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Killing Someone Else’s Beloved

Promoting the American Way of War in Campaign 2016

By Mattea Kramer | TomDispatch | March 3, 2016

The crowd that gathered in an airplane hangar in the desert roared with excitement when the man on stage vowed to murder women and children.

It was just another Donald Trump campaign event, and the candidate had affirmed his previously made pledge not only to kill terrorists but to “take out” their family members, too. Outrageous as that might sound, it hardly distinguished Trump from most of his Republican rivals, fiercely competing over who will commit the worst war crimes if elected. All the chilling claims about who will preside over more killings of innocents in distant lands — and the thunderous applause that meets such boasts — could easily be taken as evidence that the megalomaniacal billionaire Republican front-runner, his various opponents, and their legions of supporters, are all crazytown.

Yet Trump’s pledge to murder the civilian relatives of terrorists could be considered quite modest — and, in its bluntness, refreshingly candid — when compared to President Obama’s ongoing policy of loosing drones and U.S. Special Operations forces in the Greater Middle East. Those policies, the assassinations that go with them, and the “collateral damage” they regularly cause are based on one premise when it comes to the American public: that we will permanently suspend our capacity for grief and empathy when it comes to the dead (and the living) in distant countries.

Classified documents recently leaked to the Intercept by a whistleblower describe the “killing campaign” carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen and Somalia. (The U.S. also conducts drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya; the leaked documents explain how President Obama has institutionalized the practice of striking outside regions of “active hostilities.”) Intelligence personnel build a case against a terror suspect and then develop what’s termed a “baseball card” — a condensed dossier with a portrait of the individual targeted and the nature of the alleged threat he poses to U.S. interests — that gets sent up the chain of command, eventually landing in the Oval Office.  The president then meets with more than 100 representatives of his national security team, generally on a weekly basis, to determine just which of those cards will be selected picked for death.  (The New York Times has vividly described this intimate process of choosing assassination targets.)

Orders then make their way down to drone operators somewhere in the United States, thousands of miles from the individuals slated to be killed, who remotely pilot the aircraft to the location and then pull the trigger. But when those drone operators launch missiles on the other side of the world, the terrifying truth is that the U.S. “is often unsure who will die,” as a New York Times headline put it.

That’s because intel on a target’s precise whereabouts at any given moment can be faulty. And so, as the Times reported, “most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” In 2014, for instance, the human-rights group Reprieve, analyzing what limited data on U.S. drone strikes was available, discovered that in attempts to kill 41 terror figures (not all of whom died), 1,147 people were killed.  The study found that the vast majority of strikes failed to take down the intended victim, and thus numerous strikes were often attempted on a single target. The Guardian reported that in attempts to take down 24 men in Pakistan — only six of whom were eventually eliminated in successful drone strikes — the U.S. killed an estimated 142 children.

Trump’s plan merely to murder the relatives of terrorists seems practically tame, by comparison.

Their Grief and Mine 

Apparently you and I are meant to consider all those accidental killings as mere “collateral damage,” or else we’re not meant to consider them at all. We’re supposed to toggle to the “off” position any sentiment of remorse or compassion that we might feel for all the civilians who die thanks to our country’s homicidal approach to keeping us safe.

I admit to a failing here: when I notice such stories, sometimes buried deep in news reports — including the 30 people killed, three of them children, when U.S. airpower “accidentally” hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October; or the two women and three children blasted to smithereens by U.S. airpower last spring at an Islamic State checkpoint in northern Iraq because the pilots of two A-10 Warthogs attacking the site didn’t realize that civilians were in the vehicles stopped there; or the innumerable similar incidents that have happened with remarkable regularity and which barely make it into American news reports — I find I can’t quite achieve the cold distance necessary to accept our government’s tactics. And for this I blame (or thank) my father.

To understand why it’s so difficult for me to gloss over the dead, you have to know that on December 1, 2003, a date I will never forget nor fully recover from, I called home from a phone booth on a cobblestone street in Switzerland — where I was backpacking at the time — and learned that my Dad was dead. A heart attack that struck as suddenly as a Hellfire missile.

Standing in that sun-warmed phone booth clutching the receiver with a slick hand, vomit gurgling up at the back of my throat, I pressed my eyes closed and saw my Dad. First, I saw his back as he sat at the broad desk in his home office, his spot of thinning hair revealed. Then, I saw him in his nylon pants and baseball cap, paused at the kitchen door on his way to play paddle tennis. And finally, I saw him as I had the last time we parted, at Boston’s Logan Airport, on a patch of dingy grey carpet, as I kissed his whiskered cheek.

A few days later, after mute weeping won me a seat on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight, I stood in the wan light of early December and watched the employees of the funeral home as they unloosed the pulleys to lower Dad’s wooden box into the ground. I peered down into that earthen hole, crying and sweating and shivering in the stinging cold, and tried to make sense of the senseless: Why was he dead while the rest of us lived?

And that’s why, when I read about all the innocent civilians we’ve been killing over the years with the airpower that presidential candidate Ted Cruz calls “a blessing,” I tend to think about the people left behind. Those who loved the people we’ve killed. I wonder how they received the news. (“We’ve had a tragedy here,” my Mom told me.) I wonder about the shattering anguish they surely feel at the loss of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends. I wonder what memories come to them when they squeeze their eyes closed in grief. And I wonder if they’ll ever be able to pick up the pieces of their lives and return to some semblance of normalcy in societies that are often shattering around them. (What I don’t wonder about, though, is whether or not they’re more likely to become radicalized — to hate not just our drones but our country and us — because the answer to that is obvious.)

Playing God in the Oval Office

“It’s the worst thing to ever happen to anyone,” actor Liam Neeson recently wrote on Facebook. He wasn’t talking about drone strikes, but about the fundamental experience of loss — of losing a loved one by any means. He was marking five years since his wife’s sudden death. “They say the hardest thing in the world is losing someone you love,” he added. I won’t disagree. After losing her husband, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg posted about “the brutal moments when I am overtaken by the void, when the months and years stretch out in front of me, endless and empty.” After her husband’s sudden death, author Joan Didion described grief as a “relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

That squares with the description offered by a man in Yemen who had much of his extended family blown away by an American drone at his wedding. “I felt myself going deeper and deeper into darkness,” the man later told a reporter. The drone arrived just after the wedding party had climbed into vehicles strewn with ribbons to escort the bride to her groom’s hometown. Everyone’s belly was full of lamb and it was dusk. It was quiet. Then the sky opened, and four missiles rained down on the procession, killing 12.

U.S. airpower has hit a bunch of other weddings, too. And funerals. And clinics. And an unknown and unknowable number of family homes. The CIA’s drone assassination campaign in the tribal regions of Pakistan even led a group of American and Pakistani artists to install an enormous portrait of a child on the ground in a frequently targeted region of that country. The artists wanted drone operators to see the face of one of the young people they might be targeting, instead of the tiny infrared figures on their computer consoles that they colloquially refer to as “bugsplats.” It’s an exhortation to them not to kill someone else’s beloved.

Once in a while a drone operator comes forward to reveal the emotional and psychic burden of passing 12-hour shifts in a windowless bunker on an Air Force base, killing by keystroke for a living. One serviceman’s six years on the job began when he was 21 years old and included a moment when he glimpsed a tiny figure dart around the side of a house in Afghanistan that was the target of a missile already on its way. In terror, he demanded of his co-pilot, “Did that look like a child to you?” Feverishly, he began tapping messages to ask the mission’s remote observer — an intelligence staffer at another location — if there was a child present. He’ll never know the answer. Moments later, the missile struck the house, leveling it. That particular drone operator has since left the military. After his resignation, he spent a bitterly cold winter in his home state of Montana getting blackout drunk and sleeping in a public playground in his government-issued sleeping bag.

Someone else has, of course, taken his seat at that console and continues to receive kill orders from above.

Meanwhile Donald Trump and most of the other Republican candidates have been competing over who can most successfully obliterate combatants as well as civilians. (Ted Cruz’s comment about carpet-bombing ISIS until we find out “if sand can glow in the dark” has practically become a catchphrase.) But it’s not just the Republicans. Every single major candidate from both parties has plans to maintain some version of Washington’s increasingly far-flung drone campaigns. In other words, a program that originated under President George W. Bush as a crucial part of his “global war on terror,” and that was further institutionalized and ramped up under President Obama, will soon be bequeathed to a new president-elect.

When you think about it that way, election 2016 isn’t so much a vote to select the leader of the planet’s last superpower as it is a tournament to decide who will next step into the Oval Office and have the chance to play god.

Who will get your support as the best candidate to continue killing the loved ones of others?

Go to the polls, America.

Mattea Kramer is a TomDispatch regular who writes on a wide range of topics, from military policy to love and loss. She blogs at This Life After Loss. Follow her on Twitter.

Copyright 2016 Mattea Kramer

March 3, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sanders and Trump Are Too Establishment on Syria

By Sheldon Richman | Free Association | February 23, 2016

Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton both want the U.S. government to set up a “safe zone” in Syria to care for refugees from the raging civil war. You may assess their judgment by noting that Secretary of State Clinton and Sen. Rubio also pushed for bombing and regime change in Libya, which was crucial in spreading bin Ladenite mayhem far and wide. And Rubio thinks knocking out the Sunni Islamic State would hurt Shi’ite Iran.

Ted Cruz does not call for a safe zone; he merely wants to bomb the Islamic State back to the stone age while arming the Kurds, whom the leadership of NATO member Turkey wants to destroy and the Sunni Arabs distrust. Cruz says the Kurds would be “our ground troops,” yet he does not rule out American troops as a last resort.

Where do the reputed anti-establishment candidates stand on the safe zone? Alas, Donald Trump favors it, and Bernie Sanders is ambiguous.

If this is disestablishmentarianism American-style, we are in bad shape.

“What I like is build a safe zone in Syria,” he said. “Build a big, beautiful safe zone, and you have whatever it is so people can live, and they’ll be happier. You keep ’em in Syria. You build a tremendous safe zone. It’ll cost you tremendously much less, much less, and they’ll be there and the weather’s the same.”

Like Cruz, Trump says he’d send U.S. ground forces “if need be,” but he also promises to “take the oil.” How would he do that without an extended stay for grounds troops.

What about Sanders? He is reported as opposing Clinton’s call for a safe zone, or a no-fly zone, but look at his precise wording from October: “I oppose, at this point, a unilateral American no-fly zone in Syria which could get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region” (emphasis added).

I realize that candidates don’t like to close doors because reopening them later can look awkward. Still, that makes me nervous.

Sanders approves of President Obama’s bombing of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and favors “supporting those in Syria trying to overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad” — which in reality means supporting bin Ladenites or worse. He has also said the Saudi regime should be pressured to fight the Islamic State: “This war is a battle for the soul of Islam and it’s going to have to be the Muslim countries who are stepping up. These are billionaire families all over that region. They’ve got to get their hands dirty. They’ve got to get their troops on the ground. They’ve got to win that war with our support.”

A Saudi-led effort, however, would be awkward, considering that the Saudis and their Gulf state partners enabled the rise of radical jihadism as part of an effort to make trouble for Iran and its ally Assad, their Shi’ite rivals. And let’s not forget that for a year the Saudis have practically been committing genocide, with Obama’s help, in Yemen. What’s with Sanders anyway?

“Why,” asks blogger Sam Husseini, “should a U.S. progressive be calling for more intervention by the Saudi monarchy? Really, we want Saudi troops in Syria and Iraq and Libya and who knows where else? You’d think that perhaps someone like Sanders would say that we have to break our decades-long backing of the corrupt Saudi regime — but no, he wants to dramatically accelerate it…. If the position of the most prominent ‘progressive’ on the national stage is for more Saudi intervention, what does that do to public understanding of the Mideast and dialogue between people in the U.S. and in Muslim countries?”

At least Sanders and Trump understand that George W. Bush’s Iraq war gave birth to the Islamic State, just as U.S. bombing and regime change in Libya and Obama and Clinton’s declaration of open season on Assad led to its expansion. What Sanders and Trump do not understand is that even the relatively limited involvement they favor would have a dynamic that could well lead a U.S. president to deploy ground troops to the quagmire both men say they want to avoid.

February 24, 2016 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Face It: Trump is Right About Iraq — and that Should Sink Clinton

By Sam Husseini | February 14, 2106

At first I thought it ironic that Saturday’s Republican debate happened in the “Peace Center” in Greenville, South Carolina. [video and transcript]

But perhaps that had a positive effect.

Actually, no. For the discerning listener, Donald Trump has been critical of U.S. militarism for some time. On Russia, on Syria, on Iraq, on North Korea.

People say that Trump is loud. But I don’t think he’s been loud enough.

Last night, he screamed an anti war stance to the boos of Bush’s and Rubio’s and Kasich’s one percent donors. It’s only half of what needed to be said, but it was a measure of reality that’s desperately needed.

Trump: “You fight ISIS first. Right now you have Russia, you have Iran, you have them with Assad and you have them with Syria. You have to knock out ISIS. … You can’t fight two wars at one time.” But of course, to some of the U.S. establishment, two wars is slacking, they want more than two wars. Trump continued: “We shoulda never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. … The World Trade Center came down (BOOING) during the reign. He [G. W. Bush] kept us safe?”

And, if anyone noticed, even as the auditorium packed of monied interests booed Trump, the tracker at the bottom of the screen went up for him.

Trump’s truth telling was met with more ridiculousness and lies.

Jeb Bush described Trumps attacks as “blood sport” which, given the subject matter at hand — his brother’s appetite for illegal war and failure in his responsibility to protect the U.S. public was, to put it mildly, ironic. And then Bush appealed to the values of his family, which, evidence would show, includes hands quite drenched in blood.

John Kasich’s reaction on Iraq WMDs was to appeal to Colin Powell’s credibility, which has been a late night TV joke for over a decade. He also claimed the U.S. got into a civil war, which is wrong — the U.S. government helped foster the sectarian violence. And no, Kasich, the borders of the Mideast were not “drawn after World War I by Westerners that didn’t understand what was happening there” — they were drawn by Westerners who wanted to divide and rule — as is the actual goal of Western interventions to this day.

Marco Rubio was perhaps the most priceless — “Saddam Hussein was in violation of UN resolutions, in open violation, and the world wouldn’t do anything about it.” That’s a total lie. Iraq had disarmed and the U.S. did everything it could to not have the UN verify that disarmament so that the draconian sanctions would continue on Iraq indefinitely and they could have their regime change war, see my time line: accuracy.org/iraq.

The worthies at the Weekly Standard now write: “Interviewers should press Trump on this: What evidence does Trump have that George W. Bush and his top advisers knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How many other government officials does Trump believe were in on the deception? What does Trump believe would have been the point of such a lie, since the truth would soon come out?”

In fact, it’s quite provable that the Bush administration lied about Iraqi WMDs before the invasion. I know, I helped document such lies at the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work, before the 2003 invasion:

In October, 2002, John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, noted: “Recently, Bush cited an IAEA report that Iraq was ‘six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new report, ‘there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six months away from constructing a nuclear weapon.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what was knowable at the time. See other such news releases from before the invasion: “White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit” and “Bush’s War Case: Fiction vs. Facts at Accuracy.org/bush” and “U.S. Credibility Problems” and “Tough Questions for Bush on Iraq Tonight.”

The problem in 2002 and early 2003 was that Bush didn’t get those tough questions. Just like there are no real tough questions about U.S. policy in Libya, Syria, etc now.

What we’re getting is Trump raising these issues years later when it seems some of the public is finally/still willing to hear them. And that’s splendid. The establishment has tried to just keep rolling along with their wars and deceits after the Iraq invasion. No accountability, no nothing. They make Wall Street look like self-critical introverts. To answer the Weekly Standard’s question — the truth still hasn’t come out in full force; Bush and the other pro-war deceivers have managed to get away with it all.

The only problem with what Trump is saying is that he’s not saying it loud and strong enough. He didn’t back up the case for impeachment against G. W. Bush for the Iraq invasion, which was the point of one of the questions to him, though several legal scholars have done so, including Francis Boyle, Jonathan Turley, and Bruce Fein and Elizabeth Holtzman. Reps. Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, in different ways and at different times, pursued the possibility.

Some are deriding Trump for apparently exaggerating his objections to the Iraq war in 2003 and 2004. Maybe so, but the fact of the matter is that most who spoke out meaningfully against Iraq war early were defacto drummed out of establishment media and politics.

Trump is being Buchanan 2.0 — that there’s some real bad that comes with that and there’s some real good that comes with that. And quite arguably in a post 9/11 world, the good is more important than it was in 1992.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I have no idea what Trump would actually do in office and what his current motivations are. He’s been contradictory, but the thrust of his comments is quasi isolationist. His campaign should certainly be a huge opening to groups wanting to reach out to millions of working class whites on issues of foreign policy, trade, as well as some core economic issues.

And even on foreign policy, Trump can be extremely dangerous. For example, the apparent force behind his anti Muslim comments is Frank Gaffney, a rightwing pro-Israel militarist.

The point is that what Trump is appealing to is an electorate that is sick of deceit and perpetual wars and there’s a lot of good that comes with that. It should be an opportunity for anyone claiming to care about peace — and not a cause to mock the people supporting him as I’ve seen many “progressives” do.

But, for the Democrats, the import now is this: What’s it going to look like if Trump is the Republican nominee? If Clinton is the Democratic nominee, Trump — with very good reason — will tie the stench of perpetual wars and the lies that accompany them around her neck. She will make the 2004 John “I-was-for-the-war-before-I-was-against-it” Kerry look like a stirring exemplar of gracefully articulated principles.

If any Democrat cares a bit about electability, Clinton — the candidate not only of Wall Street, but of endless war and of the war machine — should have been dumped yesterday.

February 14, 2016 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s Wrong to Take Clinton’s Claim of Possible US-Russia ‘Reset’ Seriously

Sputnik – January 18, 2016

MOSCOW  – A possibility of “a reset” in the Russian-US ties voiced by US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cannot be taken seriously, experts told Sputnik Monday, stressing that the statement was a tactical ploy by an “opportunistic” politician.

Earlier in the day, former US Secretary of State and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said a hypothetical “reset” of Russia-US relations is possible, but would depend on what Washington obtained from it.

“It would be a mistake to place any hope in Hilary Clinton,” John Laughland, the director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, said, adding that she is “a very opportunistic woman who will say anything without thinking about it very much.”

Under Clinton, the idea of “a reset” was inconsistent, Laughland highlighted, citing as an example the appointment of Michael McFaul as US Ambassador to Russia, who in fact was “one of the most catastrophic ambassadors that America has ever sent anywhere I would say.”

“Clinton’s comment clearly is an electoral gimmick meant to present her as a realist ready to constructively re-engage with Russia. But after the failure of Obama’s earlier reset, and given Clinton’s record as a hardliner, Moscow is not going to be in the least impressed,” Vlad Sobell, a professor of politics at New York University in Prague, told Sputnik.

He also reminded of the failure of a previous “reset,” in which Clinton even pressed “a reset button” with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and which resulted in Washington’s “multifaceted aggressive campaign against the Russian Federation.” A new “reset” would require almost impossible conditions and circumstances, and the essential thing for Washington to revise and renew contacts with Moscow is dropping its exceptional idea, a political analyst on Russia outlined.

“A fundamental reset would be possible only when the US elite gives up on its quest to establish absolute world hegemony,” Jon Hellevig noted.

Meanwhile, Laughland called the process “a reality check,” which envisaged the need for Washington to understand that the world was composed of other states with different and sometimes conflicting interests, and those interests could not be overruled by US exceptionalism.

The United States needs to stop thinking that its power and leadership are the necessary ingredients for the world peace, he noted, adding, nevertheless, that those passages have been an integral element of all the US strategic documents.

Looking at the future of Russian-US ties, the experts appear to be quite pessimistic regardless of who is elected the US president.”It is now beyond doubt that US policy is not driven by the White House but by the military-industrial complex, or the so called deep state. And this uncontrollable monster is demonstrably hell-bent on deepening the US-Russia confrontation,” Sobell suggested.

Hellevig pointed at Donald Trump as “the one that offers a hope for a real change in America and its relations to the rest of the world.”

If Trump stands for what he has said during his campaign, he could pose a threat to the present US elite, the political analyst said.

“But it is difficult to see how a mere president of the United States could in reality stand against those interest groups,” Hellevig admitted.

Russia-US ties have been strained since 2014, when Washington, as well as the European Union and their allies, introduced several rounds of sanctions against Moscow over its alleged involvement into an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, and what the Western officials and media described as “annexation” of Crimea.

The Black Sea peninsula reunified with Russia in March 2014 following a political referendum in the region, in which 96 percent of the population voted in favor of joining Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly insisted that the vote was held in full compliance with democratic procedure and international rule of law.

January 18, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Who is the Arch Racist: The Donald or Hillary?

By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | December 29, 2015

Who is the arch racist, Hillary or Trump?  To answer that, let us ask another question, a simple one.  Which is worse: to denigrate some members of a group or religion or race – or to kill them by the millions?  And maim more millions and displace even more millions?  Which is more “racist”?  With that in mind, who is the arch racist, Hillary or The Donald?

Do the liberals who criticize Trump, but not Hillary, as racist forget the slogan of the anti-Vietnam War movement, “Stop the Racist Bombing.”

And which causes more blowback, more revenge attacks by the victims – the denigration with words or the killing with bombs and sanctions?

Then consider the careers and statements of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Is there any doubt who is the greater offender in terms of hostility to Muslims?  And yet in all of the accusations of “racism” hurled at Trump from the editorial pages of the NYT to the most “progressive” web sites and outlets, there appears no corresponding charge against Hillary as racist.  That is symptomatic of a deep imperial sickness, an inability to see what is all too clear.  It is also an indication of the deep reach of the elite into all outlets of communication from the mainstream to most of the alternative ones and even into the minds of supposed progressives.

Let us consider some of the things that Donald Trump has had to say, most notably the following from the last debate of 2015 among the GOP candidates:

TRUMP: In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have (been) wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.  (Emphasis, jw)

Doug Fuda, a Catholic antiwar activist, describes this statement as “almost a call for a desperately needed American repentance.”

Just campaign rhetoric, you might say – although hardly the kind you hear from the rest of the candidates, especially on the value of the lives of those the US bombed into oblivion. Then consider the following from Trump’s March, 2004 Esquire interview:

Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.

What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!  (Emphasis, jw)

That statement was made 11 years ago when Trump was a TV sensation, not a political candidate.  A simple rule is that the greater the temporal gap between a candidate’s statements and voting day, the more heartfelt will be the statement. With that statement of 2004 you could not get further from the sentiment expressed by Hillary’s support for the war on Iraq or the proclamation by her close colleague Madeleine Albright that the Clinton sanctions on Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands, five hundred thousand children among them, were “worth it” to overthrow Saddam Hussein!  And Hillary herself peddling every neocon war in sight from Iraq to Libya and now Syria.  How can the liberals and progressives excoriate Trump but not Clinton as “racist”?  And how can they ignore Trump’s words of compassion for those on “the other side”?  Those words are unique among the current contenders for the presidency and they ought to earn Trump a sobriquet quite different from “new Hitler” or “racist.”  Have the so-called progressives lost touch with reality?

And now Hillary claims that Trump’s words fuel the fire of ISIS.  The fires of ISIS were raging long before Trump made his appearance on the national political scene.  And they burn bright because the wars waged by the demented Hillary and the rest of the Washington political elite provided the fuel that fed the Jihadist flame.  Trump’s words, advocating a temporary halt to the entrance of Muslims into the U.S., if they have had any effect at all, were but a handful of woodchips next to the forests of fuel that Hillary’s wars provided the conflagration that is ISIS. But Hillary is no stranger to the most outrageous of lies, including the charge that ISIS has made a video featuring Trump.

Now on late night TV Hillary, despite all the blood of non-whites on her hands, has the gall to say that Trump is “dangerous.”  He certainly has become a danger to her shot at the presidency.  But for her to act as though she cares one wit about the lives of people of color, especially Arabs and Muslims, is a very sick joke.

In the context of the presidential campaign, my liberal and progressive friends, go ahead and excoriate The Donald to the max for any genuine racism or bigotry.  Have at it.  This writer for one welcomes it. But do not do so without mention of Hillary’s record with the blood of millions of Muslims all over it, as the New York Times does.  At best that is a half-truth, which, of course, is a full lie.

Postscript.   Well worth reading is this fact-based piece “The Media Needs to Stop Telling This Lie About Trump,” by a self-described liberal Alberto Martinez native of Puerto Rico and now a Professor at the University of TX at Austin.

John V. Walsh can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

December 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , | 2 Comments

In Defense of the Rise of Trump

By Sam Husseini | December 16, 2015

The establishment so wants everyone else to unfriend Trump supporters on Facebook. There’s even an app to block them. That’ll teach them!

Yes, Trump plays a bully boy and is appealing to populist (good), nativist, xenophobic, racist sentiments (bad). Those things need to be meaningfully addressed and engaged rather than dismissed by self-styled sophisticates, noses raised.

Focusing on the negative aspects of his campaign has blinded people to the good — and I don’t mean good like, oh, the Democrat can beat this guy. I mean good like it’s good that some of these issues are getting aired.

Trump is appealing to nativist sentiments, but those same sentiments are skeptical of the militarized role of the U.S. in the world — as was the case of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 campaign.

The New York Times recently purported to grade the veracity of presidential candidates. Of course by their accounting, Trump was off the scales lying. But he recently said the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State “killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity…. The Middle East is a total disaster under her.” Now, I think that’s pretty accurate, though U.S. policy in my view may be more Machiavellian than stupid, but the remark is a breath of fresh air on the national stage.

But I’ve not seen anyone fact check that, because that’s not an argument much of establishment media wants to have. Of course, a few sentences later Trump talks about the attack on the CIA station in Benghazi, causing Salon to dismiss him as embracing “conspiracies,” which is likely all many people hear.

Shouldn’t someone who at times articulates truly inconvenient truths be noted as breaking politically correct taboos? Trump says such truths — like at the Las Vegas debate about U.S. wars:

We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

Which I think is a stronger critique of military spending than we’ve heard from Bernie Sanders of late.

But Trump — or Rand Paul’s — remarks about U.S. policies of regime change and bombings are often unexamined. It’s more convenient to focus on our kindness in letting a few thousand refugees in than to examine how millions of displaced people from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somali might have gotten that way because of U.S. government policies.

People say Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants is unconstitutional. News flash: the sitting Democratic president has bombed seven countries without a declaration of war. We’ve effectively flushed our constitution down the toilet. Does that justify violating it more? No. But the pretend moral outrage on this score is hollow.

And there’s a logic to the nativist Muslim bashing. It’s obviously wrong, but it’s rational given the skewed information the public is given. Since virtually no one on the national stage is seriously and systematically criticizing U.S. policy — it’s invasions, alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel — then it makes sense to say we’ve got to change something and that something is separating from Muslims.

Some sophisticates slam Trump for acting in the Las Vegas debate like he didn’t know what the nuclear triad is. Well, I have no idea if he knows what the nuclear triad is or if he was just acting that way. But I’m rather glad he didn’t adopt the administration position of saying it’s a good idea to spend a trillion dollars to “modernize” our nuclear weapons so we can efficiently threaten the planet for another generation. People may recall that for all the rhetoric from Obama on ending nuclear weapons, it was Reagan who apparently almost rose to the occasion when Gorbachev proposed getting rid of nuclear weapons. But Reagan is totally evil, so “progressives” have to hate him and so we’re not supposed to remember that.

So much of our political culture just lives off of hate. People hated Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, so they backed anything GW Bush wanted. People hated GW Bush, so they backed Kerry or Obama or whoever without condition, no matter where it lead. People hated Assad, so they helped the rise of ISIS. People now hate ISIS — some apparently want to nuke ’em — that will almost certainly lead to worse. John Kasich — the great reasonable Republican moderate — says “it’s time that we punched the Russians in the nose” — who cares if that brings us closer to nuclear war. Many demonize Trump — at last, someone from the U.S. who some in the mainstream label a Hitler. Hate, hate, hate, hate. Can we just view people for who they are with clear eyes, assessing the good and bad in them?

Trump calls for a cutoff of immigration of Muslims “until we can figure out what the hell is going on” — which, given our political culture’s seeming propensity to never figure out much of anything, might be forever. Then again, he’s raising a real question. Says Trump: “There’s tremendous hatred. Where it comes from, I don’t know.” Now, a reasonable stance would be to say let’s stop bombing until “we can figure out what the hell is going on.” But Trump — unlike virtually anyone else with a megaphone — is actually raising the issue about why there’s resentment against the U.S. in the Mideast.

Virtually the only other person on the national stage stating such things is Rand Paul, though his articulations have also been uneven and have been a pale copy of what his father has said.

Of course, what should be said is: If we don’t know “what the hell is going on!” — then maybe we should stop bombing. But that doesn’t get processed because the general public lives under the illusion that Obama is a pacifistic patsy. The reality is that Obama has been bombing more countries than any president since World War II — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.

At the Las Vegas debate, Trump said: “When you had the World Trade Center go, people were put into planes that were friends, family, girlfriends, and they were put into planes and they were sent back, for the most part, to Saudi Arabia.” Which is totally mangled, but raises the question of Saudi Arabia with relation to 9/11.

Half of what Trump says is boarderline deranged and false. But he also says true things — and critically, important things that no one else with any media or political access is saying.

Yes, Trump says he’ll bomb the hell out of Syria, as does virtually every other Republican candidate. But Obama’s already bombing the hell out of Syria and Iraq — but it’s quiet, so people think it’s not happening. So they reasonably think passivity is the problem.

What people are right in sensing is that Obama, Bush and the rest of the establishment is playing endless geopolitical games and they’re right to be sick of it. The stated goals — democracy in the Mideast, getting rid of WMDs, stability in the right and protecting the U.S. public are obviously not going to be achieved by the policies of the establishment. They in all likelihood are pretexts and the planers have other, unstated, objectives that they are pursuing.

Trump touts his alleged opposition to the Iraq war. Some of us launched major campaigns to try to stop the 2003 invasion. I don’t remember seeing Trump at any of the anti-war rallies in 2002, but he apparently made a few remarks in 2003 and 2004. Certainly nothing great or courageous. But it’s good that someone with the biggest megaphone is saying the Iraq war was bad. People who are getting behind him are thus reachable on the U.S. government’s proclivity toward endless war.

And perhaps think for a minute about what a Trump-Clinton race would be like, given that she voted for the invasion of Iraq.

Now, Trump may well be no different if he were to get into office. But he conveys the impression that he will act like a normal nationalist and not a conniving globalist. And much of the U.S. public seems to want that. And that’s a good thing. He’s indicating that there’s a solution to constant war and that he’s different from everyone else who has signed on to perpetual war. It’s good that that’s energizing people who had given up on politics.

Trump — apparently alone among Republican presidential candidates — is saying that he will talk to Russian President Putin. Having some sense that the job of a president is to attempt to have reasonable relations with the other major nuclear powered state is a serious plus in my book. He conveys the image of being a die-hard nationalist, but — unlike most of our recent leaders — not hell-bent on global domination. People who want a better world should use that.

No prominent Democrat has taken on the position that we should really seriously examine the root causes of anger at the U.S. government. The public is never presented with a world view that does that. The only one on the national stage in recent memory to have done so in recent history was Ron Paul — and he was demonized in ways similar to Trump by much of the liberal establishment in 2008.

Bernie Sanders has of course rightly touted his vote against the Iraq invasion in 2002 and has very correctly linked that invasion to the rise of ISIS. But Sanders had a historic opportunity to address these issues in a debate just after the Paris attack on Nov. 13, and actually didn’t seem to want to talk foreign policy. Now he’s complaining about a lack of media coverage. Yes, the media are unfair against progressive candidates, but you don’t do any good by refusing to engage in what is arguably the great, defining debate of our time.

Even more troubling has been that Sanders has adopted the refrain that we need to have the Saudis “get their hands dirty.” That’s exactly the wrong approach and one shared with most of the Republican field. Even at the liberal extreme, Barbara Lee has declined to take issue with the U.S. arming with Saudi Arabia as it kills away in Yemen.

In terms of economics, Trump is alone in the Republican field in defending in a progressive tax. Tom Ferguson has noted: “lower income voters seem to like him about twice as much as the upper income voters who like him in the Republican poll.” Trump has “even dumped on some issues that are virtually sacred to the Republicans, notably the carried interest tax deduction for the super rich.” Writes Lee Fang: “Donald Trump Says He Can Buy Politicians, None of His Rivals Disagree.”

Can progressives pause for a moment and note that it’s a good thing that someone who a lot of people who have checked out of the political process are backing someone saying these things?

It’s important to stress: I have no idea what Trump actually believes. Backing him as person is probably akin to picking a the box on The Price is Right. He could of course be even more authoritarian than what we’ve seen so far. The point I’m making is what he’s appealing to has serious elements that are a welcome break from the establishment as well as some that are reactionary.

I have no personal love lost for Trump. Truth is, I lived in one of his buildings when I was growing up in Queens. His flamboyance as my dad and I were scraping by in a one bedroom apartment rather sickened me. I remember seeing the recently completed Trump Tower in Manhattan for the first time as a teen with my father and my dad bemused himself with the notion that he’d own one square inch of the place for the monthly rent checks he wrote to Trump for years.

And Trump for all I know is a total tool of the establishment designed to implode, as some of critics of Bernie Sanders have accused him of Sheepdogging for Hillary Clinton, so too Trump might be doing for the Republican anti establishment base. Or he might pursue the same old establishment policies if he were ever to get into office — that’s largely what Obama has done, especially on foreign policy. Trump says “I was a member of the establishment seven months ago.”

The point is that the natives are restless. And they should be. It’s an important time to engage them so they stay restless and funnel that energy to constructive use, not demonize or tune them out.

Sam Husseini is communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy and founder of votepact.org — which urges left-right cooperation. Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini.

December 16, 2015 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

DONALD TRUMP IS ELECTABLE AS PRESIDENT, BUT…

By John Chuckman | Aletho News | December 15, 2015

I think it entirely possible Donald Trump could be elected President. I am not in favor of it – but then neither am I in favor of any of the other candidates on offer – yet I do think his election is increasingly possible. America displays every four years – almost like a temporary clothesline erected on the front lawn of the White House loaded with soiled and tattered undergarments – the sheer poverty of its political system. Every four years, a gang of mediocrities and thugs spend vast amounts of money to say, from coast to coast, nothing worth hearing.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone bothers to run for office in a long, costly, and exhausting contest which if won means four years of taking directions from the Pentagon and seventeen security agencies. America is not a democracy, and the last president who actually tried to exert some significant influence on affairs left much of the right side of his head in the streets of Dallas. But ego is a mighty powerful motivator, and the gang engaged in national American politics has plenty of it, even if few other redeeming qualities.

Trump could make Hillary Clinton regret she ever shared a stage to debate with him, especially a Hillary Clinton whose past has finally begun to catch up with her, now finally wounded by her long record of dark intrigues and vicious lies. Trump is no angel by comparison, but his focus has been on making money and aggrandizing his name, things most Americans respect. He has no political record for which to account or apologize.

He has said many things which make him sound like a juvenile given to insulting people’s appearances, and he has some proposals which would prove impossible for anyone to implement, yet somehow he has hit on some issues which find a welcome hearing by many, especially unsophisticated people who might even once have been Democratic voters. Americans are tired of unresponsive politicians, something of which they have stables full. They are also tired of the bewildering events in a world at the center of which invariably the United States finds itself. Most Americans never voted for such things and have no interest in them. Only dishonest appeals about supporting the troops keep them from rebelling, and their own increasingly difficult economic lives generate a lot of stress. America is full of frustrated and angry people, many of them not even sure what it is they are so angry about and many of whom have no time or patience to understand the world in which they live. Hard-hitting simplicities are music to the ears.

One of the sharpest ironies of Trump is that not all of his views are simplicities. Some are dead-on assessments of things which could have been avoided and leaders who failed the country. So this man comes bundled with a wide-ranging group of political goods, far more so than anyone I can recall in recent times. Just think of the simple-minded recitals of senior American politician after senior American politician. They all sound rather like Sarah Palin reciting her money-generated mantra but with differing levels of sophistication and vocabulary. She is the basic template while other models come with little tweaks and feature, but they all say nothing worth hearing. There is a very real reason for that: under America’s establishment-run, aristocratic political system, there is almost zero latitude for change either in domestic or foreign affairs, except in the field of war where more seems always welcome.

No matter what you think of Trump’s views – and the author should confess he is not an admirer of most of them – many people find it utterly refreshing to hear him touch subjects none of the usual Washington politicians touch. He goes far beyond the pathetic high-school recitation of lines by Sarah Palin. Or, I might add, the paid lies of men like Newt Gingrich and scores of others who will literally speak in absurdities in return for multi-million dollar campaign contributions. I only mention Newt because the last time he tried to campaign, he ran around the country saying there really was no such thing as a Palestinian, his quid pro quo for nearly twenty million dollars in funds from a man with claustrophobic ties to Israel.

Just think of the all the bland, say-nothing-worth-hearing types, epitomized by Jeb Bush who resembles nothing so much as a well-groomed hamster both in the sounds he makes and in his blinking-into-the-camera, insipid-smile looks. And think of all the grotesque liars who run for high office in America never telling people what really motivates or enables them or what special interests pay their way. It all really is a parody of democracy.

You might think a brash and independent-minded guy like Trump is just the answer to changing some of that, and I can well understand the hopes, but there are very powerful barriers in American society as it now has come to be organized against such hopes being realized. The first day of sitting at a huge polished conference table, greatly outnumbered by arrogant country-club security chiefs with secret budgets you cannot imagine and rigid generals whose uniforms glitter almost like Christmas trees, might just test the mettle of a Trump. Add to that the heads of great corporations each worth hundreds of billions of dollars making private appointments. And then the polished heads of mighty special interest lobby groups used to getting their way. And just who are your allies and confidants in opposing some of the things they demand? You have no political background from which you would have built such relations.

It’s a daunting and dreary picture, and you have to remember, these powerful people who compose the formidable American aristocracy are the very ones who allowed and encouraged the ugly situations into which America is straight-jacketed.

Despite Trump’s freshness and energy, a Trump victory could prove a disaster. Not because he would flirt with atomic war, something Obama now already does regularly, or create vast new domestic schemes. Of course, the scheme of building a fence across Mexico and rounding up and returning all illegal migrants is vast indeed – a virtual moon-landing project from scratch – but this author thinks it would fortunately prove impossible. Even if the American aristocracy permitted him to pursue such a Don Quixote project, it would only be in order to gain his compliance in other, far more important and consequential matters such as the vast, destabilizing, and murderous wars in the Middle East and the bullying of Russia and China.

On top of all that, Trump has made some deadly serious enemies, and number one on the list is Israel and its supporters who view him as not adequately friendly to Israel’s interests.

When Trump, for example, speaks, entirely sensibly, about leaving Syria for Putin to sort out, he goes dead against a dark and costly scheme which was in part created by Israel. They want Assad dead. They want Syria Balkanized much as Iraq is. And they are enjoying the stolen, discount-priced oil they get indirectly from ISIS through Turkey.

And they don’t want Russia gaining genuine influence in the Mideast, the United States being Israel’s source of seemingly inexhaustible assistance, permission, and protection – the provider of vast subsidies of every kind imaginable. Moreover, Netanyahu and other leaders in Israel have long striven to have Israel assume a geopolitical role in the Mideast as a kind of miniature replica of what the United States is in the world, a bully hegemon. There’s no room in that picture for Russia.

If you read the kind of columnists who regularly serve as apologists for Israel’s brutality – there’s at least one filling that role on the staff of every mainline newspaper – you find a universally negative attitude towards Trump. It has nothing to do with conservatism versus liberalism, and it certainly has nothing to do with human rights. The columnists use words about human rights to make their view more palatable to the general population of readers and to serve as a smokescreen for what it is with which they are really defending.

After all, Israel’s Netanyahu is perhaps the world’s most flagrant violator of human rights, holding about five million people completely against their will with absolutely no rights or freedoms, periodically stealing their homes and land, violating the sanctity of their religious places, and frequently just killing large batches of them – always undoubtedly with an eye to making them so miserable that they will pick up and leave. The people of Gaza are not even allowed to import cement to repair Israel’s recent destruction of their homes and institutions. I simply do not know of crueler circumstances in the world completely tolerated by America’s aristocracy.

There have been several ugly outbursts recently, including one from an executive of Colorado’s American Civil Liberties Union who was yelling about assassinating Trump voters, words I just could not believe when I first read them.

But then in past years we have had extremist defenders of Israel propose many horrible measures including one from an American lawyer who proposed summarily killing the entire families of any Palestinian acting as a “terrorist,” so the raving speech is not without precedent. The executive’s words communicate the intense level of hate which simmers. I am sure this disturbed man – since forced to quit – is not the only one with such thoughts bubbling like sewerage through his mind.

Always admirers of political hamsters and gerbils as candidates with dark eminences behind them doing the necessary filth, the Bush-Cheney model if you will, or indeed the Eisenhower-Dulles or Reagan-Casey one – the Republicans will make every effort to stop Trump with backstage political manipulations, such as a brokered convention, but they may well not succeed, his position being made quite strong by the possibility of his running as a third-party candidate, and one with huge financial resources to boot.

But if they fail, and he wins, look out for the darkest possibilities.

All this is quite terrible, but that is simply what America is today, terrible.

December 15, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Israel funding Daesh terrorists: Trump

Press TV – December 15, 2015

US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has implied that Israel is supporting Daesh (ISIL) by “sending massive amounts of money” to the Takfiri terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

Trump made the remarks in a recent interview with the Morning Joe show, shortly before he cancelled his trip to Israel.

“Some of our so-called allies that we work with and that we protect militarily, they are sending massive amounts of money to ISIS and to al-Qaeda and to others,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group.

Asked about who he was talking about, Trump said “you know who it is. What do I have to bring it up for? You know who it is.”

He said that he will not mention US allies which support Daesh because of his relationship with Israelis, but noted that no one talks about Israel, even though everyone is aware of support Israel and other states provide to ISIL.

“There are, but I’m not gonna say it, because I have a lot of relationships with people. But there are. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And nobody says it. Nobody talks about it,” Trump said.

The multi-billionaire businessman said the US government knows about it, suggesting checking records to insure his claims are true.

“All you have to do is check your records. Our government knows the countries,” he stated.

On Thursday, Trump cancelled his plan to visit Israel, saying he would reschedule “at a later date after I become President of the US.”

One reason he mentioned why he had called off his visit was that he did not want to put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “under pressure.”

Trump’s campaign has been marked by controversy from the start, but he leads the GOP field with 33 percent support among Republican primary voters.

According to American writer Mickey Z., “It’s always interesting when Donald Trump peels away a propaganda layer to offer a tiny glimpse at the corporate-political brotherhood.”

December 15, 2015 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Trump: Obama regime ‘killed hundreds of thousands’ in Syria

Press TV – December 13, 2015

US presidential candidate Donald Trump says the Obama administration is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria and Libya.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner pinned blame for the deadly Syrian conflict and the rise of the Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.

“She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.”

“You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country,” he added. “She talks about me being dangerous; she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Fox News questioned Trump about the claim. “What do you mean, ‘hundreds of thousands?’ ”

“She was secretary of state. Obama was president, the team,” Trump responded. “Two real geniuses.”

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. The United States and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – have been supporting the terrorists operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis.

The foreign-sponsored war against the Syrian state and people has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.

Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.

December 13, 2015 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Phony Torture Debate: Why Trump is Wrong about Waterboarding — It’s Probably Not What You Think

By Sam Husseini | November 25, 2015

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — to the outrage of liberals everywhere — says he wants more waterboarding. Reports the Washington Post: “‘Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat,’ Trump said to loud cheers during a rally at a convention center [in Columbus, Ohio] Monday night that attracted thousands. ‘And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.’

“Trump said such techniques are needed to confront terrorists who ‘chop off our young people’s heads’ and ‘build these iron cages, and they’ll put 20 people in them and they drop them in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull them up 15 minutes later.’

“‘It works,’ Trump said over and over again. ‘Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing. It works.'”

There’s no shortage of people denouncing or pretending to correct Trump’s remarks. Virtually all miss the point. The fact is torture produces bad but useful intelligence. That is, it gives you “intel” that some bigwig with a conniving agenda wants to push. Like that Iraq had WMDs and we needed to invade.

As I wrote in my piece of last year: ““Both Sides” Are Wrong: Torture Did Work — to Produce Lies for War (See Footnote 857 of Report)“:

Nothing solidifies the establishment more than a seemingly raging debate between two wings of it in which they are both wrong. Not only wrong, but in their wrongness, helping to cover their joint iniquities, all the while engaging in simultaneous embrace and fingerpointing to convey the illusion of seriousness and choice.

>The truth is that torture did work, but not the way its defenders claim. It “worked” to produce justifications for policies the establishment wanted, like the Iraq war. This is actually tacitly acknowledged in the [Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, partly declassified last year] — or one should say, it’s buried in it. Footnote 857 of the report is about Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured in Afghanistan shortly after the U.S. invasion and was interrogated by the FBI. He told them all he knew, but then the CIA rendered him to the brutal Mubarak regime in Egypt, in effect outsourcing their torture. From the footnote:

“Ibn Shaykh al-Libi reported while in [censored: ‘Egyptian’] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons. Some of this information was cited by Secretary Powell in his speech at the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [censored], 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [censored, likely ‘Egyptians’], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear. For more more details, see Volume III.” Of course, Volume III — like most of the Senate report — has not been made public….

So, contrary to the claim that torture helped save lives, torture helped build the case of lies for war that took thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, helping to plunge the region into astounding violence, bringing al-Qaeda into Iraq, leading to the rise of ISIS and further bloody wars.

But rather than face how torture actually works — and indeed how the establishment acknowledges it works — it’s more fun for so-called conservatives like Trump to talk about how we shouldn’t care that a bunch of presumably bad guys getting tortured and for liberals to pontificate about how we’re better than that and we need to live up to our values. Or for some to say that “torture doesn’t work” without examining what “works” means in a manipulative political context. Everyone can then pretend to feel good about themselves: Trump cares about your safety; Liberals uphold our great values that show how superior we are to the savages, and how superior they are to Trump.

It’s all phony. I’m not even sure if Trump knows it’s phony. I do know that many reporters and presumed opponents of torture are aware of this, but have chosen to stay mum about it. Again, as I wrote in my piece last year:

Exploiting false information has been well understood within the government. Here’s a 2002 memo from the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency to the Pentagon’s top lawyer — it debunks the “ticking time bomb” scenario and acknowledged how false information derived from torture can be useful:

“The requirement to obtain information from an uncooperative source as quickly as possible — in time to prevent, for example, an impending terrorist attack that could result in loss of life — has been forwarded as a compelling argument for the use of torture. … The error inherent in this line of thinking is the assumption that, through torture, the interrogator can extract reliable and accurate intelligence. History and a consideration of human behavior would appear to refute this assumption.” The document concludes: “The application of extreme physical and/or psychological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably, the potential to result in unreliable information. This is not to say that the manipulation of the subject’s environment in an effort to dislocate their expectations and induce emotional responses is not effective. On the contrary, systematic manipulation of the subject’s environment is likely to result in a subject that can be exploited for intelligence information and other national strategic concerns.” [PDF]

So torture can result in the subject being “exploited” for various propaganda and strategic concerns. This memo should be well known but isn’t, largely because the two reporters for the Washington Post, Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, who wrote about in 2009 it managed to avoid the most crucial part of it in their story, as Jeff Kaye, a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement, has noted. One reporter who has highlighted critical issues along these lines is Marcy Wheeler — noting as the recent report was being released: “The Debate about Torture We’re Not Having: Exploitation.”

An additional irony is that Trump is putting himself out there as the guy opposed to the Iraq war.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson has acknowledge the torture-evidence link, and I questioned Powell about this. Noted Wilkerson: “What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 — well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion — its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.”

Trump can pose as standing up to political correctness. The actual political correctness is how torture is used by war makers to get the tortured “evidence” they want to have a pretext for war and other hideous policies. The actual political correctness is to pretend that “torture doesn’t work” when it works for evil ends all too well. It’s way past time to get off the liberal-conservative phony debate not-so-merry-go-round.

November 25, 2015 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Israel was prime force behind 9/11 attacks: American scholar

Press TV – November 24, 2015

An American scholar and journalist in Wisconsin says not only was the Zionist regime the primary force behind the 9/11 attacks, it was Israeli spies working for Mossad – not Arab Muslims – who celebrated the burning Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Monday, a day after an international Jewish organization based in the US denounced Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s claim that dozens of Arab Muslims cheered as the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11 as unsubstantiated.

“It is unfortunate that Donald Trump is giving new life to long-debunked conspiracy theories about 9/11,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in a statement on Sunday, after Trump said in an interview with ABC News that there were “people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population that were cheering as the buildings came down.”

The ADL statement said there is no basis for Trump’s claim, calling it irresponsible and factually challenged. “This seems to be a variation of the anti-Semitic myth that a group of Israelis were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers fell.”

Commenting to Press TV, Dr. Barrett said the Anti-Defamation League is “correct that Trump is factually challenged when he talks about the Arabs celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th.”

“But he in fact is referring to a true story, which is that Israeli spies working for the intelligence agency Mossad were in fact arrested after they were caught celebrating the September 11th attacks,” he added.

Sivan Kurzberg led Israeli spies 

“They were set up to film the World Trade Center attacks before the first plane hit. They wildly celebrated the flaming and then exploding Twin Towers. They photographed themselves flicking cigarette lighters in front of the burning and exploding buildings,” he stated.

“And then they were arrested. They were held for forty or so days. They failed lie detector tests, and they then returned to Israel. They went on television and admitted that they were there to ‘document the event’, that is Israeli spies led by Sivan Kurzberg are on record in the Israeli mainstream media, bragging that they were sent to New York to document the event,” he said.

“And that means that the people they were working for, namely the Israeli government, were complicit in the event. Apparently the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t know that, because they are saying that Trump’s comment blaming the Arabs appears to be a mixed up version of what they are calling the ‘myth’ of the dancing Israelis celebrating their success on 9/11. But that’s not a myth,” Dr. Barrett emphasized.

“It’s been reported reliably in all kinds of mainstream media, including the Bergen New Jersey Record, which first exposed the story. The leading Jewish newspaper in the United States, The Forward, and Israeli media – including the television show in which Kurzberg brags about being sent to New York to document the event, that was coming up on September 11th,” he pointed out.

“So, the Anti-Defamation League, which is actually an Israeli propaganda outfit, is essentially running a misdirection ploy. They are trying to discredit ‘conspiracy theories’ about 9/11, because they know full well that the government of Israel was the prime force behind the attacks on September 11th,” the analyst explained.

Jewish group lying about 9/11

“The Anti-Defamation League is lying when they are calling it a myth. It isn’t a myth.  And every place from the Jewish newspaper The Forward to the Israeli media, even to Fox News, which ran an investigative series by Carl Cameron, admits that this actually happened. Mossad agents were caught red-handed celebrating the success of their destruction of their World Trade Center by controlled demolition on September 11th, 2001,” Dr. Barrett concluded.

The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, and foreign intelligence agencies orchestrated the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

Dr. Barrett and other eminent scholars have argued that the 9/11 attacks were carried out through a “controlled demolition” technique by placing explosive material inside the twin towers, causing the structures to collapse on themselves in a matter of seconds.

November 24, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | 5 Comments

Truth about 9/11 would take down the US as a global empire: Scholar

Press TV – October 20, 2015

The truth about the September 11, 2001 terror attacks would not only destabilize the American political system but it would also take down the US as a global empire, an American scholar says.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, while commenting on the ongoing feud between Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Jeb Bush over the 9/11 attacks.

On Friday, Trump blamed former US President George W. Bush for the September 11, 2001 attacks. On Sunday, Trump said that if he had been president in 2001, his immigration policy would have kept al-Qaeda terrorists from attacking the US.

In response, Bush said his brother, George W. Bush, is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. “Look, my brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do.”

“He united the country,” Bush told CNN. “He organized our country, and he kept us safe. And there’s no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that.”

Bush deserves blame for 9/11

Dr. Barrett said everyone in the United States believes that George W. Bush deserves blame for the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“Ever since 9/11, many Americans, between one-third in some polls who say that the US government under Bush perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or intentionally let them happen in order to trigger war in the Middle East, and up to 90 percent of Americans in other polls, who say that they don’t really believe or fully believe the official story of 9/11, this issue has been a smoldering barrel of political dynamite, “he said. “And now it’s smoldering a little bit harder, and it might just go off.”

“According to Jeb Bush, the brother of George Bush, Jeb being the apparent favorite candidate to win the Republican nomination for president, at least until Trump emerged, Jeb is now on the defensive, arguing that his brother George W. Bush was not responsible and there’s no blame for the 9/11 attacks,” he added.

“Of course, this is an issue that Jeb cannot possibly win on, because no matter how you analyze the 9/11 attacks, whether you’ve done the full investigation using alternative sources, such as the magisterial work of Dr. David Ray Griffin, to learn that in fact the 9/11 attacks were not a surprise attack by a foreign enemy, they were in fact an inside job, a spectacular public relations stunt designed to create a neoconservative policy coup d’etat and launch a series of wars that would primarily benefit Israel,” he said.

“But whether you’ve done the search and figure that out or not, you have to admit that Bush was clearly responsible for 9/11 even if he was not actively complicit in this coup d’etat,” Dr. Barrett noted.

“And even if you refuse to admit that it was a coup d’etat, it’s obvious that Bush should be blamed for what happened,” he stated.

The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

Bush receives CIA briefing  

“In August of 2001, George W. Bush received the president’s daily briefing from the CIA, and it was headlined, ‘Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States’. Bush whipped his neck around and angrily screamed, ‘Well, you’ve covered your ass now,’” Dr. Barrett said.

“Of course, the ungenerous interpretation of this is that Bush knew full well that plans were proceeding apace for the big public relations event in September, and he did not appreciate the CIA briefer covering his posterior while passing the buck up to the president,” he added.

“The other interpretation would be that Bush is just such a complete fool and idiot that his outburst had no real meaning, and he should be blamed for 9/11 not as a complicit perpetrator, or someone who intentionally knew it was coming and let it happen, but rather someone whose incompetence was so overwhelming that somehow he caused the entire military defense system of the United States to have an unprecedented collapse,” he continued.

The American scholar went on to say that “the bottom line here is that it’s obvious to everyone in the United States that George W. Bush deserves blame for 9/11.”

“The only question is whether because he was insanely incompetent and somehow magically projected his grotesque incompetence on the rest of the government and then saw everyone who was incompetent get promoted or was it something much, much worse. But the reality is it was much, much worse,” he emphasized.

“And if this political dynamite bomb goes off, it’s not just going to take out the Bush family, which has been the most corrupt organized crime family in America running the drug dealings at the CIA, among other things, but it’s going to take down the whole political system as we know it today, and possibly going to take down the US as a global empire,” he observed.

“That’s one reason everybody in the US here is afraid to open up this can of worms, but that actually would be a very good thing; nothing better could possibly happen to the planet than for this can of worms to get opened, and for the US empire to be taken down, and for something more in line with the ideals of America’s founding fathers to rise up out of the ashes,” Dr. Barrett concluded.

October 21, 2015 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

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