide and to support the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).
AFSP and similar groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Active Minds claim there are “stigmas” and “barriers” to treatment for mental illness and there is not enough “awareness.” Two facts are missing in their messaging.
First, with as much as a fourth of some U.S. populations on antidepressants and ubiquitous quizzes and ads for them, there is neither a lack of “awareness” ––or are the drugs working. Why are suicides at an all time high at the same time psychoactive drug use is at an all time high?
Secondly, the groups are funded by Pharma to increase drug use and are widely considered unethical front groups, also called astroturf.
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, founded in 1987, is steeped in Pharma money. In 2008, AFSP merged with the Suicide Prevention Action Network USA or SPAN which had announced in 2004 that “SPAN USA’s efforts to develop and expand its suicide survivor network received a major boost with a recent grant from Eli Lilly and Company Foundation,” and “The foundation generously provided funding to support training, education and collaborative opportunities for SPAN USA’s existing network and enable further expansion into all 50 states.” No lack of transparency there.
In AFSP’s 2009 report, its leading donors were Pharma companies and it attributes a new screening project to “funding from Eli Lilly and Co., Janssen, Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.” It also credits Eli Lilly for printing its brochures. No lack of transparency there, either.
In 2011, AFSP appointed psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff president of the organization until his troubles began. Nemeroff became the subject of a congressional inquiry and was found to have so much unreported Pharma income, the $9.3 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study depression that he managed was suspended, which happens rarely. He left Emory University in disgrace.
A 1999 textbook written by Nemeroff and his colleague Alan Schatzberg was found, in 2010, to be written and funded by GlaxoSmithKline. Both Nemeroff and Schatzberg remain at AFSP and are termed “leaders.”
AFSP’s 2012 annual report reveals a $100,000 donation from Forest Laboratories, and donations from Eli Lilly, Pfizer and five other Pharma companies.
“AFSP also boasts the honor of having a former president – David Shaffer – who was responsible for leading the development of the now somewhat infamous TeenScreen,” writes Mad in America. “TeenScreen is a controversial tool that Marcia Angell (Harvard Professor and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine)…described as, “just a way to put more people on prescription drugs.”
The now defunct TeenScreen which screened young people for early signs of depression had “ties to the pharmaceutical industry,” reported the Scientific American.
Screening and intervention are widely accepted now to be nothing but sales tools—even to the mainstream medical establishment. In “How We Do Harm,” Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society and an oncologist, devotes a chapter to how prostate screening is often done just for money sometimes with disastrous and deadly results.
AFSP’s annual report names Pharma companies Sunovion, Janssen, Forest, Pfizer and Otsuka America Pharmaceuticals as financial donors. AFSP also named Phil Satow, former Forest executive, to its Project 2025 Advisory Committee. Satow has worked for many Pharma companies and is co-founder and board chair of the very pro-drugJED Foundation.
Preventing Suicides or Causing Them?
While SSRIs can be useful in some depressions, they can also cause suicide–a fact written clearly on all their package inserts. In 2005, after meeting with parents whose children killed themselves on the drugs and public health officials, the FDA attached the following “Black Box” warning to SSRI antidepressants.
Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders. Anyone considering the use of PAXIL [one SSRI] or any other antidepressant in a child, adolescent, or young adult must balance this risk with the clinical need. Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately and observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior. Families and caregivers should be advised of the need for close observation and communication with the prescriber.
One chilling demonstration of the danger to young adults is seen in the military where SSRI use and suicides have reached astounding proportions. More than a third of the deaths were in soldiers who never deployed so combat stress was not a factor.
Both NAMI and Active Minds swoop down on campuses after suicides to suggest that not enough antidepressants are being prescribed–despite the clear dangers posed for that age group and sometimes without knowing if the victim was already on the pushed drugs. To remove the fabricated stigma to mental problems, Pharma funded groups visit public schools to suggest more young people should be on drugs. They even produce posters with the message that mental illness is “cool.” Their efforts may not help the young people but they sure help Pharma.
You may like Donald Trump or not but he will go down in history as the President who made decisions of fundamental importance for his country and the world. Nobody else but Donald Trump will determine the configuration of US future nuclear arsenal, which is to go through massive modernization. Modernizing the US’s entire nuclear arsenal would cost $400 billion by 2026, according to a figure released by the Congressional Budget Office. The United States will modernize nearly every part of its nuclear arsenal, including replacement warheads, upgraded command-and-control systems, and other improvements across the strategic triad. Kicked off in April to be finished by the end of the year, the Nuclear Posture Review is underway and the final decisions are to be taken during the Donald Trump’s tenure.
The issue is being debated, with new visions presented and new proposals put forward. Concerned over America «fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity», the Supreme Commander-in-Chief wants the US to stay at the «top of the pack». The US Air Force is studying the options for «variable yield» bombs – nukes that can be dialed down to blow up an area as small as a neighborhood, or dialed up for a much larger punch.
Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believes that the future of nuclear deterrence lies, at least in part, in smaller nuclear weapons that the United States might actually use. «Whether we do it with a ballistic missile or re-entry vehicle or other tool in the arsenal, it’s important to have variable-yield nukes,» he said. Speaking at the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute at the Capitol Hill Club on August 3, the US number two military leader confirmed that as part of the Pentagon’s ongoing nuclear posture review, it is looking at a new generation of low-yield «mini-nukes» in order to ensure that the threat from America’s nuclear arsenal remains credible.
He thinks a conventional response to a nuclear strike would not be sufficient to deter the attacker. It’s not tactical or battlefield weapons the general is talking about but rather munitions with explosive force increased or reduced electronically through a dial-a-yield (variable yield) system. This combination of accuracy and low-yield will make them the most usable nuclear weapons in America’s arsenal to ensure global domination.
The threat of mutually assured destruction doesn’t work against smaller nations, such as North Korea and Iran, in the way that it used to against Russia or China. The US needs to be able launch a nuclear attack on an adversary without global consequences.
In practical terms, accurate munitions with low yield can destroy any specific target without devastation indiscriminate killing of civilians through explosive force or radioactive fallout. According to some estimates, a US counterforce strike against China’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos using high-yield weapons detonated at ground blast would kill approximately 3-4 million people. Using low-yield weapons and airbursts, the figure drops to just 700 fatalities.
In December, the Defense Science Board urged the Pentagon to incorporate low-yield and variable-yield reentry vehicles into future ICBM designs. The Air Force had not yet made a final decision on that. Discriminate employment options could be provided by a suite of low-yield, special-effects warheads (enhanced radiation, earth penetration, electromagnetic pulse, and others), including a shorter-range cruise missile that could be delivered by F-35s.
Variable yield with in combination with great accuracy means less destruction. But there is the reverse side of the medal. The smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation. Gen. James E. Cartwright, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believes that «what going smaller does,» he acknowledged, «is to make the weapon more thinkable». The Federation of American Scientists, has also argued that the high accuracy and low destructive settings meant military commanders might press to use the bomb in an attack, knowing the radioactive fallout and collateral damage would be limited.
So, the introduction of low yield accurate weapons (the nuclear utilization target selection – NUTS) asserts that such a thing as a limited nuclear war does exist and it is possible for a limited nuclear exchange to occur. So, the door is open for introducing nuclear warfare into local conflicts, such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, you name it. But a tiny nuke still has a larger impact than any conventional massive ordnance air blast (MOAB). The temptation to use more here and there will be irresistible to gradually turn the planet into a wasteland. Mutual mass destruction would occur at a slower rate, but it would still happen as mini-nukes gradually create the same amassed yield as normal nukes.
Congressional critics say the proliferation of such weapons would bring less, not more security. «I have no doubt the proposal to research low-yield nuclear weapons is just the first step to actually building them», Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told Roll Call in February. «I’ve fought against such reckless efforts in the past and will do so again, with every tool at my disposal».
There is another aspect of the problem. The introduction of variable yield weapons will provoke Russia, China and other nuclear powers into taking similar measures. Uncontrolled arms race will start. The plans to equip the delivery means with variable yield munitions never mention the problem of arms control, probably because the process is uncontrollable. Small size, variable yield warheads could be installed on a wide range of delivery means to make verification impossible. It will put an end to all hopes for saving the arms control regime which is being eroded to put the world back to the brink of nuclear war where it had been before the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. All the efforts applied to make the world safer will go down the drain. President Trump can prevent that from happening.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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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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