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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

How the Boston Bombings May Change the World for the Worse!

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

How the Boston Bombings May Change the World for the Worse!

The relation between the suspected Boston Marathon bombers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) and the Boston Police (BP) is a point of contention and controversy.

The FBI, at first, claimed no knowledge of the bombing suspects but later was forced to admit having received at least two sets of intelligence reports, one from Russian officials and another from the CIA, identifying one of the suspected bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as a potential security threat linked to a Chechen terrorist organization. Testimony from Tsarnaev’s mother and father indicates that the FBI was active in following, harassing and interrogating the suspect before the bombing. Despite general directives from the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security mandating US security to aggressively pursue ‘Islamist terrorists’, the FBI claims to have made no effort to follow-up on the Russian and CIA security alerts, especially after Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned from Russian state of Dagestan last year where he allegedly met six times with a known Chechen terrorist, Gadzhimurad Dolgatov, in a fundamentalist Salafi mosque.

The official government and corporate media versions claim the FBI may have ‘over-looked’ the security risk posed by Tsarnaev. Congressional critics argue that the FBI was ‘negligent’ in following up leads provided by the Russians and the CIA. A more likely explanation is that the FBI was actively engaged with Tsarnaev and deliberately encouraged the conspiracy for self-serving purposes.
The most benign hypothesis is that the FBI was using Tsarnaev as a means of infiltrating and securing intelligence on other possible ‘terrorists’. A more plausible hypothesis is that the Boston office of the FBI had set the pair of brothers up for a sting operation in order to enhance their anti-terrorist credentials – and that the ‘operation’ got out of hand – with Tamarlan having his own agenda. The most likely hypothesis is that the FBI facilitated the bombing in order to revive the flagging fortunes of the ‘war on terror’ foisted on a war-weary and economically depressed American public.

The FBI in Boston has a long and notorious history of working with and protecting certain leaders of organized crime in return for information about targeted rivals: The most notorious example is the FBI’s 20-year ‘partnership’ with one of Boston’s most feared gangland killers, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, where the mobster was provided with protection and collaboration in return for his information about a rival crime family and other competitors. In 2012, Bulger was finally indicted for 19 murders mostly committed under FBI ‘protection’ – although one of his closest mob-partners claims he murdered 40 people in his lifetime.

The Boston Bombings served as a detonator to mobilize the entire US security apparatus; it has led to the suspension of constitutional guaranties. It has been accompanied by an intense mass media campaign glorifying police state operations and the imposition of virtual martial law in the Boston metropolitan area of over 4.5 million inhabitants. The military police operation and media campaign aroused fear and terror among the public. Instant psychodrama produced mass worship of the ‘heroic’ police: they were portrayed as having saved the public from unknown numbers of armed terrorists lurking in their neighborhoods. The police, the FBI and the entire Security Apparatus – were repeatedly ‘honored’ at public spectacles, sports and civic events, lauded as ‘guardians’ and ‘saviors’. The sordid role of FBI in organizing entrapment operations was never mentioned. The hundreds of billions wasted in futile overseas ‘wars against terror’ went down the memory hole. The opposition to Washington’s cuts in social programs was diverted almost overnight to support new funding for US military intervention in Syria and North Korea, a greater arms build-up in Israel and domestic security.

The Boston Bombings coincided with the White House dictating a new round of domestic police state measures and launching a series of aggressive military moves in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The Pentagon has organized its biggest and most threatening air, sea and land military exercises right on the borders of North Korea. The White House has encouraged and promoted Japan’s belligerent military posture toward China regarding disputed islands in the South China Sea. Secretary of State Kerry has increased military aid to the Syrian terrorists by at least $130 million and dispatched hundreds of Special Forces to Jordan to train the jihadi-mercenaries against the Syrian government.
The White House concocted charges that Damascus deployed chemical weapons against the rebels to justify direct US military intervention in Syria. Closer to home, the White House has given unconditional support to the violent Venezuelan opposition’s post-election campaign designed to provoke a civil war– while refusing to recognize the internationally certified election victory of President Maduro.

It is very clear the Obama regime wants to turn the clock back a decade to recreate the terrible political climate of 2001-02. He seeks to fabricate a sense of an imminent terrorist threat based on the ‘Boston Bombings’ in order to re-launch another global military campaign. Instead of Iraq – the ‘threat’ is now Syria, Iran and Lebanon. Today, the threat is North Korea – tomorrow it could be China. Today, it is Venezuela – next it could be Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, and the entire edifice of Latin American regional integration.
The civilian casualties and deaths resulting from the Boston Bombings, linked to the US backing and sheltering of Chechen terrorists, are a small price for Washington to pay if it results in escalating global wars and greater impunity for the National Police State.

Re-launching a new and more virulent version of militarized global empire building is of the highest priority. The targeted countries have global significance: Venezuela and Iran are oil producing giants, the backbone of OPEC and adversaries of Israel. China is the second biggest economy in the world and the principle challenger to US economic dominance. Cowering and confusing millions of downwardly mobile Americans weakens the principle domestic obstacle to bigger and more comprehensive cuts in social programs in order to finance global wars.

Indeed, the Boston Bombings have larger political and economic consequences; they set the stage for a new round of wars abroad and regressive (and repressive) changes at home.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras’ most recent book is The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. Read other articles by James, or visit James's website.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

How America's Imperial Global War on Terror Makes Life Much More Dangerous for Us at Home




World  


 
 

 Jeremy Scahill's 'Dirty Wars' chronicles the assassination squads, private armies, and drone attacks that have turned America into a kind of Murder, Inc. 

 
 
 
US special forces stand guard as Blackhawk helicopter land in Afghanistan's Marjah region, on February 24, 2010. A NATO helicopter strike has killed two children in southern Afghanistan, officials said, in the latest civilian casualties to beset the coali

 
 
 
 
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Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed.  Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.”  In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”

After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power.  He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”

Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.”  In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged.  It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.

Talk about unintended consequences! The purpose of that war had been to give the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style bloody nose, which it more than did. All of this laid the foundation for... well, in 1999 when Johnson was writing, no one knew what. But he, at least, had an inkling, which on September 12, 2001, made his book look prophetic indeed. He emphasized one other phenomenon: Americans, he believed, had “freed ourselves of... any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe.”

With Blowback, he aimed to rectify that, to paint a portrait of how that informal empire and its historically unprecedented garrisoning of the world looked to others, and so explain why animosity and blowback were building globally.  After September 11, 2001, his book leaped to the center of the 9/11 display tables in bookstores nationwide and became a bestseller, while “blowback” and that phrase “unintended consequences” made their way into our everyday language.

Chalmers Johnson was, you might say, our first blowback scholar.  Now, more than a decade later, we have a book from our first blowback reporter.  His name is Jeremy Scahill.  In 2007, he, too, produced a surprise bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. It caught the mood of a moment in which the Bush administration, in service to its foreign wars, was working manically to “privatize” national security and the U.S. military by hiring rent-a-spiesrent-a-guns, and rent-a-corporations for its proliferating wars.
In the ensuing years, it was as if Scahill had taken Johnson’s observation to heart -- that we Americans can’t see our world as it is.  And little wonder, since so much of the American way of war has plunged into the shadows.  As two administrations in Washington arrogated ever greater war-making and national security powers, they began to develop a new, off-the-books, undeclared style of war-making.  In the process, they transformed an increasingly militarized CIA, a hush-hush crew called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and a shiny new “perfect weapon” and high-tech fantasy object, the drone, into the president’s own privatized military.

In these years, war and the path to it were becoming the private business and property of the White House and the national security state -- and no one else.  Little of this, of course, was a secret to those on the receiving end.  It was only Americans who were not supposed to know much about what was being done in their name.  As a result, there was a secret history of twenty-first-century American war crying out to be written.  Now, we have it in the form of Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.

Scahill has tracked, in particular, the rise of JSOC.  In Iraq, it grew into a kind of Murder Inc., “an executive assassination wing,” as Seymour Hersh once put it, operating out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.  It next turned its hunter/killer methods on Afghanistan and then on the planet, as the special operations forces themselves grew into an expansive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military.  In those years, Scahill started following the footsteps of special ops types into the field, while mainlining into sources in their community as well as other parts of the American military and intelligence world.

In his new book, he dramatically retraces the bureaucratic intel wars in Washington as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community muscled up, and secret presidential orders gave JSOC, in particular, unprecedented authority to turn the globe into a free-fire zone.  Finally, as a reporter, he traveled to a series of danger spots -- Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan -- that Americans could care less about, where the U.S. military and the CIA (in conjunction with private security contractors) were experimenting with and developing new ways of waging Washington’s spreading secret wars.

As Scahill writes in his acknowledgements, thanking another reporter who traveled with him, “We were shot at together on rooftops in Mogadishu, slept on dingy floors in rural Afghanistan, and traveled together in the netherlands of Southern Yemen.”  That catches something of the spirit behind a book produced by a dedicated, unembedded, independent reporter -- a thoroughly impressive, even awe-inspiring piece of work.

In the process, Scahill, who in these years broke a number of major stories as national security correspondent for the Nation magazine, fills us in on those American military death squads in Iraq, nightmarish special ops night raids in Afghanistan (that target all the wrong people), secret renditions of terror suspects to a CIA-funded jail in Somalia (after President Obama had forsworn “rendition”), the dispatching of drones and cruise missiles in disastrous strikes oncivilians in Yemen, the hunting down and assassination of American citizens (aka terror suspects, although 16-year-old Abdulrahman Awlaki certainly wasn’t one) also in Yemen on the orders of the president, the complex world of JSOC-CIA-Blackwater operations in Pakistan -- and so much more, including an indication that JSOC has even launched secret ground operations of some sort in Uzbekistan. (Who knew?)

Dirty Wars is also, in Johnson’s terms, a history of the future; that is, a history of potential blowback-to-come, a message in a bottle sent to us from the hidden front lines of America’s global battlefields -- and therein lies a tale of tales.

Preparing the Battlefield

A couple of years back, TomDispatch correspondent Ann Jones told me something I’ve never forgotten.  Having spent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, she described their patrols in the countryside this way: yes, there were dangers, mainly IEDs (roadside bombs) and the odd potshot taken at them, but on the whole the areas they patrolled every day were eerily “empty.”  In some sense, it almost seemed as if no one was there, as if they were fighting a ghost war on -- her term -- an empty battlefield.

As it happens, her observation has a planetary analogue that lies at the heart of Scahill’s remarkable book.  As you may remember, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took no time at all for Bush administration officials to think big.  Notoriously, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld began urging aides to build a case against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein only five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.  Within weeks administration figures were already talking with confidence about the need to “drain the swamp” of terrorists and enemies on a global scale.  They were reportedly planning to target 60to 80 countries, almost a third to close to one-half of the nations on this planet.  In other words, when they quickly declared a Global War on Terror, they weren’t kidding.  They meant it quite literally and, as Scahill reports, they promptly went to work building up the kinds of forces -- secret and at their command alone -- that could fight anywhere on the sly.

As these forces were dispatched globally to collect intelligence, train foreign forces (also often “special” and secret), and especially hunt and kill terrorists, a new tradecraft term came into play, a phrase as crucial to Scahill’s book as “blowback” was to Johnson’s.  They were, it was claimed, going out to “prepare the battlefield” (or alternately, “the battlespace” or “the environment”).  That process of preparation couldn’t have been more breathtakingly hubristic.  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld summed up the situation this way: “Today, the entire world is the ‘battlespace.’”

Here’s the strange thing, though: when those secret forces went out to do their dirty work, that global battlefield was, using Jones’s term, remarkably, eerily empty.  There was hardly anyone there.  Perhaps hundreds or at most a few thousandjihadis scattered mainly in the backlands of the planet.  If “preparing the battlefield” turned out to be the crucial term of the era, it wasn't exactly a descriptively accurate one.  More on the mark might have been: “creating the battlefield” or “filling the empty battlefield.”

The pattern that Scahill traces brilliantly might have boiled down to a version of the tag line for the movie Field of Dreamsif you prepare it, they will come.  The result was not so much a war on, as a war of, and for, terror.  Washington would, at one and the same time, produce a killing machine and a terror-generating machine.  Dirty Wars catches the way its top officials became convinced that the planet’s last superpower, with “the finest fighting force the world has ever known” (as American presidents now never grow tired of repeating), could simply kill its way to victory globally.

As Scahill also shows, they were often remarkably successful at eliminating the figures on their “kill list” of targeted enemies from Osama bin Laden on down: Bin Laden himself in Pakistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Aden Hashi Ayro in Somalia, Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, as well as various “lieutenants” of top al-Qaeda figures and allied groups.  And yet, as those on the kill lists died, thanks to the CIA’s drones and JSOC’s raiders, so did others.  Often enough, they were innocent civilians -- and in quantity.  People who shouldn’t have ever had their doors kicked in, their sons arrested or their pregnant wives shot down, and who bitterly resented what they experienced.  And so before Washington knew it, the kill list was growing larger, not smaller, and its wars were becoming more, not less, intense and spreading to other lands.  The battlefield, copiously prepared, was filling with enemies.

A Perpetual Motion Machine for the Destabilization of the Planet

As Washington launched its post-9/11 adventures, the neoconservative allies of the Bush administration, believing the wind in their sails, eyed the vast area from North Africa to the Central Asian border of China (aka “the Greater Middle East”) that they liked to call the “arc of instability.”  The job of the U.S., they imagined, was to bring stability to that “arc” by using America's overwhelming military power to create a Pax Americana in the region.  They were, in other words, fundamentalists and the U.S. military was their born-again religion.  They believed that its techno-power would trump every other form of power on the planet, hands down.

In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq and in light of the ongoing disastrous war in Afghanistan, if you look at the Greater Middle East today -- from Pakistan to Syria, Afghanistan to Mali -- you’ll know what instability is really all about.  Twelve years later, much of the region has been destabilized to one degree or another, which might pass as the definition for Washington of short-term success and long-term failure.

In reality, they should have known better from the start.  After all, behind the global war launched by the Bush administration and carried on by Obama was a twenty-first-century replay of a brutal flop of a strategy in Washington’s failed war in Vietnam.  The phrase that went with it back then was “the crossover point,” the supposedly crucial moment in what was bluntly thought of as a “war of attrition.” 

The idea was simple enough.  The staggering firepower available to Washington would be brought to bear on the Vietnamese enemy with the obvious, expectable result: sooner or later, a moment would be reached in which the U.S. would be killing more of that enemy than could be replaced by recruitment in South Vietnam or the infiltration of reinforcements from the North.  At that moment, Washington would “crossover” into victory.  We know just where that led -- to the infamous body count (which the Bush administration tried desperately to avoid in Iraq and Afghanistan), to slaughter on a staggering scale, and to defeat when the prodigious number of enemies killed somehow never resulted in the U.S. crossing over.

And here’s the ironic thing.  Like his father who, as the first Gulf War ended in 1991, spoke ecstatically of having “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” George W. Bush and his top officials had an overwhelming allergy to the memory of Vietnam.  Yet they still managed to launch a global war of attrition against a range of groups they defined as “terrorists.” They were clearly planning to kill them, one by one if possible, or in “signature” groups if necessary, until some crossover point was reached, until the enemy was losing more members than could be replaced and victory came into sight. As in Vietnam, of course, that crossover point never arrived and it’s increasingly clear that it never will.  Scahill’s reporting couldn’t be more incisive on the subject.

Dirty Wars is really the secret history of how Washington launched a series of undeclared wars in the backlands of the planet and killed its way to something that ever more closely resembled an actual global war, creating a world of enemies out of next to nothing.  Think of it as a bizarre form of unconscious wish fulfillment and the results -- they came! -- as a field of nightmares.

What was created in the process now seems more like a perpetual motion machine for the destabilization of the planet.  Just follow the spread of drone bases and of JSOC’s raiders, and you can actually watch the backlands of the globe destabilizing before your eyes, or read Scahill’s book and get a superb blow-by-blow account of just how it happened.  The process is now well underway in Africa where destabilization seems to be heading south from Libya via Mali.

Reread Blowback 13 years later and it’s hard to believe that anyone was so ahead of his times, given the human predilection for being unable to foresee much of anything.  Perhaps the saddest thing that can be said about Dirty Wars is that, the way things look, 13 years from now Scahill's book, too, may seem as fresh as last night’s news.  He has laid out a style of off-the-books war-making that seems destined to be perpetuated, no matter what administration is in power.

Much remains unknown when it comes to our recent non-war wars.  Thirteen years from now we may know far more about what JSOC, the CIA, and others were really doing in these years.  None of that, however, is likely to change the pattern Scahill has set down for us.

So let’s not hesitate to say it: mission accomplished!  The world may not have been a battlefield then.  But they prepared the global battlespace so well that it’s heading in that direction now.

Almost unnoticed, imperial wars also have a way of coming home.  Take the reaction to the Boston marathon bombings.  The response was certainly the largest, most militarized manhunt in American history.  In its own way, it was also an example of the empty battlefield.  An 87-square mile metropolitan area was almost totally locked down. At least 9,000 heavily up-armored local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, hundreds of National Guard troops, SWAT teams, armored vehicles, helicopters, and who knows what else hit the streets of greater Boston’s neighborhoods in a search for two dangerous, deluded young men, one of whom ended up bloodied inside a boat in a backyard just outside the zone the police had cordoned off to search in Watertown.  It was a spectacle that would have been unimaginable in pre-9/11 America.

The expense must have been staggering (especially if you add in business losses from the city’s shutdown).  In the end, of course, one of the suspects was killed and the other captured -- and celebrations of that short-term success began immediately on the streets of Boston and in the media.  But here, too, killing your way to success is unlikely to prove a winning strategy.  After all, we’re already in Scahill’s blowback world in which, no matter the number of deaths, there is unlikely to be a crossover point.

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombing suspect, was captured, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a new phrase into the American lexicon.  While calling for the 19-year-old to be held as an “enemy noncombatant” (à la Guantanamo), he wrote, "The homeland is the battlefield."  That should send chills down the spine of any reader of Dirty Wars.
Above all else, there’s this: while the world burned and melted, Washington set itself one crucial global mission: to send its secret forces out onto that global battlefield to hunt random jihadis. It may be the worst case of imperial risk assessment since Nero fiddled and Rome burned.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers:  This essay focused on Jeremy Scahill’s new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books).  In June, a film of the same title directed by Rick Rowley and based on the book will hit the theaters.  I’ve seen it in preview.  Its focus differs from the book’s.  Scahill is its narrator.  It's deeply personal and is powerfully humanizing of those whose doors we’ve kicked in during this last grim decade-plus.  It could be the documentary of the year.]

Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Bush Legacy


The Bush Legacy

April 25th, 2013

by Stephen Lendman




Throughout his tenure, media scoundrels were largely supportive. They ignored his 2000 electoral theft. In 2004, they did so again.

They backed his imperial wars. They turned a blind eye to police state injustice. They ignored torture on a global scale. They mischaracterized the measure of the man.

Early on, The New York Times praised his "new gravitas." It was days after he attacked Afghanistan. It was premeditated lawless aggression. It was two weeks before he signed the Patriot Act. Times editors called him "confident" and "determined."

He showed "statesmanship." "It was heartening to hear him say" America will fight in Afghanistan "as long as it takes." They ignored an imperial war planned long before 9/11.

They called him "a leader whom the nation could follow in these difficult times." They're comfortable with his legacy. Two recent articles feature his new presidential library and museum. More on them below.

Bush's true legacy reflects underachievement, sadism and lawlessness. His dark side emerged early on. As a young boy, he enjoyed blowing up frogs for sport. He progressed to replicating it on nations.

He had problems with alcohol and drugs. As Texas governor, he presided over more executions than any other state executive since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

His close aids said he enjoyed killing. He abused others for his own amusement. He was born into wealth and power. His family dynasty goes back four generations.

It's connected to America's military-industrial complex. George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott Bush were its founding fathers. They created a criminal enterprise.

Walker was a St. Louis financier. SP Bush was a major Ohio industrialist. He became a close Herbert Hoover advisor. Bush's grandfather, Prescott, was a Wall Street investment banker.

Over a century ago, the Bush family was connected to John D. Rockefeller, later with various Wall Street firms, as well as US intelligence since WW I.
Strong ties to wealth and power define it. Its members include a former US senator, two governors, a congressman, vice president, CIA director and two presidents.

During WW II, Prescott was a Union Banking Corporation director. The firm represented German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. It traded with the enemy. It bought and shipped millions of dollars worth of gold, oil, steel, coal, and US Treasury bonds to Germany. Doing so supported the Nazi war machine.
Prescott's Brown Brothers Harriman did business with Hitler. It did so until its assets were seized in 1942. Trading with the Enemy Act charges were filed.
Prescott wasn't alone. Rockefeller's Chase Bank and Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, IBM, and other major US corporations had no political or ideological problem doing business with Nazi Germany.

Before he became president, GHW Bush was involved in numerous criminal activities. As Gerald Ford's CIA chief, he suppressed knowledge of the Agency's involvement in coups and assassinations of foreign leaders.

As vice president, he was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. He helped get GW elected Texas governor. His record was deplorable. In return for generous political contributions, he supported the state's worst polluters.

He lobbied for a national radioactive wast dump. He lied saying it was mostly for x-rays and other hospital waste. He solicited nuclear power waste from other states. He corrupted Texas' environmental standards. He did so to accommodate corporate friends.

He permitted industrial pollution, air toxins, and hazardous wastes. He acted secretly. He stripped municipalities of local control over land use and environmental protections.

He let state parks languish in decay and disrepair. He was staunchly pro-business, anti-civil rights, and uncaring about public needs. Close aides considered him untrustworthy.

He served two presidential terms. He did so without being elected. In 2000, he lost to Al Gore. Not according to America's Supreme Court. It annulled the popular vote. It stopped the Florida recount. It highjacked the electoral process to install him.

Election 2004 was worse. Kerry won. Bush got a second term. He did so with electronic ease. Corporate controlled electronic voting machines manipulated his illegitimate "reelection."

Throughout his tenure, he waged war on humanity. He called imperial wars liberating ones. He ignored rule of law principles. He mocked democracy. He made torture official US policy. He suppressed civil liberties for our own good.
He targeted Muslims, Latino immigrants, and others. He did so for political advantage. He built Homeland Security mass detention camps. He deployed paramilitary enforcers on US streets.
 
 In his first State of the Union address, he declared war on a "terrorist underworld (in) at least a dozen countries." They ranged from "remote jungles and deserts (to) centers of large cities."

He asked "all nations (to) heed our call and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own."

He said "(i)f they do not act, America will." He designated North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil." He falsely claimed their "weapons of mass destruction posed a grave and growing danger."

His Bush Doctrine declared war on "terrorist" states, as well as on others harboring or aiding them. His 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) usurped a unilateral right to wage preventive, preemptive, and proactive wars against perceived enemies (real or invented).

He sought unchallenged control of global energy and other resources. He targeted key regions. They include the Middle East, Eurasia, Latin America, Africa and the Arctic.

He lied saying "(w)e may face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran." His 2006 National Space Policy embraced unchallenged control.
He ignored rule of law principles. He abandoned restrictive treaties. He militarized more than the rest of the world combined. He rescinded the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He did so to develop biowarfare weapons illegally.

He renounced the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act. It prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxic weapons. At the time, Francis Boyle said doing so made "a catastrophic biowarfare or bioterrorist incident a statistical certainty."

He established a homeland police state apparatus. Repressive national security and war on terrorism became imperial priorities.

He usurped unconstitutional "unitary executive" power. Chalmers Johnson called it "a ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo."

He signed secret presidential findings. He issued military orders, presidential directives and executive orders. He established unprecedented continuity of government powers. Doing so violated constitutional restraints.

His "ownership society" transferred trillions of public and private dollars from millions of ordinary Americans to corporate giants and super-rich elites. He waged war on labor. He stripped workers of bargaining rights. He targeted the nation's most vulnerable. He did so shamelessly.

He authorized warrantless spying. He trashed other constitutional protections. He subverted justice. He did so to defend privilege. He waged global war on humanity. He headed America on a fast track toward tyranny.

On April 23, CODEPINK headlined "Don't Let Bush Get Away With Murder!" Thousands are "converging in Dallas, Texas for the dedication of the Library named for George W. Bush, including President Obama, former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush."

"Local laws and barricades will keep any dissent miles away from the celebration. Help us raise voices globally to say 'Justice is Overdue.' "
"We attempted to say it in the Dallas Morning News after a 30+ page supplement ran in their Sunday edition, but our ad was rejected."

"Join CODEPINK, Vets for Peace and the Backbone Campaign’s Thunderclap during the official ceremony to share the ad, celebrate free speech and express your desire to have Justice for All."

Separately CODEPINK's co-founder Jodie Evans and Charles Davis headlined "Bush's Legacy Ought to Be on Trial - Instead, It's Put on Display," saying:
He "presided over an international network of torture chambers and, with the help of a compliant Congress and press, launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children."

"However, instead of the bloody details of his time in office being recounted at a war crimes tribunal, the former president has been able to bank on his imperial privilege - and a network of rich corporate donors that he made richer while in office - to tell his version of history at a library in Texas being opened in his name."

On April 25, he'll dedicate his $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. Doing so reinvents a war criminal. It whitewashes his criminal legacy. Who said crime doesn't pay?

On April 15, The New York Times headlined "With Grandchild and Library, a New Chapter," saying:

"For a former president, it does not get much better than this." Since leaving office, he's "remained largely removed from the spotlight."
On April 25, he'll host four past presidents and other dignitaries. He told the Dallas Morning News he has no regrets. "I'm comfortable with what I did," he said.

"I'm comfortable with who I am. Much of my presidency was defined by things that you didn't necessarily want to have happened."
He, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other rogue neocons made them happen. Imperial war plans predated his incumbency. 9/11 became the pretext for waging them.

On April 20, The Times headlined "Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide," saying:

His Presidential Library and Museum reflects "his eight years as president and six as governor of Texas."

It'll "be turned over to the National Archive and Records Administration, while the former president will retain control of a public policy institute that promotes his priorities."

"As president, he rarely had a chance to rest given the endless cascade of crises as visitors will experience in the Decisions Points Theater."

He hopes to "enhance the reputation of a president who left office with historically low approval ratings, but he denied that was his goal."

"I don't view the post-presidency as burnishing any legacy," he said. "I view it as living life to the fullest. The challenge when you're a former president is how do you use your God-given talents?"

He's a multimillionaire. He earns up to $200,000 per speech. The 1958 Former Presidents Act authorizes generous lifetime benefits. His annual pension is $200,000.

He receives "suitable office space, appropriately furnished and equipped," as well as a small staff. It's in Dallas. It's 8,000 square feet. Rental cost last year was $401,000.

Travel, postage and other expenses are paid for. In FY 2012, he received $1.3 million. He gets lifetime Secret Service protection. He's rich enough to pay all costs himself.

His war criminal record doesn't matter. America honors its worst.

-###-

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com
 
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwo
http://www.dailycensored.com/the-bush-legacy/

Monday, April 15, 2013

"I Do Not Want to Die Here": Gitmo Detainee Describes Horrific Hunger Strike, Violent Force Feedings







News & Politics  
comments_image 5 COMMENTS

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel's harrowing story was published today in the New York Times.

 
 
 
Graffiti depicts a Guantanamo prisoner.
Photo Credit: Walt Jabsco/Flickr

 
 
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel has never been charged with a crime, yet he has languished in Guantanamo Bay for over 11 years. Now, he’s on hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and how military guards have searched the Qu’rans of the Muslim prisoners locked up there. He says he will not eat “until they restore my dignity.”

Moqbel’s story was published today in theNew York Times, and is based on a telephone call he had with his British lawyers from the organization Reprieve. It is a harrowing account of the current conditions at Guantanamo as a mass hunger strike continues. Over the weekend, reports emerged that clashes had broken out between military guards and prisoners at the camp over the decision to close a communal camp in Guantanamo and isolate prisoners in individual cells. One detainee was reportedly injured by a rubber bullet.

Moqbel, the 35-year-old hunger-striking prisoner, isn’t sure how much weight he’s lost. But he’s sure of other things: that he’s been vomiting blood; that he’s been brutalized by what’s known as a Extreme Reaction Force; and that being force-fed is extremely painful.

“I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up,” Moqbel writes. “I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.”

Moqbel also relays the story of one specific instance where he was force-fed: “During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily...It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the ‘food’ spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.”

Moqbel is a Yemeni prisoner who insists he’s done nothing wrong. He was picked up in Pakistan, put on a plane and then sent to Gitmo after he asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. “The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one,” he writes.

Moqbel makes clear that a potential consequence of the hunger-strike is death. “I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day...here is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late."

Human rights groups have decried the practice of force-feeding prisoners like Moqbel. As the Empywheel blog notes, Physicians for Human Rights has come out against the practice. "If someone who is mentally competent expresses the wish not to be fed or hydrated, medical personnel are ethically obligated to accede to that person’s wishes," an expert with the group toldMcClatchy
 "Under those circumstances, to go ahead and force-feed a person is not only an ethical violation but may rise to the level of torture or ill-treatment."


Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Cathedral of the Enemy







[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s post is part one of a two-parter.  Part two will focus on the must-read new book by Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield. But this essay, while filled with long-time TomDispatch themes, was sparked at least in part by my reading of that remarkable work. Tom]


The Enemy-Industrial Complex


How to Turn a World Lacking in Enemies into the Most Threatening Place in the Universe


By Tom Engelhardt


The communist enemy, with the “world’s fourth largest military,” has been trundling missiles around and threatening the United States with nuclear obliteration.  Guam, Hawaii, Washington: all, it claims, are targetable.  The coverage in the media has been hair-raising.  The U.S. is rushing an untested missile defense system to Guam, deploying missile-interceptor ships off the South Korean coast, sending “nuclear capable” B-2 Stealth bombers thousands of miles on mock bombing runs, pressuring China, and conducting large-scale war games with its South Korean ally.

Only one small problem: there is as yet little evidence that the enemy with a few nuclear weapons facing off (rhetorically at least) against an American arsenal of 4,650 of them has the ability to miniaturize and mount even one on a missile, no less deliver it accurately, nor does it have a missile capable of reaching Hawaii or Washington, and I wouldn't count on Guam either.

It also happens to be a desperate country, one possibly without enough fuel to fly a modern air force, whose people, on average, are inches shorter than their southern neighbors thanks to decades of intermittent famine and malnutrition, and who are ruled by a bizarre three-generational family cult.  If that other communist, Karl Marx, hadn’t once famously written that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” we would have had to invent the phrase for this very moment.

In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a "cold war" between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America's Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

All these years, we’ve been launching wars and pursuing a “global war on terror."  We’ve poured money into national security as if there were no tomorrow.  From our police to our borders, we’ve up-armored everywhere.  We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.

You know that feeling when you wake up and realize you’ve had the same recurrent nightmare yet again? Sometimes, there’s an equivalent in waking life, and here’s mine: every now and then, as I read about the next move in the spreading war on terror, the next drone assassination, the next ratcheting up of the surveillance game, the next expansion of the secrecy that envelops our government, the next set of expensive actions taken to guard us -- all of this justified by the enormous threats and dangers that we face -- I think to myself: Where’s the enemy?  And then I wonder: Just what kind of a dream is this that we’re dreaming?

A Door Marked “Enemy” and No One Home

Let’s admit it: enemies can have their uses.  And let’s admit as well that it’s in the interest of some in our country that we be seen as surrounded by constant and imminent dangers on an enemy-filled planet.  Let’s also admit that the world is and always will be a dangerous place in all sorts of ways.

Still, in American terms, the bloodlettings, the devastations of this new century and the last years of the previous one have been remarkably minimal or distant; some of the worst, as in the multi-country war over the Congo with its more than five million dead have passed us by entirely; some, even when we launched them, have essentially been imperial frontier conflicts, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or interventions of little cost (to us) as in Libya, or frontier patrolling operations as in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Northern Africa.  (It was no mistake that, when Washington launched its special operations raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, to get Osama bin Laden, it was given the code name “Geronimo” and the message from the SEAL team recording his death was “Geronimo-E KIA” or “enemy killed in action.”)

And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of those wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001.  Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for.  (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.)

So let’s consider those enemies briefly.  Is there a major state, for instance, that falls into this category, like any of the great warring imperial European powers from the sixteenth century on, or Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, or the Soviet Union of the Cold War era?  Of course not.

There was admittedly a period when, in order to pump up what we faced in the world, analogies to World War II and the Cold War were rife.  There was, for instance, George W. Bush’s famed rhetorical construct, the Axis of Evil (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), patterned by his speechwriter on the German-Italian-Japanese “axis” of World War II.  It was, of course, a joke construct, if reality was your yardstick.  Iraq and Iran were then enemies.  (Only in the wake of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have they become friends and allies.)  And North Korea had nothing whatsoever to do with either of them.  Similarly, the American occupation of Iraq was once regularly compared to the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan, just as Saddam Hussein had long been presented as a modern Hitler.

In addition, al-Qaeda-style Islamists were regularly referred to as Islamofascists, while certain military and neocon types with a desire to turn the war on terror into a successor to the Cold War took to calling it “the long war,” or even “World War IV.”  But all of this was so wildly out of whack that it simply faded away.

As for who’s behind that door marked “Enemy,” if you opened it, what would you find?  As a start, scattered hundreds or, as the years have gone by, thousands of jihadis, mostly in the poorest backlands of the planet and with little ability to do anything to the United States.  Next, there were a few minority insurgencies, including the Taliban and allied forces in Afghanistan and separate Sunni and Shia ones in Iraq.  There also have been tiny numbers of wannabe Islamic terrorists in the U.S. (once you take away the string of FBI sting operations that have regularly turned hopeless slackers and lost teenagers into the most dangerous of fantasy Muslim plotters).  And then, of course, there are those two relatively hapless regional powers, Iran and North Korea, whose bark far exceeds their potential bite.

The Wizard of Oz on 9/11

The U.S., in other words, is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century.  There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China.  It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died.  When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn’t actually an apocalyptic event.
The enemy was still nearly nonexistent.  The act cost bin Laden only an estimated $400,000-$500,000, though it would lead to a series of trillion-dollar wars.  It was a nightmarish event that had a malign Wizard of Oz quality to it: a tiny man producing giant effects.  It in no way endangered the state.  In fact, it would actually strengthen many of its powers.  It put a hit on the economy, but a passing one.  It was a spectacular and spectacularly gruesome act of terror by a small, murderous organization then capable of mounting a major operation somewhere on Earth only once every couple of years.  It was meant to spread fear, but nothing more.

When the towers came down and you could suddenly see to the horizon, it was still, in historical terms, remarkably enemy-less.  And yet 9/11 was experienced here as a Pearl Harbor moment -- a sneak attack by a terrifying enemy meant to disable the country.  The next day, newspaper headlines were filled with variations on “A Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century.”  If it was a repeat of December 7, 1941, however, it lacked an imperial Japan or any other state to declare war on, although one of the weakest partial states on the planet, the Taliban's Afghanistan, would end up filling the bill adequately enough for Americans.

To put this in perspective, consider two obvious major dangers in U.S. life: suicide by gun and death by car.  In 2010, more than 19,000 Americans killed themselves using guns.  (In the same year, there were “only” 11,000 homicides nationwide.)  In 2011, 32,000 Americans died in traffic accidents (the lowest figure in 60 years, though it was again on the rise in the first six months of 2012).  In other words, Americans accept without blinking the equivalent yearly of more than six 9/11s in suicides-by-gun and more than 10 when it comes to vehicular deaths.  Similarly, had the underwear bomber, to take one post-9/11 example of terrorism, succeeded in downing Flight 253 and murdering its 290 passengers, it would have been a horrific act of terror; but he and his compatriots would have had to bring down 65 planes to reach the annual level of weaponized suicides and more than 110 planes for vehicular deaths.
And yet no one has declared war on either the car or the gun (or the companies that make them or the people who sell them).  No one has built a massive, nearly trillion-dollar car-and-gun-security-complex to deal with them.  In the case of guns, quite the opposite is true, as the post-Newtown debate over gun control has made all too clear.  On both scores, Americans have decided to live with perfectly real dangers and the staggering carnage that accompanies them, constraining them on occasion or sometimes not at all.

Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else.  Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against al-Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to al-Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world.  It took next to no time for top administration officials to begin talking about targeting 60 countries, and as journalist Ron Suskind has reported, within six days of the attack, the CIA had topped that figure, presenting President Bush with a “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” a plan that targeted terrorists in 80 countries.

What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here.  You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one -- and lost.  Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing.  Had you been able to time-travel back to the Cold War era to inform Americans that, in the future, our major enemies would be in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya, and so on, they would surely have thought you mad (or lucky indeed).

Creating an Enemy-Industrial Complex

Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable.  The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world’s intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.

Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety.  The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit U.S. Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the U.S. military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it -- effectively the president’s private army, air force, and navy -- and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty, and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety.  In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits... well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy.  For them, it was important in the post-9/11 era that threats would never again lack a capital “T” or a hefty dollar sign.

And don’t forget a media that was ready to pound the drums of war and emphasize what dangerous enemies lurked in our world with remarkably few second thoughts.  Post-9/11, major media outlets were generally prepared to take the enemy-industrial complex’s word for it and play every new terrorist incident as if it were potentially the end of the world.  Increasingly as the years went on, jobs, livelihoods, an expanding world of “security” depended on the continuance of all this, depended, in short, on the injection of regular doses of fear into the body politic.

That was the “favor” Osama bin Laden did for Washington’s national security apparatus and the Bush administration on that fateful September morning.  He engraved an argument in the American brain that would live on indelibly for years, possibly decades, calling for eternal vigilance at any cost and on a previously unknown scale.  As the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), that neocon think-tank-cum-shadow-government, so fatefully put it in "Rebuilding America's Defenses" a year before the 9/11 attacks: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.”

So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance.  They created an al-Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally.  They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.

For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.  It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us.  And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place.  As it happens, it’s not.  Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way.  Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves.
I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council -- from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy.  As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early U.S. response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.  It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world.  (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)

They were indeed manipulative men, but before they influenced other Americans they assumedly underwent something like a process of collective auto-hypnotism in which they convinced one another of the dangers they needed the American people to believe in.  There is evidence that a similar process took place in the aftermath of 9/11.  From the flustered look on George W. Bush’s face as his plane took him not toward but away from Washington on September 11, 2001, to the image of Dick Cheney, in those early months, being chauffeured around Washington in an armored motorcade with a “gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat, you could sense that the enemy loomed large and omnipresent for them.  They were, that is, genuinely scared, even if they were also ready to make use of that fear for their own ends.

Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq.  Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.  After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.  They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs.  They spoke in the most open ways of potential mushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.  They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus.  Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.

In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites.
“Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.  Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier.  One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’  At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”

In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears.  This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.

A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear.  After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100% “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world -- terrorism.  The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public -- but also the American security state -- in its grips.  After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens?  Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?

They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.

The comic strip character Pogo once famously declared: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” How true. We just don’t know it yet.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt






























Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Behind the U.S.-North Korea Conflict


Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice

Behind the U.S.-North Korea Conflict

What’s happening between the U.S. and North Korea to produce such headlines in recent days as “Korean Tensions Escalate,” and “North Korea Threatens U.S.”?


The New York Times reported:
This week, North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jung-un, ordered his underlings to prepare for a missile attack on the United States. He appeared at a command center in front of a wall map with the bold, unlikely title, ‘Plans to Attack the Mainland U.S.’ Earlier in the month, his generals boasted of developing a ‘Korean-style’ nuclear warhead that could be fitted atop a long-range missile.
The U.S. is well aware North Korea’s statements are not backed up by sufficient military power to implement its rhetorical threats, but appears to be escalating tensions all the same. South Korean President Park Geun-hye also realizes the threats are rhetorical but declared: “We should make a strong and immediate retaliation without any other political considerations if [the North] stages any provocation against our people.”

Pyongyang obviously has another objective in mind. I’ll have to go back a bit to explain the situation.

Since the end of the Korean War 60 years ago, the Worker’s Party government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has repeatedly put forward virtually the same four proposals to the United States.

They are:

1. A peace treaty to end the Korean War.

2. The reunification of Korea, which has been “temporarily” divided into North and South since 1945.

3. An end to the U.S. occupation of South Korea and a discontinuation of annual month-long U.S-South Korean war games.

4. Bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang to end tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. and its South Korean protectorate have rejected each proposal over the years. As a consequence, the peninsula has remained extremely unstable since the 1950s. It has now reached the point where Washington has used this year’s war games, which began in early March, as a vehicle for staging a mock nuclear attack on North Korea by flying two nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth bombers over the region March 28. Three days later, the White House ordered F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to South Korea, a further escalation of tensions.

Here is what is behind the four proposals.

1. The U.S. refuses to sign a peace treaty to end the Korean War. It has only agreed to an armistice. An armistice is a temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent. The armistice signed July 27, 1953, was supposed to transform into a peace treaty when “a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” The lack of a treaty means war could resume at any moment. North Korea does not want a war with the U.S., history’s most powerful military state. It wants a peace treaty and diplomatic recognition from Washington.

2. Two Koreas exist as the product of an agreement between the USSR (which bordered Korea and helped to liberate the northern part of the country from Japan in World War II) and the U.S., which occupied the southern half.  Although socialism prevailed in the north and capitalism in the south, it was not to be a permanent split. The two big powers were to withdraw after a couple of years, allowing the country to reunify. Russia did so; the U.S. didn’t. Then came the devastating three-year war in 1950. Since then, North Korea has made several different proposals to end the separation that has lasted since 1945. The most recent proposal, I believe, is “one country two systems.” This means that while both halves unify, the south remains capitalist and the north remains socialist. It will be difficult but not impossible. Washington does not want this. It seeks the whole peninsula, bringing its military apparatus directly to the border with China, and Russia as well.

3. Washington has kept between 25,000 and over 40,000 troops in South Korea since the end of the war. They remain — along with America’s fleets, nuclear bomber bases and troop installations in close proximity to the peninsula — a reminder of two things. One is that “We can crush the north.” The other is “We own South Korea.” Pyongyang sees it that way — all the more so since President Obama decided to “pivot” to Asia. While the pivot contains an economic and trade aspect, its primary purpose is to increase America’s already substantial military power in the region in order to intensify the threat to China, but next door North Korea is well within this dangerous periphery.

4. The Korean War was basically a conflict between the DPRK and the U.S. That is, while a number of UN countries fought in the war, the U.S. was in charge, dominated the fighting against North Korea and was responsible for the deaths of millions of Koreans north of the 38th parallel dividing line. It is entirely logical that Pyongyang seeks talks directly with Washington to resolve differences and reach a peaceful settlement leading toward a treaty. The U.S. has consistently refused.

These four points are not new. They were put forward in the 1950s. I visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a journalist for the (U.S.) Guardian newspaper three times during the 1970s for a total of eight weeks. Time after time, in discussions with officials, I was asked about a peace treaty, reunification, withdrawal of U.S. troops from the south, and face-to-face talks. The situation is the same today. The U.S. won’t budge.

Why not? Washington wants to get rid of the communist regime before allowing peace to prevail on the peninsula. No “one state, two systems” for Uncle Sam, by jingo! He wants one state that pledges allegiance to — guess who? In the interim, the existence of a “bellicose” North Korea justifies Washington’s surrounding the north with a veritable ring of fire power. A “dangerous” DPRK is also useful in keeping Tokyo well within the U.S. orbit and in providing another excuse for once-pacifist Japan to boost its already formidable arsenal.

The U.S.-South Korea war games in March were preceded in February U.S.-Japanese war games named “Iron Fist.” In both cases Washington implicitly demonstrated it would stand with Seoul or Tokyo and against Pyongyang or Beijing if push came to shove. The U.S.-Japanese effort was aimed at capturing an imaginary island — a direct military warning to China, which claims possession to the Senkaku Islands, as does Japan.

According to a February 15 article from Foreign Policy in Focus by Christine Hong and Hyun Le:
Framing of North Korea as the region’s foremost security threat obscures the disingenuous nature of U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy in the region, specifically the identity between what his advisers dub ‘strategic patience,’ on the one hand, and his forward-deployed military posture and alliance with regional hawks on the other. Examining Obama’s aggressive North Korea policy and its consequences is crucial to understanding why demonstrations of military might — of politics by other means, to borrow from Carl von Clausewitz — are the only avenues of communication North Korea appears to have with the United States at this juncture.
Brian Becker, leader of the antiwar ANSWER Coalition, noted March 31: “The Pentagon and the South Korean military today — and throughout the past year — have been staging massive war games that simulate the invasion and bombing of North Korea. Few people in the United States know the real situation. The work of the war propaganda machine is designed to make sure that the American people do not join together to demand an end to the dangerous and threatening actions of the Pentagon on the Korean Peninsula.
The propaganda campaign is in full swing now as the Pentagon climbs the escalation ladder in the most militarized part of the planet. North Korea is depicted as the provocateur and aggressor whenever it asserts that they have the right and capability to defend their country. Even as the Pentagon simulates the nuclear destruction of a country that it had already tried to bomb into the Stone Age, the corporate-owned media characterizes this extremely provocative act as a sign of resolve and a measure of self-defense.
And from Stratfor, the commercial intelligence group that is often in the know:
Much of North Korea’s behavior can be considered rhetorical, but it is nonetheless unclear how far Pyongyang is willing to go if it still cannot force negotiations through belligerence.
The objective of initiating negotiations with the U.S. is here taken for granted.
Pyongyang’s “bellicosity” is almost entirely verbal — several decibels too loud for many ears, perhaps — but North Korea is a small country in difficult circumstances that well remembers the extraordinary brutality Washington visited upon the territory in the 1950s. Millions of Koreans died. The U.S. carpet bombings were criminal. North Korea is determined to go down fighting if it happens again, but hopes their preparedness will avoid war and lead to talks and a treaty.

Their large and well-trained army is for defense. The purpose of the rockets they are building and their talk about nuclear weapons is principally to scare away the wolf at the door.

In the short run, the recent inflammatory rhetoric from Kim Jong-un is in direct response to this year’s month-long U.S.-South Korea war games, which he interprets as a possible prelude for another war. Kim’s longer run purpose is to create a sufficiently worrisome crisis that the U.S. finally agrees to bilateral talks leading to a peace treaty, an end to Washington’s sanctions, the normalization of trade relations, and removal of foreign troops from the south.. Some form of reunification could come later in talks between north and south.


Jack A. Smith is editor of the Activist Newsletter and a former editor of the Guardian (US) radical newsweekly. He may be reached at: jacdon@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Jack.