Category Archives: War Mongering

Americans in Afghanistan: The new Taliban?

In yesterday’s column, Glenn Greenwald, quoting from articles in The Guardian and New York Times, notes that U.S. forces in Afghanistan have been involved in torture, kidnapping, and murder of innocent Afghan citizens.

So that’s where the US is after almost 12 years of waging war in that country, the longest war in its history. The US is blamed on equal terms with the Taliban, at least. It maintains and supports (if not directs) non-government militias which are perceived, with ample evidence, as being death squads and torture units. Thus do we find, yet again, that the fruits of US humanitarian interventions – liberating the oppressed and bringing freedom and democracy to the world – are little more than replicating the abuses of the tyrannical regime it targeted, just under a different owner.

Zero Dark Thirty’s fall from grace

When it first debuted, Zero Dark Thirty was praised as being the darling of the Oscars.  But, when it was finally seen as promoting a political agenda, a discredited political agenda at that, it went down in flames.  Glenn Greenwald discusses whether it’s really the role of film critics to judge a film on its politics rather than just its aesthetics.

In an era where virtually everything the government does is shielded from disclosure, democratic accountability, and even the rule of law, films such as Zero Dark Thirty that purport to tell political stories are inherently highly political, likely to have an enormous impact on how political events are perceived. When blatant falsehoods are presented as truth on critical questions – by a film that touts itself as a journalistic presentation of actual events – insisting on apolitical appreciation of this “art” is indeed a reckless abdication.

And if Zero Dark Thirty wasn’t enough, consider that other critics’ favorite, Argo.  Nima Shirazi sums it up very well.

Over the past 12 months, rarely a week – let alone month – went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched “Argo,” a decontextualized, ahistorical “true story” of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat.

Just as champions of Israel like to disregard history before 1948, Americans tend to conveniently disregard history before the Iranian hostage crisis.  In interviews, Afleck seems not to have a grasp of the importance of the CIA role in shaping Iranian hostility toward America.  He apparently thinks the embassy take-over was disconnected from past CIA involvement in Iran.

Wrong, Ben.  One reason was the fear of another CIA-engineered coup d’etat like the one perpetrated in 1953 from the very same Embassy. Another reason was the admission of the deposed Shah into the United States for medical treatment and asylum rather than extradition to Iran to face charge and trial for his quarter century of crimes against the Iranian people, bankrolled and supported by the U.S. government.  One doesn’t have to agree with the reasons, of course, but they certainly existed.

I recommend reading in their entirety the articles of both Greenwald and Shirazi.  These few quotes don’t do justice to their thorough analysis of how far short these movies fell in terms of portraying reality and why that is important.

Nothing seems to be more difficult for the average American to grasp than the idea that America’s aggressive interference (both covert and overt) with the internal affairs of other sovereign nations creates powerful resentments that lead to deadly consequences.  Instead they insist on believing that we are “the good guys” and therefore, by definition, attacks on the U.S. are unwarranted and are perpetrated by “the bad guys”.

Late Afternoon Links

A NATO airstrike in Afghanistan has killed 4 Taliban commanders.  Another man, one woman, and five children were also killed and another five children were wounded.  But who’s counting?

State of the Union.  To paraphrase:  “We’re going to raise taxes on the rich so we can spend more on everything without increasing the deficit.  We will continue to run up a huge debt  paid for by our children because now is not the time for fiscal sanity and those poor little bastards can’t vote anyway.”  This is, of course, like promising to stop beating your kids, but not while they are still young and defenseless.  Oh, and drones will continue to be America’s primary tool of foreign policy.

Christopher Dorner is presumed dead after the cabin where he was hiding was burned down.  “People on the scene are as confident as they can be without seeing the body that it is Dorner inside,” the LA police chief, Charlie Beck, said.  I take that to mean they are just as sure that this is their guy as they were when they shot up those innocent bystanders that they also thought were Dorner.

Israel is partially lifting a gag order on its domestic news outlets enabling them to report the news about the identity of Prisoner X that is already being widely reported in the rest of the world.  From the article: “Gag orders and military censorship are common in Israel.”  The model of a freedom loving U.S. ally.

Italy’s former military intelligence chief is going to the slammer for ten years for his part in the CIA orchestrated broad daylight kidnapping of the cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan in 2003. Three Italian secret service officials were also sentenced to six years each.  Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald highlights the  irony of complaints by the U.S. State Department regarding abuses by police and security forces in Egypt.

Last night, in his State of the Union speech, President Obama claimed: “both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion – mostly through spending cuts”.  John Stossel says “Bullshit!” “That’s ridiculous!”

Federal Spending

Federal Spending

Morning Links

  • President Obama condemned a third nuclear test by North Korea calling it a “highly provocative act” that demands “swift and credible action by the international community” against North Korea. Countries that already have nuclear weapons always strongly condemn other countries getting them.
  • Glenn Greenwald asks whether drones should be used to kill Christopher Dorner, the ex-police  officer who is accused of waging war on the LAPD.  Whether drones are or are not being used is in dispute.
  • The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in the 6,656 death of military personnel.  Of course, U.S. Presidents are always wiling to pay the cost of war with other people’s lives.  But, you rarely hear about the other “sacrifices” Presidents have been  willing to commit American soldiers to: 1700 limb amputations, 50,000 combat wounds, 130,000 cases of PTSD, and 253,330 cases of traumatic brain injury (6500 of which are severe).
  • The identity of Israel’s most secret prisoner has been uncovered,  I know it’s Kind of hard to imagine a democratic country secretly imprisoning a citizen without trial and then forcing the press to keep quiet about it.   Hahaha!   Just kidding about that last part.  Nothing is hard to imagine about democratic countries anymore.

  • Knut, the polar bear that became a sensation in 2007 and then unexpectedly died in 2011 will soon have a new home at the Berlin’s natural history museum.

 

 

 

[Updated below with a couple items from The Agitator]

  • Ohio Attorney General releases a report and animation (below) of a Cleveland incident where 13 cops fired 137 rounds at a suspect vehicle killing the occupants.  Police insist someone shot at them from the car and took off in pursuit of it.  The chase involved “nearly 60 vehicles”, but no gun or shell casings were ever found in the car.  The state attorney general condemned the actions as a systemic failure, but the police chief and city council insist that existing polices and procedures work fine.

Israel’s Big Bully Brother

When I refer to the U.S. as being Israel’s big bully brother, I am not just being sarcastic.  The actual territory of Palestine is of practically zero strategic important to U.S. national security.  While, its true that Israel has a powerful military for a country that diminutive, their involvement in any U.S. military undertaking would pose more a of liability than a benefit as was clearly the case when we begged them to stay out of Operation Dessert Storm even though they were targeted by Iraqi scud missiles.

Make no mistake.  Israel is a protectorate of the U.S. solely due to their lobbying and powerful capacity to influence U.S. elections and media outlets.

Gean Healy makes some interesting observations regarding the recent confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, using a priority list assembled by Buzzfeed.com from the transcripts.  For example, he notes that China was mentioned only 5 times, but…

The “special relationship” with Israel — embraced by everyone at the hearing including the nominee — was special enough to win Israel 166 references in the transcript, more than any other country. Is Israel really 33 times as important to the U.S. as an emerging superpower with 19 percent of the world’s population?

Remember the panic after the Citizens United decision that China would try to influence American elections?  China doesn’t hold a candle to Israel in that regard, and probably never will.

And Radley Balko, commenting on Healy’s article, notes the following in today’s Morning Links:

Number of times the word Isarel was used during the Chuck Hagel hearings: 166. Number of times the word drone was used: Zero.

Remember, these hearings are about whether the nominee is qualified to be Secretary of Defense, so it seems more than a little odd that the fastest growing means of projecting American military power over the middle east doesn’t even warrant a single mention.

“Drones over Timbuktu” sounds like a snarky reductio ad absurdum of terror-war mission creep, but it’s fast becoming our policy, and with little or no debate. Indeed, the committee seemed less interested in the wars we’re currently fighting than in making sure we don’t miss any opportunities to fight new ones. Afghanistan got 20 mentions in the hearing; “Iran” got 144, with most members demanding Hagel reaffirm that bombing Iran is an option we have to keep “on the table.”

U.S. escalates provocations aimed at Iran

From the New York Times:

Under the new crackdown, the United States is tightening the rules governing countries it has allowed to keep buying Iranian oil, as long as they show they are weaning themselves of it. From now on, when China, Japan, South Korea and India, among others, pay for oil deliveries, they will be required to put that money into a local bank account, which Iran can use only to buy goods within that country.

It would be hard not to see the similarity between this and the ramp up to the 2003 U.S. led invasion of Iraq.  In fact, it would be hard to see any difference between this situation and numerous other fabrications used by the U.S. to justify its use of war as its primary tool of foreign policy.  This time the WMD is Iran’s nuclear program.

Whether they are pursuing a nuclear weapons program or not, it’s impossible to make a case that Iran poses any direct threat to the U.S.  But. America’s role as defender of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian makes Iran a target of U.S. aggression.  In other words, we are Israel’s big bully brother and it’s become a foregone conclusion that the U.S. will stand side-by-side with Israel against any country Israel feels threatened by.  This is a touchy situation for the U.S. because Israel, with it’s take-over of “The Holy Land” and perpetual antagonism toward its historical residents as well as the surrounding nations, has the unique distinction of being capable of uniting the entire Arab world.  The only force that prevents that is the U.S. which, though its support of numerous corrupt dictators in the area, keeps the Arab countries at perpetually odds with each other.

In fact, the U.S. has a long history of aiding and abetting the subjugation of the Iranian people under despotic rulers, so the fact that they seem less than friendly toward American overtures is not exactly surprising even aside from our recent attempts to destroy their economy and destabilize their current government.

In any case the sanctions, while hurting the people of Iran, don’t seem to be having much impact on Iran’s nuclear policies or their willingness to kowtow to the U.S. government.

“The people may be suffering in Iran,” one senior official involved in Iran strategy said last week, “but the supreme leader isn’t, and he’s the only one who counts.”

And that Supreme Leader just blew off the U.S. offer for one-to-one talks.  I suspect the question the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei keeps asking himself is why the U.S. is so consumed by the Iranian nuclear program while showing no such interest in Israel’s secret development of nuclear weapons.

Ron Paul says Mali may be the next target for U.S. military

We’ve been helping the French, first with cargo transport, then refueling war planes, and soon we’ll have a drone base in the area.  But, as RT quotes Paul…

France “doesn’t have the military resources to sustain its fight against Mali’s jihadists without help from the US military. For now, that amounts to the use of giant transport planes to ferry French troops into Mali, and planes to refuel French combat aircrafts that are pummeling the militants’ positions,” writes USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham. “But that might now be enough. As recent events have shown, Northern Africa has become an expanding battleground for jihadist groups with links to al-Qaeda.”

Actually, France has a long history of military incapability that ultimately draws on other western powers for rescue.

The whole video is here:

The internet: Soon to be part of the military industrial complex

This piece by Glenn Greenwald explores how the government is taking over the internet using the same tactics it used to grow the U.S. military into the largest and most aggressive force on the planet.

What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies – Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam’s chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs – has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

Step 1 is fear mongering. This has been in full swing since 2010 and continuously ramping up.

Step 2 is for the government  to saturate the media with reports about how the U.S. must defend itself from the cyber warfare programs of other states even though the U.S. is easily the biggest cyber warfare aggressor.

Step 3 is to get legislation passed that grants the executive branch the powers it needs to exert command control.

Step 4 is to grow the budget for the divisions within the NSA and Pentagon in charge of cyber warfare.

Step 5 is to make sure the government methods, rules, and involvement are secret so it cannot be challenged.

Step 6 is to bring in private sector partners, who have already proven their willingness to sell out their customers for the promise of a big government contract.

All of these steps are already in full swing, ensuring that the kind of popular uprisings we’re seeing in other police states will never happen in this one.

Obama selectively invokes MLK

An interesting observation by Glenn Greenwald:

Obama’s policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King’s phrase “fierce urgency of now”, yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world (Max Blumenthal suggested that Obama’s second inaugural speech be entitled “I have a drone”).

Ah, the irony.   After a warmongering President receives the Nobel Peace Prize, it should come as no surprise when he then uses the anti-war rhetoric of Martin Luther King to advance a conflicting agenda.

Opposition to America’s policy of routinely delivering liberation, peace, and security in the form of an air-launched missile will be a repeated theme on this website.  War is a tool of the state and, except in the case of popular rebellion, always benefits the government at the expense of the citizens.  The obviousness of this fact can only be suppressed by invoking mindless patriotism (usually on the part of the right) or the equally ignorant claim that the U.S. is bombing them for their own good, often referred to as a “humanitarian action” (a justification used by Bush and repeatedly by Obama).

[Update]

Greenwald posted another column today that points out another outrageous misuse of MLK, this time to promote the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.

The US military – which is currently bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen at least, all in secret – just exploited one of the 20th Century’s greatest proponents of nonviolence and most vehement opponents of US militarism as a public face for its aggression and violence in the world.

America’s schizophrenic (two-faced) foreign policy

Glenn Greenwald writes about the conflict between the U.S. government’s claim to be on the side of freedom and democracy even as it enthusiastically supports the worlds worst despots.

Greenwald describes how clearly this point is made in a recent memo to Obama from former CIA officer and adviser to four presidents, Bruce Riedel.

Riedel stridently argues that the US must remain steadfastly opposed to any democratic revolutions in the region. That’s because Saudi Arabia is “America’s oldest ally in the Middle East, a partnership that dates back to 1945.” Thus, “since American interests are so intimately tied to the House of Saud, the US does not have the choice of distancing the United States from it in an effort to get on the right side of history.”

Riedel is not exactly a principled advocate of peace, being an enthusiastic supporter of starting a war with Iran, the only beneficiary of which would be Israel.

In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings “scholars” which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world “as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression” – exactly what Brookings’ Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq.

It’s not hard to see that the U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would easily be considered an act of war if the situation were reversed, fit into that strategy and are remarkably similar to the initiation of war with Iraq.  There can be no doubt that the U.S. has been trying to coax Iran into a response that will justify military action.  So far, Iran hasn’t taken the bait, even though Israel has been chomping at the bit to attack Iran.

American politicians and their PR branch, commonly known as the mainstream press, spew forth all manner of rhetoric about humanitarian motives, but Greenwald points out that their actions say otherwise.

Just listen to the patently deceitful rhetoric that spews forth from US political leaders and their servants in the Foreign Policy Community when it comes time to rail against anti-US regimes in Libya, Syria and Iran. That the US and its Nato allies – eager benefactors of the world’s worst tyrants – are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face.

The fact is that the U.S. government must maintain allies in the Arab countries if it is going to fulfill its commitment to AIPAC to protect Israel.  As Israel continues to occupy and expand further into Palestinian territory, the U.S. must sacrifice it’s integrity to maintain “friendships” with the few Arab countries that can be bought off with favors and advanced military technology.  Our continued support for these dictators is very likely to come back in the form of further terrorist attacks on U.S. property and citizens.

Greenwald sums it up this way:

The fact that one can have a memo like Riedel’s so clearly explaining US policy to support the worst tyrannies that serve its interests, sitting right next to endless US pro-war rhetoric about the urgency of fighting for freedom and democracy, is an outstanding testament to that myth-making.