Why Rachel Maddow Is Wrong on James Earl Ray - Alleged Assassin of Martin Luther King

"Rachel may be smart, but she needs an editor to keep her from repeating each notion five times before she ever quite gets to the point, and she could also lose that cutesy bullshit she does about mixing cocktails and other nonsense designed to make her seem hip to her coeval."
- Jaime O'Neill, writing on the liberal pretensions of MSNBC

No less an esteemed author than James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable')  has held all of us to account for not seeing that all the 1960s assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) were interconnected and done by the National Security State. Also, each one, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset and thereby enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable" - a term first coined by Thomas Merton meaning incomprehensible evil. Douglass' implication was that the Deep State factored into each assassination and it required deep politics to get beyond the hand waving, and BS stories confabulated by media - most of which was infected by national security trolls (please Google "Operation Mockingbird'.) It was the responsibility of each of us to rip the veneer of lies and deceptions away and probe the document base to the truth.


In an earlier blog post (March 8, 2014), I noted that deep politics is usually too much for network commentators (including the so-called "liberals" on MSNBC) to handle.  In a way this is understandable because  many Americans, as I've often observed, are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics (the dark underbelly that surface politics barely touches)  which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". Thus, network sensitivities will be oriented toward not pissing off that Middle Mind too much, or forcing it too far from its comfort  zone and belief system.

Maddow, while a sometime incisive narrator, often blows it on key issues. For example, numerous times in 2013-14 one beheld Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's chained CPI proposal for cutting Social Security. She didn't wish to "go there" because she didn't want to be seen as an Obama basher.  Then there were other Maddow shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html

By hewing to the "Oswald did it" faction of the Middle Mind, she chose to play it safe in her narrative, rather than risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" or tin foil hat wearer. But by doing so she showed: a) she didn't truly grasp the lying nature of the deep state to use cover stories and b) preferred to bamboozle her audience rather than inform them.

In two earlier episodes of her show this year, around the time of the Confederate flag brouhaha, she interjected Jack Kershaw, supposedly one of the lawyers for alleged Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray. She then presented - to emphasize her point Kershaw was a racist (and by extension his client - hence the assassin with a motive) graphic images of a garish and ghoulish statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (founder of the Ku Klux Klan). Maddow's intent was clear:

Jack Kershaw was a brazen racist who idolized the founder of the KKK

James Earl Ray originally hired Kershaw as his lawyer.

Ergo, James Earl Ray had to be guilty of killing King - for racist motives.


However, as with Lee Oswald, Maddow is also in the dark on Kershaw's shady background and how he actually played Ray. As reported in Wikipedia:

"Kershaw convinced Ray to take a polygraph test as part of an interview with Playboy. The magazine said that the test results showed "that Ray did, in fact, kill Martin Luther King Jr. and that he did so alone." Ray fired Kershaw after discovering that the attorney had been paid $11,000 by the magazine in exchange for the interview and hired Mark Lane".

Playboy, in fact, did not have the expertise (at least its designated interviewer) to make that determination  and in any case it was conducted inappropriately without Ray or a genuine lawyer present for counsel - as opposed to an exploitative bloodsucker.

Kershaw's racism and role is also what a former black FBI agent (Donald Wilson) would have called a "red herring" as it had nothing to do with the actual case. Wilson, let us recall, was the agent who discovered James Earl Ray's abandoned white Mustang a week after King's killing -in an Atlanta parking lot. Inside the car he also discovered a set of papers, one of which had the name "Raul" written on it, and on another paper the phone number of the Atlanta FBI office.  Wilson withheld the papers and ten years later resigned from the Bureau ('The Assassinations', p. 479). In 1997, he copied portions of the uncovered papers and delivered them to the King family.

According to Wilson (p. 491, op. cit.):

"In my opinion King's assassination was not a black-white issue. It had nothing to do with racism.  The stories you read about whether Ray was or wasn't a racist are immaterial. That's a red herring. King wanted to redistribute the wealth of this country. That was a big turnaround for him. Now that got the attention of the shadow government people. A decision was made, he had to be eliminated"

Factoring into King's campaign for economic equity was his campaign against the Vietnam War which put him into Johnson's sights.  Johnson, ultimate architect of the war (via his National Security Action Memorandum 273 - then concocting the Tonkin Gulf pretext), could not have Martin Luther King 'crossing' him on Vietnam and fomenting protests against his policies. He also regarded it as 'backstabbing' after giving (grudging) support to King's Civil Rights program.

Further, Jack Kershaw was only one of dozens of Ray lawyers, and the more important counsel for him was William F. Pepper. It was he who finally brought the case  before a court- 32 years after King's murder- that "extended the responsibility for the assassination beyond the scapegoat James Early Ray to the United States government" according to James Douglass (Op. cit., 'The King Conspiracy in Memphis', p. 497)

Pepper, author of Orders to Kill, in a speech he gave on Feb. 4, 2003,  noted that what incepted his investigation into the King killing was an article  by journalist Steve Tompkins in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.  It dealt with the infiltration of the civil rights movement and black leaders by U.S. military intelligence.

The article showed that what transpired in the 50s, and 60s was a continuation of what had seized the American security state zeitgeist since the Russian Revolution. That is, that blacks were regarded as the prime candidates for being recruited as communists because they had the most motivation for revolution against the imperious white -controlling state.  Hoover suspected Rev. King was in this category as well, and used that to justify hounding him.

Pepper noted that "one paragraph" in particular caught his eye. It noted that on the day of Rev. King's  assassination there was in place a Special Forces Alpha 184 team, and no one understood at the time why this 6-man  sniper unit was present in Memphis. Pepper then approached Tompkins, observing this introduced a whole other dimension to the case - which was now not nearly as closed as the media would have had us believe.

Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

In the preceding, Pepper observes that:

"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling.

The military knew that once he started out bringing the wretched of America to camp out in the shadow of the Washington Memorial - and go every day to see their Senators and Congressmen - to try to get social program monies put back that were taken out because of the war- and they got rebuffed again and again they'd become increasingly angry. It was the assessment of the Army that he would lose control of that group."

Pepper goes on to indicate that had the event spiraled out of control there would not have been enough troops available to quell the violent (they suspected) results. Hence, taking out King removed the threat of instability.

My additional take is that LBJ wanted King's voice silenced once and for all. He'd gotten too much attention on the Vietnam issue, and it undermined LBJ's "great legacy" - having already taken control of all of Kennedy's ideas and programs and pushed them through. Let's also bear in mind the Army itself would have done nothing without the go ahead from the "commander- in-chief".

Sadly, all Maddow's good work (such as her documentary, 'Why We Did It' on the shady origin of the Iraq war) is overshadowed and undermined by her reluctance to delve into the deep politics of our history. Because without that deep politics understanding, including that Oswald was a pawn used by the national security state to gain power, her work echoes a shallow grasp of the political dynamics at work and the hidden forces subverting those dynamics, i.e. buried within the 'Deep state', see e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-c-koehler/54637/outing-the-deep-state


This is perhaps the most deceitful deep politics abuse of all, given the deep state and in particularly its national security operatives,  were responsible for carrying it out. The  cover-up of the facts by nominal liberals like Maddow.  is  perhaps understandable given that LBJ was the plausible architect of the hit, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/lbj-was-reluctant-warrior-it-doesnt.html

And Libs, desperate for would-be "canonized" heroes, are often prepared to latch on to anyone - given all the columns and pages Ronnie Raygun has managed to suck up. But LBJ,  given his venomous background in TX, is absolutely the wrong choice for any exaltation.

That he would extend his treachery to eliminating Martin Luther King. Jr. for his anti-Vietnam War and economics crusade, is therefore not beyond the pale.

Is the U.S.A. Off Its Rocker? Most Other Nations Believe So

Scene at an astronomy workshop for secondary school teachers in Georgetown, Guyana in August, 1978. After each session I was peppered with questions about the U.S. its foreign policies and educational system.

To anyone born after 1996 or so, it is unlikely the nation would appear to have "lost its marbles" (although older citizens should have seen warning signs from the Reepos' impeachment of Clinton for a sex act, and Bush's sleeping  (errrr, sitting, reading a child's book) on the job when the 9/11 terror attacks struck  - then using it as an excuse to pump up the defense -security enclave to monstrous proportions while also repealing habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act of 2006).

But though the evidence may be marginal in terms of a recent time perspective it is in so-called "neon lights" for those of us who've been paying attention to the national scene since the early 1960s.

We've watched the United States  slowly deteriorate in terms of its quality of life (from the time only a single parent had to work to support a family) to now when even two wage earners can't earn enough for decent housing, food and utilities.  We've seen the decaying infrastructure all around us as once grand bridges - as well as water and sewer systems built in the 1950s-60s - are now coming apart literally,  with no effort to replace or maintain them. In the intervening years we've also seen the nation- spellbound by rhetoric-  unravel its already flimsy safety net, fail to replace it even as organized labor has been diminished. This coinciding with the erosion education in most of our schools. Let' not even get into how our national legislature  has been brought to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century.

As I also learned when I worked for 20 years in Barbados, Americans who live abroad — more than six million  worldwide currently-  also face hard questions about our country. We're peppered  by people we live among, whether Europeans, Asians,  West Indians or Africans, who ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.

Questions I've had to confront over two decades have included:

* Why do so few average Americans understand science?

* How can your people speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?

* How can American voters cede the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man with a 'football'?

* How can Americans throw away the Geneva Conventions whenever it suits your fancy?

* Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

* How can so many average Americans still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

Often my attempts to address such questions, whether in college classes, cocktail parties (at the British High Commissioner's) or even following astronomy workshops at the Harry Bayley Observatory, were met with stark skepticism. For example, I'd say: 'Well - it just happens that America possesses the largest nuclear arsenal in the world and when a person becomes President he "inherits" the responsibility for when to key in the 'football' should the Russians, or whomever launch a first strike.'

At other times - such as the first question and last - I'd simply admit the  inferiority of the American educational system in most cases, to the British,  which system is still used in the West Indies. I'd also refer to the power of local school boards which were directly responsible for doing their own thing and omitting critical areas (say like evolution in biology, or large civil protests in American History) if they didn't like them.

But to many foreign citizens,  since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

Most West Indians, including Bajans, saw no point or purpose to our involvement in Vietnam, for example, and didn't see it as our business to intervene in an Asian civil land war. (They also thought the 'Domino theory' to be an excuse to butt in, like the "Bush doctrine") Others are still seething over the involvement of the U.S. in blowing up a Cuban airline (CU-455) r off Barbados' southwest coast on October 6, 1976. The bombing cost 73 lives and was the bloodiest terror episode in the Western Hemisphere before 2001.

The other event which riles people no end is the assassination of a "good and decent American president", John F. Kennedy, and most foreigners are well aware of the background of the CIA's involvement and don't buy that "one lone gunman" did it. They concur it was a conspiracy and plausibly forged by our security state in league with the military.  They also are convinced it paved the way for our future psychosis - since the truth has been kept concealed by our officialdom - who refused to even release key files 50 years after. See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/germans-tom-hanks-wasting-his-time-with.html

Did I resent the barrage of questions? Only some of them, and some of the time. But mainly it indicated the extent of curiosity about the U.S. but also that most Americans have no idea just how strange we seem to much of the world. As noted in the link above while we were in Germany two years ago, those German observers were far better informed about us than the average American is about them.

We already know this is partly because the “news” in the American corporate media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think.  And while our people can afford to keep their noses in smartphones, Ipads and remain deaf, dumb and blind to external reality, foreign citizens can't be so cavalier. After all, who knows when we will threaten  to be at war with the next enemy of the moment? America’s belligerence alone, not to mention its financial acrobatics, compels the rest of the world to keep close track of us. 

Most unnerving to me, in Barbados visits-  especially last year and in 2010, and in two European visits (in Austria and Germany in 2013 and Switzerland last year) was the subtext of American "insanity" that lingers on the tongues of many. Our actions then, speak louder than our principles and words and often contradict them - indicating at least a cognitive dissonance, but to many being out of touch with reality.

For example, as my German friends Reinhardt and Elli put it:  How is it ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support (by their votes) representatives, bought and paid for by the rich?  How to explain that?

And as one Bajan friend who'd recently visited the U.S. put it: How can we allow our roads and bridges to collapse while we hail each new high in the DOW? Is that not insanity? Are not the roads, bridges needed for transport and the water mains needed for water conveyance more important than an artificial number that can change any given day? I have  had no answers for such questions. So I have had to admit (from their perceptions)  the country is indeed off its rocker.

Others have pointed out that we spend more on our health system than any other nation yet are ranked below Slovenia in assorted charts? Is that not insane? Well, uh yes, I guess so. I do point out that the ACA (Obamacare) has made a dent but not nearly enough and many states (like Texas) won't even accept a key part of it, Medicaid.

Some other writers along these same issues have opined that  "crazy may be too strong a word, too broad and vague to pin down the problem" but I am not so sure.  Yes, it is possible Americans are merely “ill-informed,” “misguided,” “misled,” or “asleep,” and could still recover sanity.  But I still keep returning to Einstein's fundamental definition of insanity: doing he same thing over and over, while expecting a different result.

And that description fits the U.S. to a tee: starting new wars and military adventures but expecting a different outcome each time - but it never comes; playing loose with the financial markets and almost bringing them down with swap derivatives- then five years later passing a law to make it possible again. Allowing infrastructure to crumble year after year while we chase the magic numbers in the DOW - and are no better off with our basic property. And opining how we have 'advanced on race' but always seem to revert to what we were, as in the 1950s, 1960s.

The country as a whole needs a head check and needs one soon. I am sure few Rwandans in 1990 saw the signs their nation would unravel and suffer a massive breakdown and genocide in 1994, just as I am sure few Germans saw it in 1933, just after Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor simply on the basis of getting a plurality of votes. 'Why worry about that guy?' they joked. 'What can he do?  (Big business, meanwhile, like Krupp - believed they could manipulate him to their own ends). They soon found out otherwise and that der Fuhrer had his way with them.

Hopefully, our people come to their collective senses - meaning sanity - before they make similar mistakes. Say like electing Ted Cruz and Chris Christie next year as Vice-President and President, respectively.

Can We At Last Admit the Iraq Occupation Was A Waste? Have We Finally Learned the Lessons of Vietnam?

These questions bear asking as we behold  all the effort of 8-plus long years of Iraq occupation evidently all for naught as thousands of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq in Syria)  militants rage across the country - taking Mosul, Tikrit, Samara and bearing down on Baghdad. In the meantime, the $100m the U.S. spent prepping an Iraqi Army appears to have been wasted, along with the $150b reported wasted in Afghanistan this morning,  on equipment never used - only stored.  This, as we beheld images of the Iraqis cutting and running even tearing off their uniforms

Let us go down memory lane and recall here that every manjack with a brain knew Saddam was no angel, but at the same time no one would be stupid enough to displace him - given it was his strongman secular stranglehold that was in fact preventing Muslim factionalism and civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Let us also recall, lest memories have become ossified or lost, that the U.S. actually cultivated Saddam as its own 'creature' (in the 1980s)  to leverage against the Iranians. (A video still exists from the media, likely found on Youtube, showing Donald Rumsfeld praising Saddam for his efforts.) In addition, the U.S. supplied Saddam with billions of dollars in weapons to carry on the fight against the Ayatollahs - some of which were believed to be the "WMD" the Bushies used as a pretext to launch the Iraq invasion. See e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/56466/up-close-and-personal-with-george-w-bush-s-horrifying-legacy

After being shoehorned into the Oval Office by the five conservo Supremes in 2000, Bush was now in position to implement the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) which had originally been designed for 1992 after an expected Bush Sr. election win. This plan had been originally designed by the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld to extend American power in the world starting in the Middle East, namely Iraq and Afghanistan. Oil also figured mightily into the planning, and no surprise a big Oil honcho (Halliburton) like Cheney would be humping and pumping it to the nth degree.

All the best laid plans went askew after Clinton won the 1992 election, and so the PNAC plan had to be put on hold, specifically its plan for an Iraq invasion and occupation.  The plan sprung to life anew after the Bush Jr. win in the 2000 general election (though Al Gore won the popular vote). Cheney, Wolfowitz et al knew they needed an excuse for invasion, however, since "Americans are still suffering from Vietnam hangover" as Wolfie once put it.  The event for springing into action occurred with 9/11 - and all the Bushies needed was a means to link Saddam to it - even if it was all bullshit.

The Bushies did a well known propaganda two step, first perfected by Hitler ("If you repeat a lie often enough, most people will believe it.") . They started by using the Reepo-friendly FOX bunch to keep repeating a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. As this specious crap kept being repeated the Bushies became elated as watching pro-intervention poll numbers increase. Now, they needed another more believable Act Two.

They attained it via a dog and pony show after enlisting  Colin Powell to be their stooge in front of the UN. Using every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of possible "weapons of mass destruction" (from a rat named 'curve ball') - the Bushies pumped up a bogus case for invasion, just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.

Those of us who knew history, watched the hijinks in disbelief, wondering how or why so many - especially in the media - could believe it. Some tried to head it off, like Joe Wilson in an op-ed in the WSJ, pointing to the fact the whole "yellowcake in Niger"  thing was a ruse. But Wilson was crucified by the Bush bastards in a vengeful media onslaught (mainly on FOX) and in addition they outed Wilson's wife  (Valerie Plame) as a CIA agent.  Not one damned thing was done to the putative bastard who did it, which is why I don't get exercised now when the same weasels insist Edward Snowden is a "traitor".

Let's also bear in mind that congress was the last bulwark to stop the Iraq invasion and they punted. Though yes,   Bush and his craven neocon slime confected an "Iraqi War Resolution" enough courageous congressmen could have killed it - but they were yellower than the yellowcake link the Bushies claimed- as most signed on to it. So even if Bush and his cohort designed the plan, congress as the last bulwark to preventing an outlaw act could have stopped it. They didn't.

And it indeed was an outlaw, illegal act - invading a sovereign state under a pretext to launch a pre-emptive war. Bush’s aggression then exposed other unsavory aspects about ourselves as a nation:  a willingness to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive, aggressive war just as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland in 1939. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler!  Some 'Muricans actually swallowed this shit up and took it as gospel!

Again, to those of us who know and RECALL history, it also disclosed disturbing similarities to Vietnam.  For example, LBJ employed the ruse of the North Vietnamese firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters in August, 1964 as the basis to ramp up the Vietnam War. Later documents released under the freedom of information act showed it was all based on deceptions and lies.

 In 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese Naval vessels present during the incident of August 4. The report stated regarding August 2:

“At 1505G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first”

and regarding August 4:

"It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2"


In other words, the U.S. aggressors used it as a pretext to demand the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and launch a war that killed nearly 58,000.

In the aftermath, the more sober heads believed the U.S. had finally learned its lesson not to intervene in other nations on the basis of false pretexts. The losses, in blood and treasure, were just too costly. Vietnam rang up a loss of $269b compared with $ 4 trillion in Iraq.  The sad part is that our unjustifiable meddling in Iraq showed we never learned the lessons of Vietnam.

Worse, through all the years of military waste and intervention - in both Iraq and Afghanistan - we could have better used those trillions to  attend to our own nation's needs: repairing our crumbling infrastructure, bolstering our social insurance programs and providing money for students in affordable loans. What one hopes now, in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan -  is that we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened and not to invent bogus pretexts to make war on others. 


Were all those troops that went to Iraq and Afghanistan "fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton and Bechtel) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism. Believe it! (Some, of course, loved the 'high' of 'war' - as professed yesterday morning by the guy who did the recent documentary 'Korengal' and fought in Afghanistan. He claimed on CBS Early Show he got "addicted" to the "brotherhood" and the "action".)

It's about damned time future troops understand what they're getting into before they enter some hyped- up "freedom crusade" - and they also understand that when they sign onto a "volunteer army" (even for later supposed "benefits")  they become de facto mercenaries in the service of war capitalists.  As for getting "high" on the fighting, and "brotherhood" - I suggest they join a gym, take up amateur boxing, and sign on to a club volunteering in positive ways to assist their communities. You don't have to blow up villagers and kick down their doors to get "get high". Or shoot them dead.

To that end, all citizens also need to understand how Bush has recently  tried to whitewash his crimes in Iraq using the venue of his Bush Library. To see Rachel Maddow's  take down of this nonsense, go to one of my previous blog posts here:


http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-exposes-bush-library-for.html

When the militants finally get to Baghdad, as they will - and the media will show the imagery non-stop-  let's remember all the above and how we really only have limited control over our own plot of the planet. Let's mind that before we fuck around with others in the future! The Neocons, their puppets in the media (like the WaPo's Trudy Rubin) and other miscreants will scream for "boots on the ground" but that ain't an option! Besides, with a backlogged VA,  where will all the additional wounded go for care?  If the Reepos aren't going to fund the VA they have no right to call for any more wars, or ground troops!

See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/56347/blaming-obama-for-iraqs-chaos

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/chris-floyd/56373/hell-s-gate-the-iraqi-blitzkrieg-and-the-cult-of-violence

and:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/gary-leupp/56399/no-peace-and-no-democracy-two-occupations-ending-in-hopeless-disasters

IRAQ WAR An Unnecessary Waste? Of Course!

It was sad yesterday morning watching the CBS Early Show to see a number of former American troops bemoan what's been happening in Iraq - with apparent "terrorists" and "al Qaeda" affiliates re-taking towns such as Fallujah. They decried the current events, and what they were seeing and even expressed some reservations about the value of invading in the first place. It is indeed good that they did so, because the entire operation was a sham and illegal from the get go.

As I observed in previous blog posts, evil predicated on an intent to "do good" is one of the mot virulent forms. It is virulent because it can operate as evil under the guise of a good cause, or a moral crusade. Such was the basis for the whole sordid Iraq invasion.   Bush and his minions truly believed they were doing good at the time they demanded congress vote on The Iraq War Resolution in 2002, never mind what we later discovered[1].

Bush’s aggressive foreign policies also exposed unsavory aspects about the U.S. as a nation.  For example, one willing to violate Nuremberg Article IV to actually launch a pre-emptive war by invasion as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland in 1939.  In the case of Fallujah, just over nine years ago, in November 2004, the United States military carried out an atrocious war crime at the behest of its civilian leaders. Having already committed what America's chief jurist at the Nuremberg trials called "the supreme international crime" -- aggressive war  (under Article IV)-- the American military now declared a whole city full of innocent civilians to be a "free fire zone" and proceeded to pulverize the town with bombs, missiles, chemical weapons and finally a ground attack by thousands of troops.

Is this anything to be "proud" of? On the contrary, it's enough to make a sober observer and true patriot  ( as opposed to the paper variety) - VOMIT.  Especially as the orders came  after the American military had cut vital supplies of food and water to the city -- another brazen war crime.  And by the way, let us bear in mind here that any given soldier has as his duty to FIRST follow his conscience rather any orders or commands from superiors. This was in fact, one of the higher injunctions in Article IV and was applied to all the Wehrmacht troops, as well as SS riff raff rounded up after World War II. They were informed in no uncertain terms that "following orders" could not be used as an excuse for what they did because they had the higher moral  duty to disobey those unlawful orders and heed their consciences.

But in the case of the Iraq "war" (actually an occupation, as contrasted with WW II which was a REAL war, the one my dad fought in, including several REAL battles such as the Battle of Buna (New Guinea) all the above applied with special force.

The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushie PR actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939. But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like William Kristal, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney! In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 17, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents share blame in manifesting human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians. Far from malignant human evil emerging without rationality or reason, it instead erupted as if from multiple cancerous cells becoming malignant.


We the citizens also played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed unpatriotic or even "terrorist sympathizers."  Many of  us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example, references “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni[2]”  In a nutshell, too many Americans have “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions.[3]”

Back to Fallujah: So many of the former grunts seen on the CBS segment saw it as their stellar, singular "saving" battle,  in a glorious crusade against them terrible 'terr'ists  - and in addition, the
"most iconic moment" of their righteous , god fearin' campaign (now tainted because heir conquest hadn't held). But  they might want to attend to the facts of the event  - ass opposed to the Pentagon pushed PR and malarkey. So it is well that they see these facts detached in time from all the bravado and hype of the moment. In this case, they'd do well to pick up on  an eyewitness report of the attack from a BBC reporter in the city at the time:

Excerpt:

"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."

Is this something to be proud of? No, not at all. No more than the Nazi mass killings of Polish Jews in Warsaw and other ghettoes, or the slaughter of Russian Jews during Operation Barbarossa. The sad fact, and it's a brutal one for many of these troops to process - is that Iraq was a totally useless and wasteful exercise. Not only that, it was illegal under Article IV of the Nuremberg laws. It was another sordid example of what transpires when a people are driven by ideology and militarism into a conflict in which they have no business. Much like LBJ used the pretext of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to drive the country into Vietnam and the loss of 58,000 lives.

True, Saddam was no angel, not one bit. But the Bushies' exploitation of the false "al Qaeda" narrative to justify an American invasion actually back fired, because now the real al Qaeda likely has taken up residence in the chaotic vacuum left behind. What the invasion did, which had been controlled up until then, was unleash the sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shi'ites which Saddam had neutralized by his anti-religious, secular power. Once Saddam was removed from power, the Sunnis and Shi'ites were free to go at each others' throats - and all the American occupation did was delay it.

Of course, there's no going back now. We already wasted $4 trillion there, which we could have better used to repair our crumbling infrastructure here at home. What one does hope is that in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan - we finally re-learn the lessons we ought to have learned after Vietnam. That is to stay the fuck out of places where our immediate domestic security isn't threatened.  Were all those troops" fighting for my freedom"? Hell no! They were fighting for Wall Street, the Bushie opportunist Oil imperialists and their privateer companies (like Halliburton) and the advance of Amerikkan Neoliberalism.

It's about damned time future troops understand what they're getting into before they enter some hyped- up "crusade" - and they also understand that when they sign onto a "volunteer army" (even for later supposed "benefits")  they become de facto mercenaries in the service of war capitalists.

To that end, all citizens also need to understand how Bush is now trying to whitewash his crimes using the venue of his Bush Library. To see Rachel Maddow's  take down of this nonsense, go to one of my previous blog posts here:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-exposes-bush-library-for.html

 

---

[1] We now know an Iraqi (codename ‘Curveball’) made the whole WMD baloney up in order to trigger regime change to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs.

 

[2] Jacoby, Susan, The Age of American Unreason., 310.

[3] Ibid.

Putin Correct to Warn About American Exceptionalism

I know it's "politically incorrect" (at least American-style) to applaud and assert a foreign leader is spot -on in his perceptions, but no matter what the blowhard punditocracy says, Putin nailed it in his NY Times op -ed  ('A Plea for Caution from Russia') today.  Among the things Putin wrote, with which no sane or rational person could disagree (especially after last night's NBC News segment showing radical jihadis staging in Turkey then moving into Syria with IEDs etc.):

"A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism."

After seeing the pro-Syrian opposition jihadis whipping a couple for marrying non-Muslims on the same NBC segment, I believe it! And the U.S. would be dumb as a sack of hammers to oust Assad by helping these "rebels" - when it will likely be a replay of their dopey ignorant move helping Osama and his rebels in the 1980s, to harass the Soviets who had occupied Afghanistan. Stay with the devil you know, in other words, instead of unleashing tens of thousands of devils you don't. As one of the jihadis interviewed on the NBC spot put it:

"We want the Americans and Assad forces to fight, then when Assad is weak we can move in!"

Really? Hope Obama is paying attention here!

Putin went on:

"It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa."

And:

"No one doubts there was poison gas used in Syria, but there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army but by opposition forces... to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists"

Well, where have we seen this before? In Afghanistan, in the 80s, as I already noted, siding with Osama bin Laden to harass and punish the Russians. And more recently, in Egypt, siding with the Muslim Brotherhood president Morsi.....well, how did that turn out?

Putin then hit the chord with American exceptionalism, a meme American Neoliberal Presidents have fed to their charges since the Reagan era - trying to take the minds of the hoi polloi off the vast and expanding economic inequality that's emerged as a direct result of their allowing and enabling the war state's meddling ....from Reagan in Nicaragua and Honduras, to Bush I in the Gulf (after encouraging Saddam's reckless expansion), to Clinton in Kosovo, to Bush II in Afghanistan and Iraq - when the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. But then Bush's oilmen had special deals with the Saudis, so couldn't go after them- hence allowing the bin Laden family to leave the country in the wake of the attacks.  Oh, and Obama now wanting to meddle in Syria if the Russians "aren't serious".

Putin wrote:

"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional , whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy"

According to the corpora-media blow drieds this a.m.  the WH dismissed it as "posturing" but they shouldn't. Whether really posturing or not, the words contain more than the proverbial grain of truth - in fact, they contain a store house of truth.

One can debate about whether Putin was "posturing" or "hypocritical" in lecturing on democracy, but he was dead on in terms of sounding the dangers of American exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism refers to the virulent meme that Americans and the U.S. are somehow "special" in history and hence, are charged with acting "special" on the world stage. That ranges from valuing American lives much more than foreign ones - embodied in the U.S. refusal to sign on to Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions - which explains how military strikes and aggression can be carried out without being mindful of collateral damage, to indiscriminately messing in other nations' because the U.S.  feels it's a sole superpower's "right" to do so.

In regard to the devaluation of foreign lives one can look at travesties from meddling in Honduras and Guatemala - see e.g.  http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/  leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, as well as extended internal instability to the malignant  exceptionalist invasions sponsored by the Bushies in the name of the so-called "Bush doctrine".   These, when the historical savvy person examines them, little different from the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

The point is, the maniacal Bushie Neocons believed their own puffed up bullshit that this nation is "exceptional" and has the right to lord it over all others, by intervening and "policing" any time it chooses. No bigger pile of horse shit has ever been conceived as national policy and Americans would do well to reject it.

Does that mean the rational American rejects ALL wars? Of course not! There ARE just wars, just as there are unjust and ILLEGAL wars!  World War II was a just war because first, Americans were attacked by the Japanese Empire at Pearl Harbor, and second the Axis Powers and especially Japan and Nazi Germany, were bent on global domination. Not to have responded would have invited a nightmare world we can only imagine today.

Vietnam, by contrast, was an ILLEGAL war! The conflict was started on a pretext, i.e. the Gulf of Tonkin incident,  wherein the Turner Joy and Maddox were allegedly attacked without provocation in the summer of 1964. The claim of baby killer LBJ was that the attack(s) were initiated by the North Vietnamese.  But in 2005, an internal National Security Agency historical study was declassified; it concluded that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2, but that there were no North Vietnamese Naval vessels present during the incident of August 4.

The report stated regarding August 2:

“At 1505G, Captain Herrick ordered Ogier's gun crews to open fire if the boats approached within ten thousand yards. At about 1505G, the Maddox fired three rounds to warn off the communist boats. This initial action was never reported by the Johnson administration, which insisted that the Vietnamese boats fired first”

and regarding August 4:

“It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. [...] In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on August 2”


In other words, the U.S. "exceptionalist" aggressors used it as a pretext to demand the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and launch a war that killed nearly 58,000.

Here's advice for every real red -blooded American, as opposed to the paper patriots, including cook and bottle washers who pound their chests for having "served their country" but never saw more than a soup spoon and kettle: Don't trust anything any leader says if he uses the words "exceptional" as applied to you the citizen or the country as a whole, or  employs manipulative bafflegab throwaways like "freedom" and especially "defending our freedoms".

Oh, and if he asserts:  "Y'er either with us or against us!" Tell him to fuck himself!

See also:  http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/51589/the-presidents-speech-reveals-he-has-never-seen-war

The U.S. Lacks The Moral Authority to Launch Any Unilateral Attack

"The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression."- John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963 (Speech at American University)

"Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone" -  John 8:7

Is the U.S. "without sin" in the sense that it has any moral authority to "cast the first stone" in a unilateral attack on Syria? Hardly! The problem is most Americans are too forgetful of past hideous U.S. war crimes.

Yes, you heard that correctly! The exasperating thing about the U.S. to a citizen invested in its adherence to its own principles, is the recurring hypocrisy and double standards. Case in point is "the war on terror".  While the Bushistas marked al Qaeda as the supremo terrorists in the world, they had no problem pardoning the perpetrators (or letting them off on less serious crimes) of the most horrific terror episode before 9/11: the bombing of Cubana Arlines Flight CU-455 off the coast of Barbados. This is personal to me, because I was there on Paradise Beach on Oct. 6, 1976 with my 5 nieces. I won't even begin to describe the blood and horrors we beheld but I warrant they far exceeded what any smarmy ass hate blogger claims he saw in the Army or Marines. In fact, I will bet he didn't see any blood at all as a cook and bottle washer. Wait! On second thought, they probably did see some blood after accidentally cutting a fat paw whle slicing tomatoes!

Anyway, last night on Chris Hayes'  'All In', Amy Goodman reminded memory -challenged Americans of our own violations of international norms over the years. She thereby showed that unless we have adhered impeccably to our own standards we have no business hectoring or lecturing other nations on right or wrong. And certainly not launching any unilateral attacks based on the presumption WE are the unsullied moral guardians, or police of the planet! She listed a number of examples, including:


- The use of napalm and Agent orange during the Vietnam war (itself an illegal operation based on LBJ exploiting a bogus attack which was itself provoked by the U.S.)

In the case of those two horrendous chemicals, and for those who don't know:

"napalm is a mixture of plastic polystyrene, hydrocarbon benzene, and gasoline. This mixture creates a jelly-like substance that, when ignited, sticks to practically anything and burns up to ten minutes. The effects of napalm on the human body are unbearably painful and almost always cause death among its victims. “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can ever imagine” said Kim Phúc, a survivor from a napalm bombing. “Water boils at 212°F. Napalm generates temperatures 1,500°F to 2,200°F.” Kim Phúc sustained third degree burns to portions of her body. She was one of the only survivors of such extreme measures "


The preceding is from the website: http://vietnamawbb.weebly.com/napalm-agent-orange.html

Is anyone in his or her right mind going to now claim - based on the above description- that napalm is less terrible than the nerve agents Kerry claims were used on a Syrian opposition enclave? If so, believe me, that's an argument you do not wish to get into!

What about Agent Orange? According to the same site:

"Agent Orange is a toxic chemical herbicide that was used from about 1965 – 1970 in the Vietnam War. It was one of the main mixtures used during Operation Ranch Hand. Operation Ranch Hand was intended to deprive Vietnamese farmers and guerilla fighters of clean food and water in hopes they would relocate to areas more heavily controlled by the U.S. By the end of the operation over twenty million gallons of herbicides and defoliants were sprayed over forests and fields."
     Agent Orange is fifty times more concentrated than normal agricultural herbicides; this extreme intensity completely destroyed all plants in the area. Agent Orange not only had devastating effects on agriculture but also on people and animals. The Vietnam Red Cross recorded over 4.8 million deaths and 400,000 children born with birth defects due to exposure to Agent Orange.
    Agent Orange was later determined to be in violation of the Geneva Contract".

The problem again, is too many Americans, including Presidents, are oblivious to our own bloody history in violating international norms and standards which, if they knew or took them to heart- would halt them from their own precipitous actions violating such norms.

Amy then referenced how the U.S. in the 1980s, not only dispatched nerve agents to Saddam (when he was still a useful pal) but actually helped him target Iranians - giving him the coordinates- during the bloody Iran-Iraq war.

Finally, Amy referenced the horrific use of white phosphorus in Fallujah, Iraq  e.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75DsfSOeBSQ

Laughably, critics of the preceding as well as the film Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre , try to argue that white phosphorus is not considered a "chemical weapon" under the Chemical Weapons Convention but an incendiary weapon . Oh, OH, excuse the hell out of me! So then it's preferable to be burned alive than gassed? Give me a break!  Again, we have irrational, baseless and skewed arguments that seek to analogously invoke the  egregious ruse of "picking gnat shit out of pepper" (according to one famous quote by former congressman Hale Boggs, referring to the inconsistencies in the Warren Commission Report).

JFK warned in his June 10, 1963 speech at American University (See http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BWC7I4C9QUmLG9J6I8oy8w.aspx  ) that no kind of peace could be forced on the world using American weapons of war. Yet since his speech, the U.S. has progressively adopted the role of planetary cop and done just that, often invoking bogus "laws" or "war resolutions" to justify unilateral action outside the UN or even congress.

Among the key excerpts more Americans (and American Presidents!) need to take to heart:

"What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time."


"First  examine our attitude towards peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

We have no business, not with our sordid past of numerous violations of international norms,  of launching any unilateral attacks on any country  - no matter what the excuse or rationalization. Obama would do well to consider that before issuing the go ahead for an attack that may escalate to the point we may all regret it!

Former Defense Analyst Chuck Spinney Predicted ‘War on Social Security, Medicare’ as Long Ago as 2005

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school for more than 30 cities, …two finely equipped hospitals, or 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million barrels of wheat. We pay for a new destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people…Under a cloud of threatening war it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

-  President Dwight D. Eisenhower in an April, 1953 address

In August, 2002, former Defense Analyst Chuck Spinney – appearing on a Bill Moyer ‘NOW’ (PBS) segment- examined how the Pentagon had somehow ‘misplaced’ (couldn’t account for) $1.2 trillion of taxpayer money. He noted that this reckless, careless bookkeeping miscue disclosed the U.S. was no longer a democracy or even a Republic, since a key branch of gov’t had become totally unaccountable.

Three years later, after the Bushies had ramped up defense spending to dramatic new heights, what amounted to 2.4% of GDP as opposed to 1.2%, Spinney predicted it would incept a “war on Social Security and Medicare”. He predicted the total costs of military spending, including in Iraq, and Afghanistan and a de facto perpetual ‘war on terror’ (as well as a burgeoning national security state) would become so great that the major social programs would be slashed to pay for the deficits engendered. How large is the military money pit?  What sort of monster must it ‘feed’?


The United States currently maintains 702 military 'installations' in 63 foreign countries (it has 4,471 bases altogether), according to the Defense Department's annual budget statement. These figures don't include bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also spend more on military weapons than the next 25 nations combined. No wonder seniors’ and disabled vets are now on the chopping block – despite what Neoliberal mouthpieces like Jonathan Alter and David Axelrod bloviated night before last (on ‘All In with Chris Hayes’ and on Rachel Maddow). Maddow, give her credit and kudos,  did give Axelrod fits in his defense of the Chained CPI, noting a better path is simply to raise the payroll taxes threshold and that S.S. didn’t contribute to the deficit – good for her!.

One more thing, Lawrence O'Donnell was totally, absolutely wrong in the last segment of his show last night, trying to depict one of Social Security's founders - Frances Perkins - as favoring any COLA cuts now via the Chained CPI. Neither she nor FDR would be in favor of such an atrocity if they knew how much of our budget we were squandering on military bullshit, wars of choice and national security! So Lawrence, you need to consult more with your colleague Rachel on this! (And NO! For the nth time, I do not believe Obama is playing 'three dimensional chess" with the Repukes via his budget!)

With the planned cuts to Social Security, revealed Wednesday in Obama’s budget, we see that at the very least Spinney’s predictions have partially materialized. (They are merely in the ‘proposal’ phase so far, not let voted on by either Senate or House, and fortunately, it appears the Repukes will never accept it anyway – so seniors and the Left live to fight another day)


Media expert Jeff Cohen has shown this is not merely a coincidence: the U.S. having metastasized into the most extensive military empire the world has ever known- needs ever more money, from whatever sources, to keep its monstrosity going. As Cohen observed in a recent smirkingchimp.com blog:

"Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war."

While Cohen has emphasized the “perpetual war” meme (born after 9/11) he’s not the first to point it out. Gore Vidal, for example, belabored the way dozens of minor conflicts, interventions since WWII have weakened the U.S. – especially domestically- in his  book ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace- How We Got to Be So Hated’.  See, e.g. http://www.meaus.com/perpetual-war-gore-vidal.htm

Though the willfully naïve “consumer” mutation of the citizen and paper patriots will dismiss it as “anti-American” it ought to be required reading for the real citizen and REAL patriot, who isn’t so dumb or gutless as to ape what too many Germans did in the 1930s, parroting:  “my country, right or wrong”.  The Real Patriot and citizen never agrees with his country when he sees it’s going wrong.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was such a man, as Cohen notes.  In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

We may have well passed that point, probably soon after the Bushies adopted the Nazi “Blitzkrieg” template of “pre-emptive war” to invade Iraq ten years ago.

Sadly, while real journalists – night after night – helped expose the waste and destruction of the Vietnam War, that has not been the case with the more recent conflicts. The Pentagon has basically kept the ‘lid on’ by conceiving of the “embedded journalist”. This is the paper copy of the real one, but gutted by virtue of having to follow a set of phony rules as he gets to ride along with the troops. Rather than showing the realities of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, these mock journalists helped to fabricate an unreality which explains the current disconnect between a majority of Americans and the military. Since most Americans never really see what’s going on – except what the Pentagon’s manipulators want them to see- and have no skin in the game (either with a son or daughter over there, or paying taxes to support the conflicts waged) they really don’t give a damn.  

As Cohen observes:

“I know something about mainstream journalists being silenced for questioning bipartisan military adventures because I worked with Phil Donahue at MSNBC in 2002/03 when Bush was revving up the Iraq invasion with the support of Democratic leaders like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid. That’s when MSNBC terminated us for the crime of JWI. Not DWI, but JWI – Journalism during Wartime while Independent.  JWI may be a crime in mainstream media, but it’s exactly the kind of unauthorized, unofficial coverage you get from quality independent media today and from un-embedded journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Dahr Jamail and Glenn Greenwald.”

Of course, the images night after night of the carnage and loss in ‘Nam helped to fuel the push to end that conflict. Little wonder that current conflicts like Afghanistan are still going on, given how few reality-based (as opposed to confected) images, Americans have been exposed to. With its “embedded” (read: compromised) journalists the Pentagon now stage manages everything as a rule, only letting American viewers' eyes see what they want them to. But if Americans don’t see all or most of the the images, such as innocent villagers being blown to bits by rockets, off-target bombs or drone attacks, how can they know what they are opposing, if they opt to oppose that conflict at all?


And when a source like Bradley Manning comes out of ‘left field’ to help us see what’s going on, via the Wikileaks, he’s mercilessly persecuted, treated like a 3rd rate traitor. Meanwhile, Nazi-level arch war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Co. (a few still wanted in European nations, like Italy) are allowed to run free. It’s little wonder this nation is now approaching the shitpile-dumpster of history and 61% in a recent ABC-WSJ poll believe the country is “on the wrong track”.

 

As Cohen notes at the end of his blog piece:

“What our mainstream media so obediently call the “War on Terror” is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war OF terror – kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians – that creates new enemies for our country. Interestingly, you can easily find that reality in mainstream media of allied countries in Europe, but not in the mainstream media of our country. Needless to say, it’s our country that’s waging this global perpetual war.

In a democracy, war must be subjected to questioning and debate”


Bingo!

Are Afghan Lives = American Lives? The Lessons of Vietnam - Why They Remain Unlearned.

My Lai, with some of the hundreds of villagers slain, in 1968 by Lt. William Calley and his troops. Will Americans ever learn the lessons of Vietnam, or remain in denial – providing an excuse for our leaders to start more wars?

The NBC News lead story last night noted the death of a 25-year old U.S. diplomat, her life cut short by a roadside bomb attack. Yes, she was yet another casualty of the odious overlong U.S. occupation of Afghanistan – still continuing even after al Qaeda has been chased out of the country and its putative leader, Osama bin Laden, killed. Less mentioned by our corpora-media was that 10 innocent Afghan villagers, including toddlers and women, were slain in a misguided NATO attack.

Let me spell this out in black and white so that even an idiot ignoramus like my youngest bro can compute it: If you kill more ‘friendlies’ than you do bad guys, you are not going to win the hearts and minds of the people you are supposedly fighting for, and you won’t win any claimed “war”. All the beleagured people will do, as they did in Vietnam, is collaborate with the enemy to rid themselves of the vicious invaders. This stuff isn’t rocket science, and it is but one more reason Obama, in his budget Wednesday, ought to be announcing an additional saving of $600b by pulling out of Afghanistan immediately! (Another $400b would be saved in having less materiel to send back after this farce is finished)

The Russians learned their lesson in Afghanistan, but too late. That involvement essentially laid waste to the USSR, and bankrupted their nation as it’s doing to us. A superpower was reduced to an ordinary power with lots of nukes. Meanwhile,  our politicos are so wedded to the tits of the military- industrial bloodsuckers (including their lobbyist defense contractors) and parasites they can’t or won’t see that. Hence, they refuse to act, though they insist the "deficits matter". Bull pockey!

According to a recent article in The Washington Spectator (Vol.39, No.4, p.6) by Nick Turse, the U.S. still hasn’t learned and applied the lessons of the Vietnam debacle. Because like it or not, our involvement in dozens of conflicts since Vietnam is underwritten by our failure to grasp the lessons of Vietnam. This, as Turse, notes, is because we display a “collective failure to reckon honestly with the reality of the Vietnam War”.

He goes on to add (ibid.):

“The reason that the conflict rises again and again like a B-movie monster is because the United States has long refused to truly acknowledge , let alone take responsibility for, the bombs and artillery shells, grenades and rockets, mines and bullets, incendiary weapons and chemical defoliants that ravaged the land, made refugees of more than 1.1 million, killed an estimated 2 million and wounded 5 million more.”


Why such waste of lives? FOREIGN lives? My personal theory is because this nation, exceptionalist that it is, doesn’t grant the same value to foreign lives (especially of those it seeks to ‘save’) as its own. Hence, it repeatedly gets involved on these ‘Pax Americana’ missions in which more  lives are wasted, destroyed than the putative ‘enemy’ would have done. Because we are so detached from reality in our exceptionalist blindness, we don’t see lives we have taken as wasted but write them off as “collateral damage”.

As if that stupid canard justifies further warmongering and ‘all is well’! (See also the book, 'Collateral Language' and how they are making our language a casualty as well, to mindfuck most of us not paying attention.)

Anyway, Turse goes on:

“Never having come to grips with what this country actually did during this war, we see its ghost arise anew with each successful military intervention. Was Iraq the new Vietnam? Or was that Afghanistan? Do we see the light at the end of the tunnel? Are we ‘winning hearts and minds’? Are we applying the lessons of Vietnam? What are those lessons anyway?”


At least one lesson ought to have been to remove the blinders and cease with the hindsight war mythology, e.g. “Vietnam was a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys who should not be tainted by the occasional mistake of a few bad apples in their midst”.


All of which is balderdash. The truth is Vietnam was a war of choice, initiated under false pretense, fought at the behest of banksters (Wall Street), oil men and defense contractors (who needed to try out new weapons developed since the Korean conflict) and by a manipulative president who nullified the previous National Security Action Memorandum of his predecessor to pull out by 1965.

Its commanders were mostly craven, untested egomaniacs who stayed at the rear while they ordered pizza deliveries and brewskies, as they sent green horn grunts out on ‘search and destroy’ missions. Those grunts were mostly only able to function by taking daily tokes on their weed or other drugs, and if they got pissed at a fellow grunt, or more often an officer, would as soon “frag” him as look at him. Moreover, given the demand for the daily “body count” – innocent villagers such as slain at My Lai, were way more common than generally believed.

But this is a truth that exceptionalist Americans- raised on the codswallop of Pentagon PR and modern “history” books- refuse to accept. However, until they do, we are bound to enter into ever more “wars” at the cost of even more blood and treasure.