Chris Floyd Online - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium

The Base Court: Another Fortress Rising in America's Ring of Iron

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:45:13 +0100

While President Obama circumnavigates the globe, talking loftily of peace and engagement with the peoples of the world -- in language largely cribbed from old George Bush speeches, but presented in a far more photogenic, plausive package -- this is the real face that the United States is showing to the world. Chalmers Johnson writes:

The U.S. Empire of Bases — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new "embassy" in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad...

Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in our already bloated military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country. Instead these so-called embassies will actually be walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials, and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick get-aways.

Strangely enough, this bristling musculature of imperial dominance doesn't sit well with the locals in the "garrisoned lands" -- an apt phrase used by Tom Englehardt in introducing Chalmer's piece. Englehardt also points us to this Christian Science Monitor story:

In Pakistan, however, large parts of the population are hostile to the US presence in the region – despite receiving billions of dollars in aid from Washington since 2001 – and anti-American groups and politicians are likely to seize on the expanded diplomatic presence in Islamabad as evidence of American "imperial designs."

"This is a replay of Baghdad," said Khurshid Ahmad, a member of Pakistan's upper house of parliament for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the country's two main religious political parties. "This [Islamabad embassy] is more [space] than they should need. It's for the micro and macro management of Pakistan, and using Pakistan for pushing the American agenda in Central Asia."

While one has very little sympathy for religious parties anywhere (just look at the murderous, sanctimonious gits of the Republican and Democratic parties, all of them -- Obama included -- oozing Heepish piety as they rob the poor and wage ceaseless war all over the world), in this case Mr Ahmad hits ye old nail on the head. "Micro and macro management" of the imperial satrapies are indeed the feverish obsessions of our Potomac poobahs -- especially in a world which they darkly suspect is rapidly slipping from their accustomed control.

Chalmers also makes the vitally important -- hence universally ignored -- point that the American power structure, whether led by Neanderthal conservatives or ultramodern "progressives," has no intention of giving up the global archipelago of military bases that are the physical footprint of the American imperium:

And what is being done about those military bases anyway — now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people’s countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls, and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.

Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23rd, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic which, back in February 2009, announced that it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here’s the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and trans-ship supplies to Afghanistan.

Chalmers believes that the ring of iron that the United States has wrapped around the world will ultimately be the unmaking of the empire:

I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country, and so — on the analogy of a financial bubble or a pyramid scheme — if you’re an investor, it’s better to get your money out while you still can.

This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly and slowly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire and all the bases that go with it will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.

While Chalmers is undoubtedly one of the wise men of our day, I am not so sure about this final point. Oh, it's true that the empire of bases is further bankrupting our already bankrupt country. And it's an indisputable fact that the fever-dream of dominance and militarism has already spelled the end of the United States as we knew it (or as we once perceived and hoped it to be). Yet it is hard for me to believe that if push really comes to shove for our imperial managers, they will simply stand by and watch their power and privilege melt away with nothing more than a wistful sigh for passing glories. Especially with a unfathomably vast military arsenal -- including thousands of nation-devouring nuclear weapons -- at their command.

In such a case, I strongly doubt they will show the wisdom and courage that unaccountably appeared among the party hacks of the late Soviet leadership, who had the guts to look reality in the face and realize they could not maintain their own militarist empire without a cataclysm of murder and violence that would have put the whole world in peril. They did something almost unthinkable for a political class -- especially those which, like the Communists (and the Democrats and Republicans), see themselves as the righteous vanguard of a uniquely blessed system beyond question or reproach: they admitted defeat, they let go -- not only of the Eastern bloc nations they had controlled since World War II, but also core territories that Russia had governed for centuries, such as Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine. They risked an internal breakdown of epic proportions -- a fate which did indeed come to pass -- but they did not make war to save their empire. They withdrew their troops, and their political control, from country after country after country.

It is one of the most extraordinary episodes in world history. But it will almost certainly not be mentioned next week when Barack Obama visits Moscow -- where, as the proud head of a war machine that has killed a million innocent people in Iraq and is killing thousands in Afghanistan, as the stout defender and expander of the authoritarian power grabs of his White House predecessor and a staunch shield for torturers and other war criminals, he will scold the Russians for their lack of liberty and scanting of human rights. The vast sacrifices that the Russian people have made in the peaceful surrender of their empire -- the shattering of their society by the foolish adoption of Western "shock doctrine" economics and the Western-backed oligarchism of the bufoonish Yeltsin, all of which opened the door to the thuggish authoritarianism of the current Kremlin regime -- will once again go unremarked.

(Just as little was said a few weeks ago in the outpouring of official ceremonies marking the 65th annivesary of D-Day, where endless press paeans and political rhetoric hymned the "decisive" invasion, in which Allied forces faced 14 German divisions -- no mean feat, to be sure, and worthy of remembrance. But at the very same time, the Soviet armies were fighting 163 German divisions, rolling them back in a series of monumental battles that dwarfed the Normandy invasion, in a campaign that cost the lives of 20 million Russians and other Soviet peoples -- and was, by any measurement, the decisive factor in destroying Nazi power. But this too is largely ignored in American re-tellings of how "we" won the war.]

Perhaps -- when the last T-bills are called in, when the gigantic Ponzi scheme of the bailout scam runs out of suckers, when thousands of angry 'natives' are beseiging the walls of the Crusader fortresses the empire has raised in the midst of the "garrison lands," when the whole, sky-blackening hoard of imperial chickens comes home to roost -- perhaps the American elite of the day will rise to the moral level of late-20th century Soviet hacks, and let go. The history of America's bipartisan, multi-generational elite does not exactly inspire confidence in this regard, of course -- although stranger things have happened, I suppose, so it remains at least an outside chance. But I fear that when and if the Iron Ring comes down, it will not be "without great fall of blood."

Lean Cuisine: Counting Calories On the Checkpoint Diet

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:14:40 +0100

Remember, no matter what the facts say, just keep repeating to yourself: This is not a ghetto. This is not a ghetto. This is not a ghetto....

A West Bank checkpoint managed by a private security company is not allowing Palestinians to pass through with large water bottles and some food items, Haaretz has learned....

The private security company Modi'in Ezrahi...stops Palestinian workers from passing through the checkpoint with the following items: Large bottles of frozen water, large bottles of soft drinks, home-cooked food, coffee, tea and the spice zaatar. The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed: Five pitas, one container of hummus and canned tuna, one small bottle or can of beverage, one or two slices of cheese, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and 5 to 10 olives. Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools.

MachsomWatch told Haaretz that Sunday, a 32-year-old construction worker from Tul Karm, who is employed in Hadera, was not allowed to carry his lunch bag through the checkpoint. The bag contained six pitas, 2 cans of cream cheese, one kilogram of sugar in a plastic bag, and a salad, also in a plastic bag.

The typical Palestinian laborer in Israel has a 12-hour workday, including travel time and checkpoint delays. Many leave home as early as 2 A.M. in order to wait in line at the checkpoint; tardiness to work often results in immediate dismissal. Workers return home around 5 P.M. The wait at the checkpoint can take one to two hours in each direction, if not longer.

The food quantities allowed by Modi'in Ezrahi do not meet the daily dietary needs of the workers, and they prefer not to buy food at the considerably more expensive Israeli stores.

Two cans of cream cheese? Two? And we're supposed to feel sorry for these people? My god, they're living in the lap of luxury, just like those chicken-gobbling freeloaders down in Gitmo. Well, this is why the West is losing out to the Islamofascists, isn't it? We've grown too soft, we just mollycoddle these people, we really do.

Idols of the Marketplace Self-Rendered Down

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:56:17 +0100

Another shot of ragged beauty for you, back in the days when an idol tore down his own graven image in public, clearing a path to keep the artist alive. Remarkable.

Hammersmith Odeon, London, February 1990:

Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:21:16 +0100

Various factors are complicating our ability to do substantial posts here at the moment, but we will return to more or less regular programming soon. Meanwhile, here are a few choice tidbits that cry out for more comment than we can provide right now.

1. Siege Replaces Surge
When is a withdrawal not a withdrawal? When it's an "encirclement." The indefatigable Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com points us to this rather obscure little gem from the Christian Science Monitor: "US forces withdrawing from Iraqi cities will move instead to encircle them." As Ditz notes:

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the United States requires that all US combat forces leave Iraqi cities by the end of Tuesday. The US is going to be going along with the requirement, more or less, but those troops won’t be going far. According to Major General Robert Caslen, the commander of US forces in the north, the troops that are being pulled from the cities will be massing along the outskirts of the cities, encircling them in what the general called an attempt to replicate the surge strategy outside of the cities.

But come on, now. If there were say, 15,000 Chinese troops encamped outside your city limits, bristling with ordnance and overflying your neighborhood night and day with drones, attack copters and bombers, and barreling down your street with heavy weapons every time the local cops called them in -- wouldn't you feel sovereign? Liberated? Free? You know you would.

2. Plainview on the Potomac
Jeffrey St. Clair points out yet another progressive betrayal in full swing from the Obama Administration: the corporate bagmen and eager accomplices of landscape rape that the president has appointed to oversee his environmental policies: "Meet the Retreads." St. Clair makes the salient point that here -- as in so many other areas -- Obama's appointments speak far louder than his rhetoric:

Of all of Barack Obama’s airy platitudes about change none were more vaporous than his platitudes about the environment and within that category Obama has had little at all to say about matters concerning public lands and endangered species. He is, it seems, letting his bureaucratic appointments do his talking for him. So now, five months into his administration, Obama’s policy on natural resources is beginning to take shape. It is a disturbingly familiar shape, almost sinister.

It all started with the man in the hat, Ken Salazar, Obama’s odd pick to head the Department of Interior. Odd because Salazar was largely detested in his own state, Colorado, by environmentalists for his repellent coziness with oil barons, the big ranchers and the water hogs. Odd because Salazar was close friends with the disgraced Alberto Gonzalez, the torturer’s consigliere. Odd because Salazar backed many of the Bush administration’s most rapacious assaults on the environment and environmental laws. Odder still because Salazar, in his new position as guardian of endangered species, had as a senator repeatedly advocated the weakening of the Endangered Species Act. Salazar never hid his noxious positions behind a green mantle. Obama certainly knew what he was buying.

And as St. Clair details, Salazar is just the tip of the (soon-to-be-melted) iceberg.

3. Once More Into the Somali Breach
Barack Obama is also reviving the Bush Regime's strategy of direct intervention in Somalia -- and the Washington Post is dutifully doing its bit with this headline: "U.S. Sends Weapons to Help Somali Government Repel Rebels Tied to Al-Qaeda." It is of course superfluous in us to point out that the aforementioned rebels have consistently denied any ties to al Qaeda.

Which is not to say they are a bunch of sweethearts. But the rise of this faction of militant religious extremists is the inevitable (deliberate?) result of the bipartisan Terror War that the United States has been conducting in Somalia for years. With American backing, blessing -- and direct military support -- a coalition of Islamist factions that had brought the first measure of stability to Somalia in many years was shattered by foreign invasion and local warlords in the pay of the CIA. Some factions in the broken coalition were further radicalized by the brutal war that followed; others have sought compromise with the Western-backed transitional government. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died, and millions more have been driven into exile, ruin and terrible suffering -- and still the Great Game goes on.

4. Plan 9 From Outer Space

Finally, Stars and Stripes give us the quintessence of the American empire's oh-so-effective "counterinsurgency" strategy, with this quote from a U.S. officer toiling in the killing fields of the oh-so-good war in Afghanistan:

"I tell my men they have to be thinking warriors," Capt. Bobby Davis of Columbus, Ga., whose platoon went out to help the convoy, said the following day. "You have to be able to go out and talk to people and in the flick of a switch, like yesterday, to kill and then continue the mission — go out again and talk to people."

Hearts and minds -- blow their brains out -- then hearts and minds again. Yep, that sounds like a winning plan, all right! Criswell predicts: another 25 years of road-building, switch-flicking and people-killing in the distant hills of Bactria.

It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:36:42 +0100

From the very beginning of the abomination that is the American war in Iraq, imperial courtiers have pushed the same line: every act of mass slaughter in the occupied land was actually an encouraging development -- a sign that the insurgents were "getting desperate," that "dead-enders" were launching last-gasp efforts, unable to derail the bounty of liberty and peace that America's paternal goodness had bestowed upon the Iraqi people.

This has held true from the first suicide attacks following George W. Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in the spring of 2003 and all through the mounting violence that has claimed more than a million innocent lives. The only exception was during the height of the genocidal fury of 2006, when the forces unleashed and empowered and assisted by the American occupiers carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against fierce resistance. The American elite suffered a slight wobble at that point, putting together a conclave of worthies in the "Iraq Study Group" to suggest ways to tamp down the raging PR disaster. (And that's all there was to the ISG plan; they were never going to pull out of Iraq.) The whole episose could be seen as yet another sorry chapter in the saga of the ghoulish, goonish family that somehow came to hold sway in American affairs for almost three decades, with Daddy Bush's factotums guiding the ISG, while Junior Bush brushed them off and consulted his own little circle of militarist agitators to find a way to continue the war but get it off the front pages.

This was, of course, the famous "surge," which saw a fresh influx of not-so-fresh American troops, blanketing the country and helping consolidate the gains of the ethnic cleansing campaign for the occupier's favored factions. The ultimate result was the violent demographic shift -- including the forced migration of 4 million people -- and mass murder that is the foundation of the American-propped Maliki regime. Its sole purpose was to ensure that the war continued, and that the American military presence could be more deeply embedded in the client state.

The levels of violence did drop from the horrific heights of 2006 and 2007 -- again, partly because the American-assisted ethnic cleansing had been so successful. (In much the same way, there was a significant drop in Nazi violence against Jews in, say, Poland -- after the Nazis had killed most of the Jews in Poland.) But the violence in Iraq never went away; the conquered land remained one of the most dangerous places on earth, and very few of the 4 million refugees felt safe enough to return home. (And in many cases, their "ethnically cleansed" homes were no longer available to them.) And of course, the million dead are still dead -- and the millions more maimed, broken, ruined, grieved and traumatized are still suffering.

And now that the Americans and their Iraqi clients have reneged on their payoff deal with the Sunni insurgents they bribed to keep quiet during the surge, we are seeing the inevitable "uptick" in violence (to borrow Joe Biden's atrociously dismissive term for the coming slaughter in Obama's Afghanistan "surge"). More than 150 people have been killed in just two bombings of Shi'ite sites in the past five days.

And right on cue, the Obama Administration trots out the same old platitudes: "Nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, things are just hunky-dorry, don't sweat the small stuff, it's all good." Or as Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell put it:

"Despite the fact that you've seen sporadic high-profile attacks still taking place in Iraq, the overall security climate is a good one and we remain at all-time lows."

"All-time lows" means that, on average, "only" a few dozen or more are murdered in war-spawned violence each and every month of the year. The Obama mouthpiece then tried to blame the "sporadic" mass slaughters on the "Status of Forces Agreement," which calls for American troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities by the end of June. This is all part of an overall "withdrawal" plan concocted by the Bush Regime and their client Maliki, and adopted, with only the slightest modifications, by Barack Obama as his own. Naturally, both the "withdrawal from cities" this month and the promised "withdrawal of all combat troops" from the country in August 2010 are riddled with "exceptions." For example, Americans will remain thoroughly ensconced in strategic points inside the city of Baghdad (not least in the massive Crusader fortress they are building in the Green Zone), while continuing to "assist" Iraqi military operations in all Iraqi cities. And of course, the long-range "withdrawal" plan will leave tens of thousands of American troops on the ground in Iraq -- again, "assisting" and "training" Iraqi forces.

The recent "uptick" (and yes, Morrell used that very word in his spin session) is just part of the endless ebb and flow of death that the bipartisan American war on Iraq has set in motion. These bloodsoaked tides will continue to "surge" across the conquered land as the years of America's military implantation drag on and on -- and no doubt for long afterward.

"But you know what they say, man: It's all good." -- Bob Dylan

Hebrew Lessons: America's Secret Lexicon and the 'Synagogue of Satan'

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:17:07 +0100

I.
Jonathan Schwarz points out how that bastion of the "secular-humanist liberal media," CBS, edited the new release of Nixon tapes in order to protect the reputation of the national saint of Bible-believing conservatives, Billy Graham.

The latest release of White House conversations secretly taped by Richard Nixon shows the elite's favorite evangelist spewing venomous invective about Jews. Responding to Nixon's ostensible worry that America might be gripped by Nazi or Franco-style anti-semitism if Jews "don't start behaving," Graham replies with the time-honored wisdom that made him the confidant and confessor of presidents for generations:

Well, you know I told you one time that the bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.

This is the bit that CBS snipped out of the conversation, leaving only an innocuous statement by Graham about Jews' "usefulness" to God. Schwarz also notes that Nixon's warning about Jewish behavior had nothing to do with Israeli militarism, as the CBS story claims; it was in fact a response to "Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." Schwarz concludes:

The whole thing is well worth listening to if you're a connoisseur of the psychosis of the people who run this planet. My favorite part is the repeated tongue baths Graham bestows on Nixon, assuring him the country loves him and he may well be the greatest president in history.

II.
There is of course nothing really new in the latest tapes. Nixon and Graham's fascinating dialogues about Jews have already entered the public record. I first wrote about this issue more than seven years ago, in The Moscow Times, showing also how Graham also helped sow the seeds of anti-semitism in yet another of his elite charges: George W. Bush.

Picture this: the skulking ruler of a corrupt and vicious regime, hunkered down in his palace, besieged by the forces of good as he plots to unleash weapons of mass destruction on his "satanic" foes across the sea. Accused of war crimes and military aggression, he cynically turns to religion, often calling in the leader of the country's largest fundamentalist sect to lend "moral" support to the criminal regime. Together, the ruler and the holy man engage in frenzied diatribes against the enemies of the state, especially that sinister conspiratorial power lurking behind every eruption of evil in the world – the Jews.

A portrait of Saddam Hussein, raging desperately as he braces for the final reckoning at the hands of history's avenging angel, George W. Bush? No, it's just our ole pal Tricky Dick – Nixon, that is, not Cheney – back from the dead in White House tapes released this week: yet another star turn from the Founding Father of modern U.S. politics.

In the tapes, recorded in early 1972, we find Nixon hankering to hurl his nuclear thunderbolts at Vietnam – standard Cold War ranting for the apostate Quaker, who first suggested nuking 'Nam back in 1954. More relevant to the current scene is the Jew-bashing duet Nixon shares with the American elite's favorite fire-breathing evangelical, the Reverend (sic) Billy Graham.

Graham has – not to put too fine a point on it – sucked from the teat of American power for more than 50 years, lending his "moral authority" to various presidents (usually when they're in political hot water) then leveraging the resultant publicity into boffo box office for his stadium harangues around the world. He is perhaps best known in recent years for a miracle that changed the course of human history – saving the soul of the aforementioned angel, G.W. Bush.

Bush credits Graham with "planting the seeds" of fundamentalist faith in his pre-presidential person during a family gathering in 1985. Graham was visiting the Bush clan's luxurious compound in Maine, mooching free meals and sucking up to the sitting vice president, Daddy Bush. (Well, what else should a disciple of Christ be doing? Breaking bread with the poor or something? Get real.)

At that time, of course, young George was in wastrel mode, boozing it up and losing millions of dollars of other people's money in the oil companies Daddy's friends gave him to play with. But the meeting with Graham struck a chord in the lost soul, as Bush himself (or rather his ghostwriter) tells it, in properly hagiographic tones: "[Graham] sat by the fire and talked. And what he said sparked a change in my heart. I don't remember the exact words. It was more the power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and loving demeanor."

That divine emanation was somewhat occluded in the Nixon meeting, where Graham heatedly denounced "satanic Jews" and warned Nixon that the "Jewish stranglehold" on the national media "has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." The Lord-reflecting preacher then gently and lovingly described how he turned the Jews' two-faced perfidy against them with wily Christian deception of his own.

"A lot of Jews are great friends of mine," Graham begins with gentle, loving sarcasm. "They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them."

Graham chortles heartily when Nixon's toady and enforcer, H.R. Haldeman (the Karl Rove of his day) tells him to "wear a Jewish beanie" at an upcoming meeting with Time Magazine editors. And he yearns for a Nixon re-election later in the year: "Then we might be able to do something" about those nefarious Hebrews, says Graham.

As with Bush, Graham's potent spiritual seed found fertile ground in Nixon. "It's good we got this point about the Jews across," the president says after the meeting. "The Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards."

This week Graham issued a most Nixonian reply to the taped revelations, saying he had "no memory" of the occasion, but even so, he "deeply regretted" comments he "apparently made" during the meeting. "Apparently?" Perhaps those "satanic Jews" doctored the tape, eh, Billy? As it says in the Gospels: "When the sins of thy past confront thee, always use a weasel-word to squirm thy way out."

These days, the elderly Graham is too frail to whack the Bible leather on the road anymore. His place has been taken by his son, Franklin, who runs the racket along the same old lines: hell-fire for the common folk, political cover for the high and mighty. Indeed, Franklin was called upon by the skulking ruler of yet another corrupt and vicious regime in January 2001, when he showered the Lord's blessing on the illicit inauguration of the unelected wastrel whom Daddy Graham put on the road to glory all those years ago.

Meanwhile, Bush is still faithful to his Imam's teaching. He believes Jews are damned to eternal torment unless they adopt his own pinched and primitive fundamentalist faith -- an opinion that once landed him in hot water with his less jihadic mother. Alarmed at her son's ignorant intolerance, she called – who else? – Graham to set Junior straight. Graham's response? "I happen to agree with what George says."

Well, he would, wouldn't he?

III.
Graham's janus-faced enmity -- supporting Israeli militarism while hiding what he "really feels" about Jews -- is still very much alive among the American elite. (And not just among the elite, of course.) The marriage of convenience -- or rather, the three-way orgy -- between Likudnik Jews and America's imperial militarists and Christian nationalists -- has obscured the fundamental hatred and distrust of Jews that underlies much of the nation's political discourse. For example, veteran cognoscenti have long known that "liberal media" is a code word for "the Jews" -- cast as wily, relentless corruptors of America's pure soul, with their promotion of immoral movies, jungle be-bop music, investigative journalism and what all. Indeed, in the subterranean American lexicon, the term "liberal" itself has long denoted a) Jews; b) uppity darkies duped by Jews, and c) white commies and race traitors in league with Jews to destroy America.

And if you think this template doesn't lie buried but percolating in the amygdala of America's cultural brain, then brother, you don't know these here United States at all. Of course, as with almost every anti-semitic elite down through the ages, there are also many "good Jews" around -- as Graham himself noted. In our day, these are the Jews who support America's imperial agenda and help keep down the "recalcitrant tribes" of the Middle East, in much the same manner as the American elite's illustrious forbears cleaned out those pesky redskins. In fact, with Israeli society now hurtling headlong into a quasi-fascist fortress state, there are probably more "good Jews" of this stripe than there have been in a long time -- perhaps ever.

But of course, most Jews are not imperial stooges or ethnic cleansers -- and these clearly belong to the "Synagogue of Satan" (with Noam Chomsky as High Priest, perhaps.) The American amygdala still pulses with a primitive fear response at the thought of these impure Others: Nixon's "irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards," still potently evoked by the masking term "liberal."

NOTE: One should not be fooled by the manufactured "tussle" between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations over Israeli "settlements," by the way. The bipartisan foreign policy elite of the United States do not give a rat's damn about how many Palestinian Indians are forced from their land, or how many Warsaw Ghettos the Israelis construct for their captives. If they did, they would not have sat idly by and watched the "settlements" grow like topsy throughout the so-called "peace process." Such rote displays of displeasure are just part of the game. Israeli nationalists get to look tough for their domestic political audiences; the Americans get to appear "even-handed," which in turn provides some cover for the brutal dictatorships they support in the region. Israel can then make "concessions" (insincerely offered, never carried out), which makes the American president look effective -- and casts Israel in a better light for the American audience. ("See, they listen to reason, they want to work things out.") It's a game that everybody wins -- except ordinary Palestinians.

If the Americans were serious about influencing Israeli policy on the "settlements" -- or anything else -- then they would move to cut off the nearly $3 billion a year the United States provides to fund Israel's war machine -- and its settlements. In politics, as in so much else, you must follow the money. And in American-Israeli relations -- as in so much else -- the money is not where the mouth is.

P.S. If you want to hear what the "Synagogue of Satan" really sounds like in full flow, then attend the words of Sir Gerald Kaufman, standing up in Britain's House of Commons during Israel's brutal decimation of Gaza earlier this year. As the UK magazine Lobster notes, Kaufman "described the murder of his Polish grandmother by a German soldier and then said:

"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as their justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."

Compare that to the overwhelming pro-massacre majority in the U.S. Congress, which voted its "vigorous and unwavering commitment" to Israel during the slaughter. Or indeed, compare it to the eloquent response then-President-Elect Barack Obama made to the attack, which Israel conveniently ended just before his inauguration:

A Brand New Day -- Yea, Verily, Morning in America!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:04:23 +0100

Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's program to seed the nation's university classrooms with covert students being secretly groomed for service in the security apparat: "Obama's Classroom Spies" (David Price, Counterpunch).

Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's plutocratic economic policy in his latest "financial reform" plan: "Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street" (Michael Hudson, also Counterpunch).

Disturbing news of the true fruits of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's plutocratic economic policy: "Goldman Sachs to Make Record Bonus Payout" (Guardian). Quoth the paper: "The biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history."

Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's inhumanity in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp: "Military Attorney Major Barry Wingard Reveals Injustices Continue at Gitmo" (Buzzflash).

Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's claims of authoritarian powers: "In Stark Legal Turnaround, Obama Now Resembles Bush" (McClatchy).

Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:42:35 +0100

Professor As'ad AbuKhalil rightly notes the rank hypocrisy of Barack Obama's statement on the turmoil in Iran:

Obama has spoken: "The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights." There is so much that you can do with this statement. The hypocrite in [chief] is invoking an argument that he himself so blatantly ignores and will continue to ignore to the last day of his presidency. Does he really believe in that right for peoples? Yes, but only in countries where governments are not clients of the US. Will he invoke that argument, say, in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Morocco or Tunisia or Libya or Jordan or Oman, etc? Of course not. This is only an attempt to justify US imperial policies. And even in Iran, the Empire is nervous because it can't predict the outcome. But make no mistake about it: his earlier statement to the effect that the US can't for historical reasons "appear to be meddling" sets the difference between the Bush and the Obama administration. The Bush administration meddled blatantly and crudely and visibly, while the Obama administration meddles more discreetly and not-so-visibly. Tens of thousands of pens equipped with cameras have been smuggled into Iran: I only wish that the American regime would dare to smuggle them into Saudi Arabia so that the entire world can watch the ritual of public executions around the country.

I'd like to say an additional word about Obama's statement. When I saw that the president also invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’”), I very nearly threw up. To quote an apostle of non-violence, who spent his last days standing with striking workers and railing against the American government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" because of its murderous war machine, when you yourself are in command of that war machine, spewing out Vietnam-style death (and "targeted assassinations") in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan; when you are striving with all your might to defend, shield and in many cases continue the heinous torture atrocities of your predecessor; when you are pouring trillions of public dollars into the purses of the financial elite while letting millions of workers go hang; and when you yourself have made repeated statements that you will never take any options "off the table" when dealing with Tehran, including the nuclear destruction of the Iranian people for whose liberties and well-being you now profess such noble concern -- well, that seems a bit much, if I may riot in understatement.

In other posts, AbuKhalil offers more good sense on the Iranian situation:

The hypocrisy [of Western media coverage] is quite stunning. They are admiring the dare of the population when the Palestinian population shows more dare. They are outraged at the level of repressive crackdown by the regime when Israeli crackdowns on demonstrations are far more brutal and savage? They are admiring the participation of women in a national movement, when Palestinian women led the struggle from as far back as the 1930s (see the private papers of Akram Zu`aytir). They are outraged that the Iranian government is repressing media coverage, when the Israeli government is far more strict: when it was perpetrating slaughter in Gaza few months ago, the Western press was not allowed any freedom of movement except the hill of death where Michael Oren led reporters to watch Israeli brutal assualt on the Palestinian civilian population from a distance.

The media coverage in the US and UK proves beyond a doubt that increasingly the Western press has been serving as a tool for the various Western government. If the government cheers, the media cheer, if the government condemns, the media condemns, etc. And would the Western media ever be as unrestrained in its glamorization and glorfication of demonstrators and demonstrations in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan as they are now? There are no claims of even covering a story anymore: it is merely how can we best help the beautiful demonstrators who are not bearded and whose women are more loosely veiled. This is not to say that the Iranian regime is not repressive and needs to be overthrown: far from that. But it is to say that the Iranian regime is as bad (in fact Saudi Arabia and Egypt are probably worse) and as unjust as the various Middle East governments that are supported by the Western governments and Western media. When Western media sit with Saudi and Egyptian leaders, it is as if they are sitting with a friend...

And for those who see the union-busting, privatizing Ahmadinajad as some kind of leftist champion of the poor and the oppressed, AbuKhalil notes:

The rift I sense between Iranian left and Arab left is due to some admiration on the part of some in the Arab left for Ahmadinajad: that really angers people in the Iranian left. (And I am here with the latter group in that regard. I find Ahmadinajad's rhetoric of disservice to Palestine).

And for those who see the hidebound sectarian Moussavi as some kind of champion of "Western-style" pluralist democracy, AbuKhalil has these observations:

I am very proud to be writing in a paper (Al-Akhbar) that is the only Arabic newspaper in the world that advocates for gay and lesbian rights. But the Western media are more impressed with a lackey of Ayatullah Khomeini who led the purges against leftists, Baha'is, and Jews in Iranian universities in the 1980s....

I can't support a movement that writes its signs in English, in order to please the White Man, and I can't be in the same trench with Fox News. Yet, I support the overthrow of a regime that fed its people foreign policy slogans and religious jargon and (along with Saudi Arabia) fought all manifestations of secularism, leftism, and feminism in the Middle East since 1979 (much earlier in the case of Saudi Arabia).

Finally, AbuKhalil takes on the racist undertones that have crept into some Western championing of the Iranian uprising, particularly Andrew Sullivan's implication that the Iranians are more "capable" of democracy than Arabs:

Andrew Sullivan responds to my critique ("As'ad AbuKhalil doesn't appreciate Americans' double standards [when he declares "why do Western media express outrage over a stolen election in Iran but they don't even feign outrage over lack of elections in Saudi Arabia?") by saying this: "Because Iran actually has a population capable of sustaining democracy; and Mousavi is as good as we'll get."

Oh, you have to do better than this. What does these cliches mean? That the population "is capable of sustaining democracy"? Hardly the case if you measure it historically: I personally don't believe in the inequality of people as you seem to do; and I don't belive in those culural arguments that assumes one culture is hostile to democracy while others are not. It is fascinating that Iran is largly Islamic so they can't invoke the non-Islamic arugment, but Iran has produced two successive forms of dictatorships, so the attempt to separate the genetic makeup of Iranians from the Arabs is historically flawed.

And the argument that Mousavi is "as good as we'll get" can't be reconciled with the history and presence of the man. Just yesterday, he released a statement that was dripping with religious demagoguery and was argument that his mission is really to prove the compatibilty of Islam with the republic. Mousavi does not miss an opportunity to to invoke the memory and teachings of Khomeini. People are forgetting that when Mousavi was prime minister and was engaged in a conflict with the then president Khamenei, Khomeini was invariably siding with Mousavi. So there is a history of close association with this so-called democrat with the teachings of Khomeini. Let us not kid ourselves: it is not about the charactertics of the population and not about the "as good as it gets" bogus argument: it is about cheering for anybody who sides against a government that oppoes the US.

In a world riddled with journalistic cant -- and thought-killing political and religious tribalism of every stripe -- AbuKhalil's perspective remains a most useful and astringent corrective.

Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:23:04 +0100

Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
But there's a woman on my block,
She just sits there, facing the hill.
She says, Who's gonna take away his license to kill?
--Bob Dylan

There is, I understand, a popular cable television show featuring a "good" serial killer who has been taught by a kind mentor to channel his murderous psychosis toward socially worthy ends; i.e., killing scumbags who deserve to die but have somehow escaped the law. I often wonder if this show is actually a better mirror of the national psyche than "24," the "good torture" saga that in the Bush years was often cited by top administration officials, conservative pundits -- and Supreme Court justices -- as an insightful inspiration for national security policy.

Certainly it often seems that concept of "Dexter" has been writ large in what we are now pleased to call our "Overseas Contingency Operation" -- in preference to the old Bushist term, "War on Terror," or the admirably straightforward locution once favored by Donald Rumsfeld: "The Long War." (Couldn't we just combine the two and call it the "Long Overseas Contingency Operation" -- i.e., LOCO?) For whatever else LOCO might be -- sustained campaign of plunder and profiteering; reckless dice game for geopolitical domination; massive dose of Viagra for an ageing militarist/media elite -- it is, most assuredly, a license to kill: serially, savagely, and best of all -- the psycho-killer's dream -- without accountability.

On Friday, an internal investigation by the Pentagon into the American airstrike with B1 bombers on villages in Afghanistan's Farah province in May was released. [For more on the attack, which Afghan officials say killed more than 140 civilians, see "Tales of Yankee Power."] As McClatchy reports, the Pentagon -- which at first denied that any civilians were killed -- now admits outright that it sure enough killed 26 civilians...and might well have actually blown 86 hunks of collateral damage to smithereens.

This comes after weeks of high-octane weaseling from American officials -- including the grand LOCO warlord himself, General David Douglas MacArthur Petraeus, who at one point announced that he had video proof that our boys had only been killing dirty rotten terrorist ragheads hidden amongst so-called civilians who might have been giving the insurgents shelter and who anyway like to lie about how many of their family members get killed in these essential raids -- or words to that effect.

Needless to say, this documentary evidence has not been forthcoming: much like the documentary evidence that Colin Powell once promised would show the world that the 9/11 attacks had come from Afghanistan, with Taliban complicity. This dossier of "evidence" -- i.e., the supposed casus belli justifying the entire American military operation in Afghanistan -- has never seen the light of day, and never will. It was just like the murky photograpsh and sinister-looking vials that Powell later waved around the UN to "justify" the invasion of Iraq: a PR prop, part of "rolling out the product" to sell a war already planned.

In any case, the atrocity in Farah was so glaring, the death count was so high, and the eyewitness accounts of the true nature of the attack and its aftermath were so credible, plentiful and multi-sourced that the Pentagon was forced to concede at least some ground to reality -- even though our "Good War" leaders seem to think that "only" murdering 26 civilians is OK. Hey, it coulda been 146, they shrug, with a charming, aw-shucks Dexterish grin. And anyway, it's all in a good cause, right?

And although Afghan officials are standing by the higher death count, the American military brass has already decided that no one will be disciplined for killing the 26 and quite possibly 86 innocent human beings slaughtered in the operation. Hell, our boys actually did themselves proud! As Reuters reports:

The U.S. military is unlikely to discipline troops involved in a deadly air strike in Afghanistan that heightened tensions between Washington and Kabul, the top U.S. military official said on Thursday.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. troops handled themselves well during the battle last month against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's western Farah province....

"At least in my review, I found nothing that would lead to any specific action along the lines of what you're asking," Mullen said at a Pentagon briefing when asked it disciplinary action might be considered.

"Civilian bloodbath? So what?" That pretty much says it all. So if you've got an insatiable lust for killing your fellow human beings, there's no need to get some dinky job in a stateside police department, confining yourself to a piecemeal, penny-ante kill-rate. No sir. Get with the LOCO program instead, and you can murder wholesale, worldwide, without fear of retribution -- indeed, with the praise and support of the highest authorities in the land. Hey, it's boffo box office in the Homeland. They can't get enough of that kind of stuff in the shining city on the hill.

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled.
Oh, man is opposed to fair play,
He wants it all and he wants it his way.
But there's a woman on my block,
She just sits there, as the night grows still.
She says, who's gonna take away his license to kill?

Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:32:46 +0100

Iranian academic Ali Alizadeh points out an important fact missed by many who see nothing but sinister American manipulation behind the post-election protests in Iran: that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies -- touted as a possible reason that he expanded his vote total by 10 million over the last election, a bounty ostensibly harvested from the grateful rural poor -- are actually much more in line with his old nemesis, George W. Bush. As Alizadeh notes (via the Angry Arab):

It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees.

The trope of a singular American hand guiding a million-headed puppet in the streets of Iran seems a bit odd anyway. There is of course little doubt that the imperial security apparat will try to make hay from the turmoil; but the American militarists have already made it clear that they prefer a victory for the incumbent Ahmadinejad; after all, without a readily demonizable figure as the public face of Iran, their unquenchable lust for conquering Persia becomes that much harder to consummate. As Steven Zunes notes, the grim-visaged rightwing avenger Daniel Pipes spelled it out in a recent jowl-flapping at the Heritage Foundation, proclaiming that "he would vote for Ahmadinejad if he could, because he prefers 'an enemy who is forthright, blatant, obvious.'" (Well, don't we all? And as with so many other enemies of peace, liberty -- and sanity -- Pipes himself fits the bill quite admirably. One always knows exactly where that po-faced squeaker of pips is coming from.)

And as we noted here late last month, the American security apparat seemed to be intervening on Ahmadinejad's behalf, with a stepped-up terrorist campaign by the militant Sunni extremist group, Jundullah -- just one of the terrorist organizations inside Iran now on the American payroll:

...the attack on the Zahedan mosque serves a confluence of interests. For it comes not only at a strategic location but also at a strategic time: just two weeks before the Iranian presidential election, with the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing a strong challenge from two reformist candidates.

Of course, the very last thing that the militarists in Washington and Israel want to see is the election of a moderate in Iran. They want -- and need -- Ahmadinejad, or someone just like him, so they can keep stoking the fires for war. A moderate president, more open to genuine negotiations, and much cooler in rhetoric than the loose-lipped Ahmadinejad, would be yet another blow to their long-term plans. Because the ultimate aim -- the only aim, really -- of the militarists' policy toward Iran is regime change. They don't care about "national security" or the "threat" from Iran's non-existent nuclear arsenal; they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel -- or even more ludicrously, the United States -- even if Tehran did have nukes. They don't care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran's "sponsorship of terrorism," for, as we've seen, the militarists thrive on -- when they are not actively fomenting -- the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and 'justifies' its own ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.

No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran's current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no essential difference in aim or method between today's policy and that of 1953. (Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in the heart of the oil lands -- precisely what they wanted, and got, with the installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a half-century ago.... To lose a fear-raising (and fundraising!) asset like Ahmadinejad now would be a bitter disappointment.

And what better way for an incumbent president to stand tall before the voters than to rally the nation around him in the face of a horrible terrorist attack? A mosque full of Shiite worshippers, blown to pieces, with photos showing the blood of the innocent martyrs splattered on the ruined walls? This serves the interests of all the major players in the great geopolitical game: the Iranian hardliners, the American and Israeli militarists, the Jundullah extremists.

Moussavi -- a long-time paladin of Iran's ruling establishment, a conservative who was once a hardline prime minister himself, closely aligned with the Ayatollah Khomeini (America's own "Great Satan" of yore) -- is hardly the pliable stooge sought by the Potomac plotters. Of course, as we noted earlier this week, this fact doesn't necessarily make him a Jeffersonian hero of human liberty, either -- an Aung San Suu Kyi of Iran. The corporate media's portrayal of the Iranian uprising is indeed a lazy slotting of chaotic reality into neatly defined, "color revolution" stereotypes; but their misjudgment needn't be compounded a comparable stereotyping the other way. (The corporate media's false depiction of Moussavi as a "liberal" has ironically been seized upon by some American dissidents as proof that he is a color-revolution cut-out for Western interests, even, as some have described him, an "Iranian Ahmad Chalabi." If he were a returned exile who had spent years in the pay of the CIA, that might be true. But that is not the case. Again, it is no endorsement of Moussavi to point out these facts.) As Alizadeh notes, the crowds appearing at the protest rallies are

made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

As I noted the other day, no one knows how the current turmoil will turn out -- or how the various power-players, including the many elite factions inside Iran and the many vultures circling outside, will attempt to mold the chaotic reality to their own advantage. But it seems to me that the circumstances in Iran cannot be forced into any simplistic template. For while it is true that the American imperium does indeed seek to exert its influence everywhere and always, it does not and cannot engender and control every event on earth. We risk partaking of the courtiers' own hubris -- and their mythology of American exceptionalism -- if we make that automatic assumption.

Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:22:41 +0100

The recent, mysterious death of yet another captive in the Guantanamo concentration camp opens yet another door into the blood-caked labyrinth of the American gulag, where despite all the soaring rhetoric about "restoring the rule of law," torture is still very much the order of the day.

Scott Horton at Harper's provides this telling quote from an AP story on the death of Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, which gulag officials have classified as an "apparent suicide":

A Guantanamo Bay detainee who left his cell to meet with military commanders as prisoner representative never returned, and was instead sent to a psychiatric ward where he died five months later, a former detainee recalled…

The U.S. military has refused to say how Saleh allegedly killed himself in the closely watched ward. But the former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, said it wasn’t like him to commit suicide. “He was patient and encouraged others to be the same,” Mohamed said. “He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair.” Even if it was suicide, Mohamed still classifies the death as “murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it,” saying that the U.S. had caused Saleh to lose hope by locking him up indefinitely without charges.

They took him away, held him under the close supervision in a psychiatric ward -- and yet he still managed to magically kill himself by some as-yet undisclosed method. No doubt the "ongoing investigation" -- by the NCIS guys! just like on TV! -- will eventually manage to concoct an explanation plausible enough to satisfy our ever-incurious political and media elites.

But as Horton notes, Saleh was also a victim of an particularly sadistic form of torture that is still being practiced -- openly, unapologetically -- by the Obama Administration's agents in the Guantanamo concentration camp: force-feeding. Horton writes:

The techniques do not comply with the international standards for actual force-feeding, established in the World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration of 1991. Instead they have a darker and more distressing progeny. From the use of restraint chairs down to the specific brand of commercial diet supplement used by the doctors, the force-feeding techniques now in use at Guantanamo replicate the methods used by the CIA at black sites under Bush. At the black sites, those methods were not part of any medical regime. Instead, they were a part of a carefully designed torture regime, the very same regime that Obama claims to have abolished in his first executive order.

Pentagon spokespersons righteously defend the “force-feeding” program at Guantanamo as medically necessary to save lives. That’s a farce. In fact, this program is the last residue of the Bush-era torture system. Did it just claim another life on June 1? That’s a question that some apparently don’t want to have to answer. And two weeks later, the public continues to await a serious explanation of this death. The passage of time will not make the ultimate explanations more credible.

As we have noted many times before, Obama has not "abolished torture," any more than he has abolished the worldwide American gulag -- or indeed, renounced any of the autocratic powers claimed by Bush, including the "right" of the Unitary Executive to seize anyone on earth and hold them in captivity indefinitely, without charges -- or to have them murdered in "extrajudicial assassinations." This latter power -- which Bush also delegated to covert agents in the field, who could murder selected targets on their own volition, without awaiting approval from higher up -- was openly trumpeted by Bush, on national television, before a joint session of Congress -- and was routinely noted by the mainstream press. To my knowledge, no leading figure in the national political establishment has ever publicly objected to this practice of state murder -- nor has Obama repudiated or overturned Bush's directives on this point. In fact, Obama has made one facet of Bush's "Murder, Inc." program a very public linchpin of his strategy in the "Af-Pak" War: the use of drone-fired missiles to assassinate alleged terrorists, alleged insurgent leaders -- and everyone else in the missile's general vicinity.

But we must give credit where it's due. Obama has wrought some changes in the imperial torture policies, making good on his campaign pledges to restore the American values that were lost or diminished under his odious predecessor. As Alfred McCoy -- the premier historian of the American elite's long, long love affair with torture -- points out, Obama has revived the venerable bipartisan practice of relying on client states to do the bulk of the dirty work for the U.S. security apparat. McCoy writes (at TomDispatch):

If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years....

Then, on April 16th, President Obama ... released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting: "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no prosecutions of Agency employees. "We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but urged Americans simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law that the U.N.'s chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington was actually obliged to investigate possible violations of the Convention Against Torture.

This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global torture policy that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly advocating human rights while covertly outsourcing torture to allied governments and their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.

There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon Panetta announced that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where we can, as he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment." Showing the quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell.

Another suicide, in murky circumstances, of a Terror War captive -- a cynic might begin to detect a pattern here.

We also learned this week that the Obama Administration had renewed the contract of the two psychiatrists who were instrumental in designing several of the more exquisitely painful and perverse elements of the Bush Regime's torture program. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were re-hired by the CIA -- for 1,000 smackers a day -- in February. As Jane Mayer notes (in an interview with Horton at another venue, The Daily Beast):

To my amazement, I was told that the CIA renewed its rich contract with James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in February 2009—in other words, after Obama took office. What is so astounding about this is that these two former military psychologists have been described to me and others as the original designers of the torture techniques. They were there at the creation when waterboarding was used 183 times on Abu Zubaydah. Waterboarding, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, is torture. Torture is a felony, sometimes treated as a capital crime. Yet despite all of this, the CIA renewed their contract this year. The only thing that finally cut their revenue stream off was the passage of a new law curbing the CIA from using contractors in interrogations. This past spring, after that law passed, Leon Panetta fired their firm. But it seems that for seven years they have been on the public dole. If the CIA had any qualms about using the cruel techniques these two contractors designed, it certainly wasn’t reflected by February 2009. [For more on dynamic duo of Mitchell and Jesson, see here and here.]

In other words, now that the security apparat is outsourcing most of its torture again, there is no need for pricey stateside contractors to do the job. Hey, we all know foreign labor is cheaper! Hell, those Libyans and Egyptians and what have you probably do it for free, just to stay on the good side of their imperial patrons.

McCoy's remarkable piece gives us dreadful chapter and horrifying verse of the history of American torture -- a long and proud tradition that our government is still staunchly upholding today!

Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:42:26 +0100

Events are unfolding in Iran rapidly and chaotically, with no clear indication yet where they may lead. (In the short term, that is. One is always mindful of Zhou Enlai's response when he was asked for his opinion on the historical impact of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell.") Solid information is still scanty and piecemeal, so it is difficult to offer any telling insights on the developments and their possible implications. So the following are just a few tentative observations.

It does seem clear, by all the evidence so far -- particularly studies of past voting patterns -- that the final vote totals were rigged and padded rather clumsily (much as they are in Russia, for example), although that doesn't necessarily mean that Ahmadinajad actually lost. Again, we just don't have enough information on this point yet. It would be good if he did lose and had to step down -- but I think it's highly unlikely that the powerful elites who back him will allow this to happen.

Then again, the Iranians are in general a braver, bolder people than some other peoples we might mention, who in recent memory sat slack-jawed and supine when their franchise was stripped from them in broad daylight by powerful elites. The Iranian people have already overthrown one seemingly powerful and permanently entrenched regime in the last 30 years, and could well do so again -- or at least force the current regime to become more open and humane. In any case, the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iranians who have taken to the streets, risking -- and in some cases, losing -- life and limb to demand their rights shame the bloated, bored, distracted masses of the American empire (and its British satrapy), who have watched numbly and dumbly as their liberties have been systematically dismantled, their public treasuries looted by plutocrats and war profiteers, and their own children thrown into murderous wars of aggression and occupation.

But while the Iranians continue to work out their own destiny, coverage of the events in the Western press has largely fallen into the expected -- indeed, predestined -- patterns. Western media have swiftly fitted the Iranian unrest into the now-standard "color revolution" template -- seen in Serbia, Georgia, Lebanon, and other -- where plucky, pro-Western (i.e., reliably pliable to American interests) forces rise up against their oppressors. The leaders of these forces are invariably depicted as "moderates" committed to installing Western-style governments and liberal, Western-style social orders, etc. For example, the recent election in Lebanon was presented as a great triumph for the "pro-Western March 14 Faction" led by the son of slain tycoon Rafik Hariri -- even though this "pro-Western" faction includes Sunni extremists aligned with Osama bin Laden.

Similarly, the Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi is universally depicted as a "moderate." Yet, as Professor As'ad AbuKhalil points out, when Moussavi was Iran's prime minister under Ayatollah Khomeini, he "presided over a regime far more oppressive than Ahmadinajad's." AbuKhalil's take on the hypocrisy of the Western media coverage on Iran is worth quoting more fully:

...there is so much hypocrisy in the Western coverage and official reactions to the developments. Most glaring for me was the statement by the secretary-general of the UN who insisted on the respect of the will of the Iranian people. Would that US designate utter such words, say, about Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and other dictatorships that are approved by the US? ...I am in no way sympathetic to Moussavi. He is a man who suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy. When he was prime minister back in the 1980s, he presided over a regime far more oppressive than Ahmadinajad's. And why has no Western media really commented on his rhetoric during his own campaign: the man kept saying that he wants a "return" to the teachings of Khomeini. I in no way support a man who wants a "return" to the teachings of Khomeini.

Of course, Moussavi -- like some other politicians we could mention -- has now become, for millions of people, an emblem for genuine changes and reforms that he probably has no desire or intention to enact, even if given the chance. Like Barack Obama, he is of the power structure, and would, in end, no doubt act for the power structure. (Albeit with minor mitigations which, as we've often noted in regard to American politics, can also mean real differences in the lives of many individuals, and thus are not to be airily dismissed -- although such an acknowledgement in no way requires an endorsement or acceptance of the overall power structure in which these mitigations occur, or of any particular mitigator in that system.)

But as we noted above, the Iranian people have already demonstrated the courage to stand up for their rights. Unlike the acquiescent Americans, seemingly content with cosmetic makeovers of the imperial management, the Iranians may yet force their emblem to more fully inhabit the role that the times -- and their own ardent desires for change -- have created for him.

Day Late, Dollar Short -- Your Good Luck

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:14:54 +0100

I was going to write a piece on this NYT story ("Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan"), but Arthur Silber beat me to it -- and that's your good fortune, because his piece is far better than I could have done: "You're on the Battlefield Right Now."

Silber is on an Olympian roll these days, producing essay after essay of powerful insight and wicked wit, working at a level we haven't seen since Gore Vidal in his heyday. So do yourself a favor: head on over to his site, and dive in to his latest offerings. I would especially recommend this piece -- on the deep politics of race, sexuality and gender that permeate public discourse and policy, and bedevil much private emotion and action as well -- but you should check out all the recent work over there as well.

Apt Pupils: Assassinating the Truth About Atrocities in Iraq

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:29:17 +0100

To speak out for human rights in an occupied land -- to investigate and publicize the systematic tortures and atrocities practiced by the client regime of the occupying power -- is a dangerous, often deadly business. Harith al-Obaidi found that out in Iraq this week, when he was gunned down in a Baghdad mosque a day after he condemned the American-installed government for its flagrant abuses. The New York Times reports:

The Sunni leader, Harith al-Obaidi, was leading Friday prayers at al-Shawaf mosque in the upscale neighborhood of Yarmouk, and also gave a sermon complaining about the abuses, when a gunman entered the mosque and fired at him...Mr. Obaidi, who was deputy chairman of the human rights committee in Parliament, actively campaigned against what he saw as abuse in Iraqi prisons.

“He was probably the No. 1 person in defending human rights,” said Alaa Maki, a senior member of Tawafiq, the Sunni bloc that Mr. Obaidi headed. “And he was the No. 1 person visiting and touring the Iraqi jails.”

...In his work, Mr. Obaidi was fighting against such practices as torture and delayed releases for prisoners, as well as to improve their sleeping quarters.

The prisons of the American-installed, American-trained, American-maintained government led by the longtime violent religious extremist Nouri al-Maliki are notorious hellholes of torture, deprivation, murder and injustice -- just as they were under Saddam (whose party was installed in power in the 1960s with CIA assistance), and just as they have been under the American occupation. The Americans still hold more than 10,000 captives in their own facilities; at one time, the International Red Cross estimated that between 70-90 percent of America's captives had committed no crime whatsoever, much less any violent action against the occupation forces. And of course, the progressive champion of open government, Barack Obama, has just won another court battle to bury evidence of American atrocities written on the bodies of Iraqi captives.

As the Iraqis used to say just after the American invasion in 2003: "The pupil is gone; the master has come." Now new pupils are passing on the master's lessons. And those who dare speak out against the fruits of this sinister education find themselves in the cross-hairs of the client government -- and of those who do its dirty work "on the dark side, if you will." It is, as our eloquent president has said of the million-killing act of aggression in Iraq, "an extraordinary achievement."

Go Tell It On the Mountain

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:06:33 +0100

I'm on the road, in a strange country; by all appearances, a fragile, brittle, frightened land, where the natives must be told every day -- and preferably every hour -- by every means possible how wonderful they are, how good, how righteous, how deserving and important, how unquestionably, uncritically, purely and simply (oh so simply) special they are in every way. A land where cleavage-popping babes adorn forty-foot billboards for bail bonding companies. Where pasty realtors and corn-starched pols gather to pledge allegiance to the Confederate flag, and cranky predestinarians sketch flowcharts of salvation on basement whiteboards in the wee hours of the night. A land where fine dining establishments politely ask patrons to check their weapons at the door, and thunka-thunka country hunks lob self-regarding bombast through the wastelands and broadbands of suburbia. A land scoop-gutted, a land of simulacra , of empty gesture and thin masquerade. A land where only weather, only nature in its patches and adaptations, only the grass and earth that enclose the heartrendered dead can still convey the tang of deep reality that once flourished here. I am at present lost in such a country.

As you can imagine, it is difficult, if not impossible -- if not completely pointless -- to "blog" in such circumstances. Indeed, this sojourn in deracinating irreality has called the entire enterprise -- or rather, my own contribution to it -- into question. Faced with these Alps of ignorance and error, I have to look into the rippling, mud-rimmed mirror left by the downpour and ask: What can I say to the mountain? Anything new? Anything of import and enlightenment? Anything that will contribute something other than my own voice reverberating back? Should I set myself to a deeper schooling, excavate more thoroughly my own ignorance and error? Should I come at the mountain from a different angle?

Fortunately, as I continue my doubt-staggered journey, there are those out there for whom these questions in no way apply. They are most indubitably delivering new and important information, new stores of enlightenment. In the ancient hipster measurement of ultimate worth, they "have something to say." And so, whilst the wrestling with logistical, technical and spiritual difficulties impedes my blogging, I direct you to these learned Thebans.

First and foremost, Arthur Silber has been on a roaring tear for days, delivering piece after piece of genuine importance: weighty essays, acerbic asides, bone-rattling insights. You should get to the site now and begin reading your way down -- or hell, start at the bottom and read your way up. But read it, one way or another, if it is information, provocation, inspiration and enlightenment you seek.

As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab," is another writer who constantly offers new information and new perspectives, particularly on the cauldron of suffering, folly, and murderous geopolitical gamesmanship called "the Middle East." He is an excellent corrective to the ignorance and error that pervades media and government attitudes toward the region -- and in the region itself.

Other something-sayers worth checking regularly include Chris Hedges, Winter Patriot, John Caruso, William Blum, Jon Schwarz... There are many others, of course, but time and logistics are suddenly bearing down hard and preclude any further thought on the matter. I just wanted to drop in briefly at the site while I could to say we will back to regular programming -- or some kind of programming anyway -- in a few days.

*Note: My connection at present is so bad that I can't link properly. So here are links to the writers mentioned above:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
http://www.distantocean.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer70.html

Speech Therapy: Pretty Words in Cairo Hide Brutal Realities of Power

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:01:13 +0100

We are told that Barack Obama gave a "major address" on the subject of US-Muslim relations. He was speechifying in Cairo, capital of one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East, following a sleepover with the Saudi king, Abdullah, ruler of one of the most repressive regimes on earth.

Regarding the deep impact of this landmark event, we defer to the observations of Professor As'ad AbuKhalil, who provides this incisive commentary:

Who cares about what Obama will say or not say? I mean, why should people care about what the visiting White Man (yes, as soon as you run for the American presidency you assume the role of the White Man, regardless of the color of your skin) will preach to Egyptians and Muslims? I await that speech the way I await sequels to Rocky movies.

We heartily recommend the professor's website for a whole series of pertinent views on Obama's trip -- and for information and analysis of the region generally. He also points us to this piece by Hossam el-Hamalawy, who was graciously vouchsafed a small scrap of space in the New York Times:

President Obama should not have decided to come to Egypt. The visit is a clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers. No words that Mr. Obama will say can change this perception that Americans are supporting a dictator with their more than $1 billion in annual aid....

As for the other host of the president’s visit, Al Azhar University, one of its students, Kareem Amer, is languishing in prison after university officials reported his “infidel, un-Islamic” views to the government, earning him a four-year sentence in 2007. In advance of the visit, Egyptian security forces have rounded up hundreds of foreign students at Al Azhar.

We do want allies in the West, but not from inside the White House. Our real allies are the human rights groups and unions that will pressure the Obama administration to sever all ties to the Mubarak dictatorship. Their visits to Egypt are more meaningful, even if unlike Mr. Obama, they do not get a lavish reception.

We might also note the nature of President Obama's journey through the capital of this friendly, close American ally. From the NY Times:

Mr. Obama arrived in Cairo at 9 a.m. and was greeted by the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmad Aboul Gheit. The streets surrounding the university and across the city were largely quiet and empty on Thursday. Many workers in the Egyptian capital had been told to stay home. The sidewalks were closed to people, but lined by hundreds of uniformed soldiers — some dressed in black, others in white — who had been standing in place for hours before Mr. Obama arrived.

As you can see, "they love him, they really love him," as Professor Juan Cole eagerly informed us earlier this week.

But strangely enough, even as the president was meeting with the unelected despot of Saudi Arabia and the authoritarian tyrant-for-life in Egypt, over in Iran -- which, as we all know, is the site of a monolithic mullah state bent on nothing less than the destruction of the world -- they were having a heated debate on national television, with the nation's president -- whom we all know is an absolutist dictator just like Adolf Hitler -- being roundly denounced by his political opponent, who assailed him for, among many other things, questioning the Holocaust.

(As we noted here last year, one of the most popular television shows in recent Iranian history was a series about an Iranian diplomat who worked to rescue Jews in wartime Paris. But nothing will shake the carefully cultivated Western caricature of Iran as a horde of slavering anti-Semites -- not even the fact there is a Jewish community, and Jewish member of Parliament, in Iran -- something you would never see in the judenfrei realm of Obama's "wise and gracious" friend, King Abdullah.)

During the speech, we heard many nicely-turned phrases and heartfelt pieties from President Obama as he sought to "correct the misunderstandings" that Muslims have about America and its benevolent policies around the world. But what speaks far more loudly to the reality of those policies is a small story already being shunted aside by the tsunami of gushing press devoted to the empty flapping of presidential jaws in Cairo -- the suicide of a Yemeni man held captive, without charges, in the Guantanamo concentration camp since 2002:

A Yemeni captive died in an apparent suicide at the detention center for foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, the U.S. military said on Tuesday....A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died....

The dead man had been held without charge at Guantanamo since February 2002. He had been on hunger strikes in the past to protest his detention, but was not among the more than two dozen long-term hunger strikers currently being force-fed at the camp, a Guantanamo spokesman said....

Human Rights First condemned the death as "a stark reminder of the inhumanity of indefinite detention without charges or trial." The American Civil Liberties Union said it illustrated the need to resolve the detainees' fate in a regularly constituted court with long-established rules.

"There is no room for a system of indefinite detention without charge or trial under our Constitution," the ACLU said. "Those against whom there is no legitimate evidence must not be given a de facto life sentence by being locked up forever."

It would of course be superfluous in us to point out that the progressive president who even at this moment is in Cairo telling Muslims how they misunderstand American values is himself a staunch supporter of "indefinite detention" and "preventive detention" and is seeking ways to entrench these unconstitutional (not to mention immoral) concepts into a formalized imperial law.

But we would certainly not want the Muslim world to misunderstand America's abiding commitment to justice, freedom, liberty and peace. We are sure the president made it all crystal clear in this "major speech" from the heart of a brutal, repressive, American-funded regime. Let's just hope there are no major mass civilian slaughters in America's Terror War operations in the Muslim lands of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan today, after the president's lyrical waxing in Cairo about how America "rejects the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children." That would sure put a crimp in the old PR.

Magnificent Valor

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:33:45 +0100

As we prepare for an excursion beyond the reaches of Inner Blogolia, to strange realms and undiscovered countries from whose bourne no traveller returns -- for at least a few days -- we direct your attention to the musings of a youngish man known only as "The Grey Shield." Said Shield scampers in God's domain at the website Magnificent Valor, where lately he has entertained himself -- and, er, ourselves -- with an homage to the Master, S.J. Perelman.

So scoot on over there and give Mister Grey a gander. After all, in these petty, piping times, do we not need all the magnificent valor we can get?

Death of the Republic, Part CLXVIII

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:53:47 +0100

Glenn Greenwald, among others, is enraged at Barack Obama's eager embrace of the latest disgorgement of third-rate juntaism to belch forth from the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress: the "Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009," sponsored by those ever-stalwart champions of liberty, Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman. As Greenwald describes it:

[The bill] literally has no purpose other than to allow the government to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." As long as the Defense Secretary certifies -- with no review possible -- that disclosure would "endanger" American citizens or our troops, then the photographs can be suppressed even if [the Freedom of Information Act] requires disclosure...What kind of a country passes a law that has no purpose other than to empower its leader to suppress evidence of the torture it inflicted on people? Read the language of the bill; it doesn't even hide the fact that its only objective is to empower the President to conceal evidence of war crimes.

What kind of country passes such a law? Why, a cheap, corrupt, third-rate junta state, which has elevated war and militarism into its supreme value, its "ultimate concern," its divinity -- that's what kind of country. What other kind of country did you think was skulking there between Mexico and Canada these days?

But the perniciousness of the act doesn't lie merely in its immediate goal -- suppressing war crimes evidence to protect the Terror War machinery that Obama has inherited and is expanding. After all, Obama has been working overtime from the beginning to suppress war crimes evidence against his predecessor, whom he treats more and more as a revered elder, not the despised leader of a discredited faction. No, it is, as they say, the principle of the thing: the enshrinement in law of the notion that anything that could be construed as "harmful" to American troops and operatives abroad -- or even the sad sacks back home -- can be suppressed by the government.

Adopting the principle of potential "endangerment" as a justification for government repression is not just an open door to tyranny -- it kicks the door down and brings the rest of the front wall crashing with it. But of course, that edifice crumbled a long time ago. The only thing remotely surprising about this latest Banana Republic Act is that is so blatant in its gutless abandonment of even the slightest pretense that the United States is anything other than a militarist empire. And yet so many people -- including Greenwald at times -- continue to praise the new imperial manager whenever he makes a "good decision" or implements a "good policy" -- presumably with the idea that you can tame or train the president by rewarding him for good deeds and sternly admonishing him when he does wrong.

But almost every leader in history has made some "good decisions" or implemented some "good policies" in one respect or another, even in the worst regimes. For example, both the Nazis and the Stalinists provided unprecedented programs of recreation and self-improvement for ordinary, long-denigrated, long-ignored workers. Hitler designed and promoted one of the world's most efficient and affordable cars, which after the war provided millions of ordinary people with new freedom and mobility. Soviet communism brought literacy, electricity, education and modernity to millions of people mired in a brutal, brutish existence. Saddam Hussein's Iraq did much the same.

It is very easy to pick through the record of any leader in any system and find things worthy of praise. But when the system itself is pernicious, when by its very nature it produces terrible evils on a vast scale -- as, for example, a militarist empire is bound to do -- then such praise, however piecemeal, hedged or nuanced, becomes a kind of unwitting support, or justification, or legitimization of the system.

And the system we are dealing with here is not a constitutional republic -- one gone awry, perhaps, but still a basically sound system that can be put to rights with the proper behavior training of its leaders. No; what we have here is a militarist empire: devoted to war, driven by war and by the constant exercise and growth of authoritarian power that every state of war (and state at war) produces. It seems to me that the best reaction to such a system is the one offered by Thoreau, and quoted many times here before:

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

The Graham-Lieberman War Crimes Shielding Act is just one more disgrace in a long train. Or as we said here in February 2008, when -- with Barack Obama's help -- the Democratic-controlled Senate voted to uphold Bush's illegal domestic spying program and immunize the corporations that helped carry it out: If the Republic Had not Died Long Ago, This Would Indeed Be the Death of the Republic:

We've been mourning the death of the American Republic here (and at other venues) for many years now, since Congress surrendered its Constitutional responsibilities with the "Enabling Act" it passed on September 14, 2001, giving Bush a blank check for "all necessary and appropriate force" against any organization or individual that he alone declared was somehow connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. Three days later, Bush then declared that he had the right to kill anyone on earth anytime he felt like it and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. The many, many outrages that have followed -- the gulag, the torture program, the Hitlerian war crime in Iraq, the Military Commissions Act (which stripped away the ancient right of habeas corpus and also officially enshrined the concept of the "unitary executive"/presidential dictatorship into law), right down to Tuesday's vote to "legitimize" Bush's illegal keyhole-peeping and the corporate criminals who abetted it -- have simply been further confirmations of the Republic's moribund state. Bush and the Democrats have been abusing the corpse over and over, like the sick and degraded moral perverts that they are.

I don't know what will come next. I don't know if the United States can crawl out of the filthy pit of empire and tyranny over the next few decades and claw its way toward some new manifestation of democracy -- or if it will just keep sinking, raging, rotting, mutating further into a war-and-torture state that must feed constantly on human flesh to survive... But whatever will be, one thing is certain now: the constitutional republic of the United States is a dead letter, a relic of history.

And nothing that happens in November -- when one imperial factotum or another gets their turn at the top of the greasy pole -- will change that basic fact. The Freedom Road is a long road -- and we're still a long way from taking even our first steps on that journey.

Sex-Haunted Saints and Sinister Clowns: Engendering Anti-Abortion Terror

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:59:29 +0100

(UPDATED BELOW.)

What drove the man who killed Dr. George Tiller? Perhaps someone who had seen Tiller lambasted by one of the nation's leading media figures as someone "who will execute babies for $5,000" and protects "rapists impregnating 10-year-olds." Tiller's activities were compared by the leading national media figure to "the kind of stuff that happened in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union." The multimillionaire media figure then promised that "we're going to try to stop Tiller," declaring that Tiller's Nazi-like atrocities were stripping the entire nation of its moral authority.

In other words, one the nation's most prominent and highly paid media figures told his national television audience that Dr. George Tiller was child-murdering protector of child-rapists, a figure of filth and evil on a par with Adolf Hitler. And on Sunday, someone filled with precisely that idea walked into Tiller's church -- his church -- and shot the doctor dead.

As Salon.com reports, Bill O'Reilly (aka "The Falafel of Love") has been "trying to stop" Tiller for years, since denouncing him as a Hitlerian child-murderer and child-rape accomplice on national television in 2006. We have no doubt that O'Reilly, who routinely trumpets his ability to move millions with his golden words (Is he not the man who, year after year, saves Christmas from the evil encroachments of Jews like George Soros?), will manfully step up to claim a large share of responsibility for the stormcloud of murderous demonization that has engulfed Tiller for years, and has now taken his life.

Come on, Bill, be a man: step up to the microphone, put your rubbery jowls right up there in the camera and tell us you are glad that your acolyte pumped some hot lead into George Tiller. After all, he was as bad as Hitler, right? If someone had gunned down Hitler, you wouldn't hide behind any milksoppery about "the process of law" or namby-pamby handwringing about "vigilantism," would you? Go ahead; dip your finger into one of the holes in Tiller's corpse, smear the blood on your cheek, and say it loud and proud: "We got him!"

II.
Behind the howling pieties, witless inanities and deadly hypocrisies of the "abortion debate" lies a more fundamental issue: the millennia-long, world-wide war against women. I touched on this briefly in a piece I wrote back in 2003:

The defining issue of modernity is control of women's fertility. It is this question – more than religion, politics, economics or the "clash of civilizations" – that forms the deepest dividing line in the world today. It is a line than cuts through every nation, every people, from the highest level of organized society down to, in many cases, the divided minds and emotions of individual men and women.

Control of fertility – and its active principle, sexuality – has always been an organizing principle of human society, of course, but modernity has presented the world with a revolutionary concept that overthrows millennia of received wisdom and tradition: namely, that an individual woman should control her own fertility. This notion destabilizes state structures and religious dogmas, and uproots cultural mores whose origins reach back to prehistoric times. It is a profoundly disturbing development in the life of humankind.

Little wonder, then, that anxieties over fertility and sexuality are the chief engines driving the frenzied and increasingly violent fundamentalist movements now sweeping through the world. It is here that extremists of every stripe make common cause against modernity. Almost every other aspect of "the modern" – science and technology, high finance, industrialization, etc. – has been absorbed, in one form or another, by the most "traditionalist" societies. But what today's fundamentalists – from Osama bin Laden to George W. Bush to Pope John Paul II, from the American-backed warlords of Afghanistan to the anti-American mullahs of Iran – cannot accept, at any cost, is the freedom of a woman's body.

This frenzy, this primitive fear – understandable perhaps in the face of such a wrenching upheaval – does not in itself make a fundamentalist an evil person. But it can – and does – lead them into evil: sometimes blindly, in ignorance and panic; but sometimes knowingly, with eyes wide open, a willing embrace of primitive emotions to serve selfish and cynical ends.

In the end, we will probably find that the murderer of Dr. Tiller is in the former category: someone led into evil blindly, in ignorance and panic. But we already know exactly where to place that walking, talking putz, Bill O'Reilly: with those who embrace primitive emotions to serve selfish and cynical ends.

But if you would like a much deeper, far-reaching analysis of this issue -- and its broader historical, psychological and current political implications -- then I strongly urge you to read this 2007 essay by Arthur Silber: Of Abortion, and Women as the Ultimate Source of Evil.

There is genuine wisdom in this piece and it will well reward your close reading. Among many other things, it draws upon the incisive scholarship of Elaine Pagels, especially regarding the great, fateful (and fatal) turning in Western consciousness engineered by St. Augustine of Hippo after Christianity merged with the power of the Roman Empire. I hesitate to risk distorting or diluting it with an excerpt, but the opening sets down with power and clarity a stance rarely seen in any mainstream commentary or discussion of the "abortion debate." But don't stop with this excerpt; head on over to Silber's blog and read the rest. And while you're there, if you are in coin, drop a few in Silber's hat to help support this vital and humane voice.

From Silber:

There are a great many aspects of today's world that are variously horrifying, ghastly, destructive and appalling -- and among the very worst is an idea that appears to be rapidly gaining support: the noxious notion that all questions relating to abortion rights should be returned to the states. For many reasons, only a few of which are discussed below, this idea is completely incoherent as a matter of political theory, and it undercuts any defense of individual rights on the most fundamental level. If you give a damn at all about the liberty of a single human being, you should oppose all such attempts to your last breath.

The human being to which I refer is not the developing fetus, but the woman who carries the child. I well understand that many people believe that the fetus is a human being long before birth, with all the rights that attend to that designation. In the political context, I consider all such beliefs irrelevant, no matter how sincerely and deeply held. Only one ultimate point matters here: whether you think the developing fetus is a human being or not, the fetus is contained in and supported by the woman's body. If the woman's body did not exist, neither would the fetus. Only the woman's existence makes that of the fetus possible.

The fetus only exists because of the woman's body -- not yours, not that of some possibly corrupt and stupid politician in Washington, and not the body of some possibly ignorant and venal politician in a state legislature. As I have watched this debate develop, and as I have considered with astonishment the increasingly byzantine efforts to " draw lines" about the point of viability, the time at which a full set of rights attaches to the fetus, and all the rest, I have become increasingly convinced that the right of the woman to control her own body when she is pregnant must be absolute up to the point of birth. All the attempts to craft legislation circumscribing that right prior to birth quickly become enmeshed in what are finally subjective claims that can be disputed into eternity, and impossible of proof in one direction or another.

Certainly, the woman's right to an abortion must be absolute in the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. And even in the third trimester, up to the time of birth, that right must be absolute, and the decision must be that of the woman in consultation with those medical personnel she chooses. Yes, a decision to abort late in pregnancy may be agonizingly difficult, just as it may be at an earlier time -- but whatever agony is involved is that of the woman, not a politician or bureaucrat who is unjustly empowered to make decisions that affect someone else on the most profound level. The responsibility and the consequences are the woman's, and no one else's. The choice is also hers, and no one else's.

UPDATE: Gabriel Winant at Salon.com has much more detail about O'Reilly's demonizing campaign against Tiller, including his nationally-broadcast declaration that anyone who didn't work to "stop this man" would have "blood on their hands," just as the Kansas politicians, like former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who O'Reilly condemned for failing to stop Tiller's entirely lawful activities.

Will Sebelius -- or new governor Mark Parkinson, who was Sebelius' lieutenant governor -- be the next to feel the Putz's proxy wrath?

Convergence and Continuity: The American-Backed Terror Campaign in Iran

Fri, 29 May 2009 15:54:18 +0100

On Thursday, a suicide bomber walked into a mosque, detonated his explosives and killed and wounded almost 140 people. In the wreckage and confusion afterward, a final death count has not yet been established, but the latest available information puts it at 23.

It is unlikely that you heard about this terrorist attack -- because it took place in Iran. For years, Iran has endured a series of terrorist actions -- suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, open assaults by fanatical gunmen, sabotage, and "targeted assassinations" of government officials, scientists and others. Multitudes have been slaughtered in these operations, whose ferocity and frequency are surpassed only by the atrocities that have been unleashed in the four countries that have been on the forefront of America's Terror War: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. One shudders to think what Washington's response would be to such a sustained campaign on American soil.

Of course, it is no mystery why the attack on the mosque in Zahedan -- a city situated at the strategic point where the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan converge -- attracted so little attention in the Western press. Every day, we are schooled relentlessly by our political and media classes to regard the Iranians -- heirs to one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated civilizations -- as demons and subhumans, whose lives are of little account. This can be seen in the long-running debate over an attack on Iran, which focuses almost entirely on the advantages or disadvantages such an assault would pose for American and Israeli interests -- and not at all on the thousands of human beings living in Iran who would be killed in the operation.

But There is another reason why the terrorist attack in Zahedan has not been greeted with commiserations from the White House or excited coverage from our government-spoonfed media: because it is highly likely that the United States played a role in fomenting the attack, either by direct or by collateral hand.

As AFP notes, Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, with "a large ethnic Sunni Baluch minority," which is often at odds with the Shiite-dominated central government. The region -- which is also a prime conduit for arms and drug trafficking across the volatile borders -- has been roiled for years by the militant Sunni extremist group, Jundullah (Soldiers of God). This group, aligned philosophically if not operationally with al Qaeda, has openly boasted of killing hundreds of people in its campaigns, and, as Chris Hedges notes, "has a habit of beheading Iranians it captures, including a recent group of 16 Iranian police officials, and filming and distributing the executions."

You would think that such violent, frenzied zealots -- fellow travellers of Osama bin Laden! -- would be taken up by our Terror Warriors as poster boys for the evils of "Islamofascism." But as we noted here a few months ago, "bombings and beheadings and deathporn videos are not inherently evil; they can also be a force for good -- as long as they put to the service of America's ever-noble, ever-lofty foreign policy ideals."

For Jundullah is one of the several armed insurgent groups inside Iran being supported by the United States. As Andrew Cockburn reported last year:

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, "unprecedented in its scope."

Bush's secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department's list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother-in-law's throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi Arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran's Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

Thus the attack this week in Zahedan is an integral part of a wide-ranging campaign of American-supported terrorism inside Iran -- even if the "darksiders" in the U.S. security organs had no direct involvement or knowledge of this particular attack. When you are in the business of fomenting terror (see here and here), there's no need for micro-management. You co-opt the armed extremists who best serve your political agenda of the moment; you slip them guns, money, intelligence, guidance -- and then you turn them loose on the local populace.

We have seen this over and over; in Iraq, for example, where American death squads -- such as the ones led by Stanley McChrystal, recently appointed by Barack Obama to work his "dirty war" magic in Afghanistan -- joined with mostly Shiite militias to carry out massive "ethnic cleansing" campaigns and individual assassinations. We saw it years ago, in the American-led construction of an international army of mostly Sunni extremists raised to hot-foot the Soviets in Afghanistan -- then turned loose upon the world. And of course this lineage of terror-breeding as an instrument of American foreign policy goes back for many decades. with one of the earliest, most spectacular successes being the use of religious extremists to help bring down the secular republic in Iran in 1953.

And as we noted here last year:

Bush's directive represents an intensification of the drive for open war with Iran, but it is not a new development; rather, it is a major "surge" in a state terror campaign the Administration has been waging against Iran (among others) for years. As I wrote as along ago as August 2004, the Bushists have openly sought, and received, big budgets and bipartisan support for terrorist groups and extremist militias all over the world. Here's an excerpt from that 2004 report:

If you would know the hell that awaits us – and not far off – there's no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain – clearly, openly, with confidence and pride – their plans to foment terror, rape, war and repression across the face of the earth.

Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in seed money to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" – i.e., bands of lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington's proxy killers in the so-called "arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.

Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big bucks to run "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing "sanctuary" for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy" of unprovoked aggressive war against "potential" enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour....

There's nothing really new in Bush's murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do Washington's bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed "paramilitaries" who helped Ronald Reagan's favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren't given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.

But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush's plan: targeting the Homeland itself as a "terrorist sanctuary." In addition to loosing his own personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to prevent anyone he designates a "terrorist" from "abusing the freedom of democratic societies" or "exploiting the technologies of communication" – i.e., defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that "difficult decisions" would be required.

[Perhaps some of those measures to prevent people from "exploiting the technologies of communication" to spread discontent with the Imperium are being formalized right now in the new Administration's plans for a "cyberspace command," where "the armed forces [will] conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare," as the NY Times reports. And since "cyberwar" -- like the Terror War -- "knows no borders" (as the usual anonymous "senior intelligence official" told the Times), the Obama White House is now busying trying to figure out just how you can aim its cyberwar offensives at the Homeland itself. After all, said the official, "how do you fight them if you can’t act both inside and outside the United States?” How indeed? Better start training your carrier pigeons for any private messages you might want to send.]

II.
In any case, whatever its provenance, the attack on the Zahedan mosque serves a confluence of interests. For it comes not only at a strategic location but also at a strategic time: just two weeks before the Iranian presidential election, with the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing a strong challenge from two reformist candidates.

Of course, the very last thing that the militarists in Washington and Israel want to see is the election of a moderate in Iran. They want -- and need -- Ahmadinejad, or someone just like him, so they can keep stoking the fires for war. A moderate president, more open to genuine negotiations, and much cooler in rhetoric than the loose-lipped Ahmadinejad, would be yet another blow to their long-term plans. Because the ultimate aim -- the only aim, really -- of the militarists' policy toward Iran is regime change. They don't care about "national security" or the "threat" from Iran's non-existent nuclear arsenal; they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel -- or even more ludicrously, the United States -- even if Tehran did have nukes. They don't care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran's "sponsorship of terrorism," for, as we've seen, the militarists thrive on -- when they are not actively fomenting -- the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and 'justifies' its own ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.

No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran's current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no essential difference in aim or method between today's policy and that of 1953. (Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in the heart of the oil lands -- precisely what they wanted, and got, with the installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a half-century ago.

They play the long game, our militarists. For example, they agitated openly -- and plotted covertly -- for the invasion of Iraq for almost 10 years before they finally got their way. They have worked for 30 years now to restore a client regime in Iran, and today, with the relentless bipartisan demonizing of the Iranians -- and the "mushroom cloud" fearmongering over a non-existent nuclear weapons program -- they are as close as they have ever been to their goal. To lose a fear-raising (and fundraising!) asset like Ahmadinejad now would be a bitter disappointment.

And what better way for an incumbent president to stand tall before the voters than to rally the nation around him in the face of a horrible terrorist attack? A mosque full of Shiite worshippers, blown to pieces, with photos showing the blood of the innocent martyrs splattered on the ruined walls? This serves the interests of all the major players in the great geopolitical game: the Iranian hardliners, the American and Israeli militarists, the Jundullah extremists. Of course, it doesn't serve the interests of the murdered dead, or the Iranian people -- or the American people, for that matter. But this too is nothing new. As we noted here in 2007, in a piece about an earlier escalation of state terror by the American government:

There are really no words to describe how morally depraved and monumentally stupid this policy is. It is of course not all that surprising that it springs from a family whose political fortunes are founded, at least in part, from the financial fortunes it reaped from helping build the Nazi military-industrial complex; a family that continued trading with the Nazis even after Americans were in battle against Hitler's forces. The Bushes and their outriders have always been attuned to the kind of brutal realpolitik that is willing -- at times eager -- to see American blood shed in order to advance their elitist agenda. (Which they have of course internalized as being identical with the "national interest.")

But as we've also noted many times, this political "philosophy" is by no means unique to the Bush Family faction. It is resolutely bipartisan, and deeply embedded in the mindset of the American Establishment. The Bushes are nothing but second-rate camp followers, empty shells and non-entities, originating nothing, ignorant and cynical in equal measure, their only unusual trait being how open they are in their scorn for the worthless rabble and the bullshit Constitution that the crypto-Commies like Madison and Jefferson foisted on the proper rulers of the country. Otherwise, they simply regurgitate the unprocessed prejudices, unexamined assumptions and vulgar ambitions of the clique that spawned them.

Of course, at times the idiot George W. Bush and the criminally ignorant crew that surrounds him have brought the inherent lawlessness, greed, brutality and incompetence of the American elite to what seem like new heights -- although even the sick-making murder of the Iraq campaign has still not approached the genocidal fury of, say, the bipartisan bombing of Indochina, and the millions of dead that the "best and the brightest" left behind there. Nor have Bush's domestic repression and flagrant abuse of authority -- as bad as they are -- yet approached the toxic and all-pervasive level of the "Red Scares" launched by Democratic icons Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. (Joe McCarthy merely took the ball that Truman put into play and ran with it.) But sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof; the crimes of the Bush Administration are not any less heinous -- and the people they have murdered are not any less dead -- just because these crimes are not some aberration of the idiot and his crew but are instead continuations and at times accelerations of long-standing Establishment thinking and policy.

But with each passing decade, the technological tools of repression and militarism grow more overpowering and far-reaching. With each passing decade, the pernicious after-effects and blowback from past depredations build up and compound, breeding new evils. With each passing decade, the societal rot engendered by the rapacity of the elite spreads deeper, eating away at the foundation of the Republic and the fabric of our communities, and weakening or destroying the social and institutional counterbalances to unchecked greed and ambition.

Thus in one sense it doesn't matter if the Bush Faction is any more or less criminal and destructive than other administrations. The world in which they are blundering around killing people is far more unstable and dangerous than before, because it is filled with the compounded evil and folly of previous times.

Of course, that was written a long time ago, back in those dark days when Bush Family factotum Robert Gates was still running the Pentagon and operators of death squads and torture shops like Stanley McChrystal were given high commands; back when the government was going to court to protect warantless spying on Americans and seeking to strip all rights from Terror War captives held indefinitely at the arbitrary will of the president, and devising "legal" justifications for these exercises of authoritarian power; back when the Pentagon and CIA were expanding their operations in Pakistan and intensifying the civilian-shredding air war in Afghanistan; back when we had militarist leaders who considered the mass-murdering war crime in Iraq to be "an extraordinary achievement;" back when cynical and hypocritical presidents would travel to harsh dictatorships in the Middle East to deliver "major speeches" on America's great commitment to freedom and democracy in Muslim lands; and back when the president and his secretary of state routinely ignored all contrary evidence to insist that the Iranians were developing a nuclear arsenal that would soon threaten the whole world with destruction, while U.S. covert agencies were funding and fueling the death and suffering of Iranian civilians in terrorist operations.

Thank god everything is different now, in our glorious new era of Progressive Continuity. Too bad those people in Zahedan can't tell the difference.

Topic for the Day: This Blog is a Disgusting Insult to All Right-Thinking People

Wed, 27 May 2009 15:39:04 +0100

An earnest -- if, as usual, anonymous -- reader writes in to take issue with last week's piece, The American Way: In Defense of George W. Bush. Here's a brief excerpt from the post to put the comments by Anon E. Muss in context:

Faced with prosecution for their admitted deeds, the principals of the Bush Administration would have only one defense: precedent. They would have to show that their actions had been accepted practice in American government for many, many years -- from the very beginning, in fact -- and had never been regarded as prosecutable offenses before. To imprison them now -- or even execute them -- for carrying on the standard policies and practices of bipartisan governance stretching back for generations would surely constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It would be selective prosecution. It would be nothing less than the "criminalization of political differences" -- for the historical record clearly shows that aggression and torture have always been treated in the American system as political implements, tools of political policy, and not as criminal matters.

Thus the Bush defense team would have to put forth a mountain of historical evidence, laying out in great detail the use of military aggression and torture (both directly and by client states under American direction, for American purposes) over the entire course of U.S. history. Naturally, they would focus most of their attention on the decades since World War II, as this would involve institutions, agencies -- and even some of the same people -- that serve as instruments of American policy and practice today; It would be easier, and more relevant, to show the continuity with their more immediate bipartisan predecessors. But the older historical material would also be important in setting out the long-established precedents and philosophies in which modern policies are rooted.

It is here that I would want to contribute to the defense. I would gladly act as a lowly researcher for them, sifting through the accumulation of historical fact and insightful analysis provided over the years by such noted writers as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Arthur Silber, Alfred McCoy, Richard Seymour, Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton, and far too many more to mention. And beyond these overviews and works of synthesis, there are the innumerable, highly detailed articles, studies, monographs, and full-scale scholarly works produced by historians in every field of specialty: political, economic, legal, cultural, military, and so on.

A war crimes trial of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their chief minions would be a public spectacle of perhaps unprecedented scope. Millions of people all over the world would be riveted to it every day; the American public especially would be hanging on its every word. To mount such a defense, on such a powerful platform, would devastate the myth of American exceptionalism like nothing else imaginable. Horrific atrocity, brutal arrogance, deadly ignorance -- again, by both direct and collateral hand -- would all be brought into the glaring light. The principle of violent domination -- continuous, accepted, celebrated, legitimized, institutionalized -- would stand revealed as a core value, if not the core value, of the American way.

Only through such a spectacular act of non-violent "creative destruction" could we hope to sweep away the false narrative that is drummed into every American from birth until it becomes an integral part of their own self-image and their understanding of the outside world: the false narrative of righteous exceptionalism that underpins and "justifies" the monstrous violence of empire.

To which Mister Muss replies (with my comments interspersed):

These points are well-taken, but are ultimately not persuasive for the following reasons:

1) the Bushco crimes were much more blatant than previous US injustices

Wow! Worse than slavery! Worse than the holocaust of the Native Americans! Worse than the decades-long overt and covert "regime changes" around the world, leading to US-backed tyrannies that have killed millions of people, from Central America to the Middle East to Asia and Africa. Worse than all that!

2) there is hope that prosecuting Bushco would serve as a deterrent for future US warcrimes

On the contrary, there is no hope at all that a prosecution of "Bushco" would deter future US war crimes, if such a prosecution is based on the proposition that "Bushco" were just a small bunch of bad apples in an otherwise glorious, righteous system. And that is precisely how any prosecution imaginable in the current system would be framed.

3) letting Bushco go unpunished will serve as an incentive for worse crimes in the future

Who in God's name said I wanted "Bushco" to go unpunished? I made no mention at all of the desired verdict in the imaginary trial with the imaginary defense that I, er, imagined.

4) an exposure of Bushco crimes WOULD shine a light on other US crimes-- including 9/11

Yes, that was exactly my point, and the entire substance of the article: that a genuine "Bushco" war crimes trial would indeed shine a light on other US crimes. It is a wonderment that someone could read the entire piece and not only not grasp that point but use it to attack the piece for not doing what it actually did.

5) Floyd suscribes [sic] to the blow-back theory of 9/11 and thus is either very naive or an intel shill in the mold of Howard Zinn and his ilk (whom Floyd cites in his post)

I don't believe I mentioned 9/11 at all in the post, but yes, I feel I must now admit it to the world: I am a covert intelligence operative just like the well-known CIA/NSA "black ops" bagman, Howard Zinn. Both Zinn and I get our orders -- and our immeasurably vast remuneration -- from secret drops arranged by our control, Lt. Gen. Noam Chomsky. Boy, it sure feels good to finally get that off my chest.

In fact this "defense" of Bushco is a disgusting slap in the face for anyone who wants a better world.

The "defense" of "Bushco" that I outlined in the post would entail exposing, in the most public way possible, decades -- centuries -- of atrocity, lies, corruption and evil. Such revelations, on such a scale, would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the deceits -- and the deep-rooted self-deceptions -- necessary to perpetuate this system and its depredations, thus leading to what I believe would be a better world, with less war, less torment, less suffering. I'm sorry if this admittedly almost hopeless desire disgusts and insults you. But perhaps you have a much different vision of what would constitute a better world.

Holiday Hangover

Tue, 26 May 2009 16:41:48 +0100

1. Domination Fetish
President Obama promised the nation there will always be a fresh supply of new war dead to honor each Memorial Day as long as he's in charge: Barack Obama pledges to keep U.S. 'dominance' (Politico).

2. Outsourcing Atrocity
The progressive president is also re-embracing traditional American values in foreign policy: letting foreigners torture and terrorize our captives, rather than dirtying our own dainty hands. U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases (NYT).

3. All-Day Permanent Red
Arthur Silber reminds us all, once again, that the factionists feverish for war with Iran never cease their labors. In 'Pleasant Nightmares,' he points to Obama's new order to update the "Iran attack plan." Not a "defense against an Iranian attack on United States territory" plan, mind you, but a good, old, straightforward, "Here's how we'll whack 'em when we take a notion to whack 'em" plan. Or as that martyred progressive hero-for-a-season Admiral Fallon said last year, when asked about the possibility for war with Iran: ""Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them." (The admiral was a progressive hero, you see, because he advocating waiting to crush the Iranian ants until a few more ants in Iraq and Afghanistan were crushed first. As the glorious reign of Barack Obama is demonstrating, it don't take much to be a progressive hero these days.) The new Obama moves come in as the Israelis open up a new front in their agit-prop for an Iran hit: claiming the filthy pinkos in Venezuala and Boliva are slipping uranium to Tehran. (What, is Niger out of yellowcake?)

4. Militarism, Morality and Misplaced Reverence
And while you're at it, check out Silber's own powerful address for Memorial Day: 'No, I Do Not Support "The Troops.'" This major essay should have been broadcast as a rebuttal to Obama's holiday pledge of eternal dominance.

Far Away and Over the Wall

Mon, 25 May 2009 23:14:23 +0100

Belated birthday greetings to the best darn ladies undergarment salesman this side of the Alleghenies.

A Bitter Cup of Joe: Bagman Biden's Bully-Boy Diplomacy

Sun, 24 May 2009 16:50:58 +0100

Anyone who lived through the howling, roaring exhalation of meaningless noise that was the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination and still retained some fleeting, desperate, hope against hope that Barack Obama might represent at least some modicum of substantial change surely had that last, microscopic flicker extinguished for good the instant they got the news that Obama had picked Joe Biden as his running mate.

Joe Biden! The eager, oily frontman for one of the fiercest weapons of mass destruction in the elite's eternal War on the Poor and Working Folk, the back-breaking, ball-busting "Bankruptcy Bill." Joe Biden! Who was so witless that he plagarized his own family history from a speech of a British politician. Joe Biden! Who had only months earlier showered Obama with paternalistic praise for being "clean" -- unlike all those other grubby darkies out there. Joe Biden! Whose fervent dream was to shatter Iraq into partitioned pieces, and when the conquered rabble objected to this plan, exploded: "I don't know who the hell they think they are. We have a right. We've expended our blood and treasure in order to back their commitment to their constitution. That's the deal." The deal being, obviously, that the "liberated," "sovereign," "democratic" nation of Iraq had to do exactly what Washington wanted -- or else.

Joe Biden! The barnacle of the Beltway, the bellicose, belligerent, blundering bagman of empire and elitism. There he was, standing in the artfully arranged embrace of the world-historical Agent of Change, the zeitgeist-zapper himself, Barack Obama. The only thing the scene lacked was a parade of fully-clothed pigs trotting out to declare, "Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!" And of course, a giant banner unfurling overhead, declaring: "Continuity Über Alles!"

The game was well and truly over at that point, all pretenses fell away. It was now obvious, beyond all excuses, rationalizations and self-delusions, just what we were in for: more militarism, more lawlessness, more eager servicing of the rich and powerful. All that has followed -- the trillions for Wall Street, the accelerated Terror War, the embrace and expansion of the Bush Regime's authoritarian powers, the swaggering thrust for endless domination of world affairs by violent intervention and bullying threats -- was standing there before us, in carefully rolled-up, regular-guy shirtsleeves, on that day.

And so it came as no surprise to see Biden last week carrying out precisely the task that he was picked for: bullying the lesser breeds now under imperial tutelage. In this case, it was Lebanon, which has come more deeply into the American orbit since the assassination of the corrupt, Saudi-backed and -- for most of his career -- Syria-allied billionaire Rafik Hariri a few years back. When the Syrians ended their long military presence in the country -- a military presence originally backed by the United States but later seized upon as a stick to beat Damascus with; as we know, only one nation in the world has the right (nay, the duty) to keep military forces in other countries for decades on end -- Washington moved in to nurture and protect the fragile democracy of the "Cedar Revolution." So protective were the great white fathers of the Beltway that they stood by and cheered in 2006 when Israel laid waste to great swathes of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure -- and more than 1,300 civilians -- while littering the land with a quilt of cluster bombs as a parting shot when the conflict was essentially over. This orgy of destruction was hailed by Condi Rice as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East."

Last week, Biden arrived in Lebanon to continue the paternal solicitude. He told the natives that United States stands one hundred percent foursquare true-blue straight down the line behind their "sovereign" democracy -- unless, of course, the little bastards vote the wrong way. AP reports:

Vice President Joe Biden said Friday that future U.S. aid to Lebanon depends on the outcome of upcoming elections, a warning aimed at Iranian-backed Hezbollah as it tries to oust the pro-Western faction that dominates government...

"The election of leaders committed to the rule of law and economic reform opens the door to lasting growth and prosperity as it will here in Lebanon," Biden said. The U.S. "will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates."

This is a pretty good double-barrel shot from both the Obama White House and the media sycophantry. Lebanon is about to hold a democratic election, in which one contending faction is led by Hezbollah but also "includes a significant portion of the nation’s Christian voters," as Jason Ditz notes. But if this broad-based, multi-faith, multi-ethnic coalition happens to win the election, AP tells us this will not be the kind of legitimate transfer of power that one might expect in a "sovereign" democracy; no, it will be an "ousting" by an "Iranian-backed" "militant group."

No loaded language there then. And none from Biden either, of course, who declared strict neutrality while also signalling that Lebanon will suffer the same fate as the Palestinians did when in an open, democratic election, they chose a government led by Hamas. The result was a civil war instigated and exacerbated by Israel and America, followed by a murderous blockade then the savage decimation of Gaza.

So the Lebanese have something to look forward to if they vote the "wrong" way in the June 7 election. Biden made it abundantly clear:

"Lebanon has suffered terribly from war and we have a real opportunity now ... for peace," he said after talks with the president. "So I urge those who think about standing with the spoilers of peace not to miss this opportunity to walk away from the spoilers."

You savvy? Vote for our guys -- or there will be war. You can't make it much clearer than that. Of course, if Hezbollah's coalition does win the election, there will only be war if the American-backed faction refuses to accept the democratic outcome and resorts to violence to overturn it.

This is "continuity" with a vengeance -- not only with the Bush Regime's bully-boy diplomacy, but with the ancient American tradition of threatening -- or fomenting, or outright inflicting -- war and ruin on all those who fail to exercise their freedom in the way that suits the imperial agenda du jour on the Potomac.

Note: You can find more on Lebanon in the plague-on-all-their-houses reportage of The Angry Arab.

The American Way: In Defense of George W. Bush

Wed, 20 May 2009 23:15:40 +0100

If George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other principals of the previous administration were ever brought to trial for war crimes, I would offer my services, in all sincerity, to their defense. For I think they would have a strong case to make, one that would be of vital, perhaps decisive importance for the future of the nation -- and the world.

I. The Case for the Prosecution
To see the Bush Faction in the dock -- charged with launching a war of aggression and creating a worldwide gulag of torture and illegal detention -- is of course the fervent dream of millions of people across the globe. Such a sight would seem to provide tangible proof that the ideal of justice cannot be vanquished entirely by the brute force of elite power.

The evidence supporting these charges is mountainous, and growing all the time. What's more, the essentials are undisputed, even by the defendants themselves. In the case of aggression, the public reasons offered by the Bush White House for the invasion of Iraq were even less substantial than those put forth by Adolf Hitler for the invasion of Poland in 1939. And this is true even if you accept the highly disputable notion that the Bush Administration really believed that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, it would be true even if Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction.

In the Nazis' case, there was at least the pretense of a (faked) direct attack on German territory; not even Hitler dared publicly base his invasion on a mere threat, on the presumption that Germany might be attacked at some point in the future. But even in the best-case scenario, giving the American government the full (and wholly undeserved) benefit of the doubt, the Bush Administration launched a war that has killed more than a million innocent people solely on the basis of a mere threat, from weapons that had never been used against the United States -- and whose existence had not even been proven. If this is a legal, moral justification for war, then every American president of the last half-century has been guilty of a treasonous dereliction of duty for not launching a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union, whose actually existing arsenals of nation-destroying weapons were aimed openly and specifically at the United States for decades.

So the facts of the aggressive war case are not in dispute. And no, the UN resolutions stemming from the 1991 Gulf War are not relevant; nothing in them gave any member nation the right to launch military action unilaterally to enforce the resolutions without the prior approval of the Security Council. In every way, then, the invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of the UN Charter's very clear and specific strictures against aggressive war -- strictures which the United States helped formulate and had publicly subscribed to for almost 60 years at the time of the Iraq invasion. There is no genuine legal basis for denying that the invasion of Iraq constitutes the formal war crime of military aggression, as Arthur Silber, for one, has pointed out in great detail.

The torture case is, if anything, even clearer. According to the laws of the United States, it is simply illegal to order or carry out torture, at any time, under any circumstances whatsoever. Moreover, the question of what constitutes torture is clearly addressed -- and even though Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton colluded to exempt certain exquisite psychological and indirect tortures devised by the CIA from the law (as Noam Chomsky reminds us), the existing legal threshold for defining torture still falls far, far below the one adopted by the Bush Administration; i.e., anything short of death, organ failure or permanent physical damage. And of course, even these cynical and sinister standards were routinely violated: there have been many deaths -- murders -- as a result of the torture program which no one now denies was established, maintained and closely monitored by the Bush White House.

And again, the accused do not denying employing these practices; on the contrary, they champion them openly, and have long done so, as in the case of Dick Cheney's acknowledgment and praise for waterboarding -- a torture technique that has been prosecuted as a serious crime in American courts for generations, and was regarded, by the American government, as a basis of war crimes charges against Japanese officials following World War II.

Thus, by any understanding of the law -- from the most common-sense reading to the most arcane and convoluted parsing -- it is clear that the capital crime of torture has been committed by the Bush Administration. Any court proceeding would immediately establish this fact.

To sum up: Did the leading members of the Bush Administration instigate and collude in actions that resulted in a war of aggression and the deliberate, systematic infliction of torture on captives? Yes. Do they admit -- even boast -- that these actions occurred? Yes. What defense can they offer then?

II. In Defense of George W. Bush
Faced with prosecution for their admitted deeds, the principals of the Bush Administration would have only one defense: precedent. They would have to show that their actions had been accepted practice in American government for many, many years -- from the very beginning, in fact -- and had never been regarded as prosecutable offenses before. To imprison them now -- or even execute them -- for carrying on the standard policies and practices of bipartisan governance stretching back for generations would surely constitute cruel and unusual punishment. It would be selective prosecution. It would be nothing less than the "criminalization of political differences" -- for the historical record clearly shows that aggression and torture have always been treated in the American system as political implements, tools of political policy, and not as criminal matters.

Thus the Bush defense team would have to put forth a mountain of historical evidence, laying out in great detail the use of military aggression and torture (both directly and by client states under American direction, for American purposes) over the entire course of U.S. history. Naturally, they would focus most of their attention on the decades since World War II, as this would involve institutions, agencies -- and even some of the same people -- that serve as instruments of American policy and practice today; iIt would be easier, and more relevant, to show the continuity with their more immediate bipartisan predecessors. But the older historical material would also be important in setting out the long-established precedents and philosophies in which modern policies are rooted.

It is here that I would want to contribute to the defense. I would gladly act as a lowly researcher for them, sifting through the accumulation of historical fact and insightful analysis provided over the years by such noted writers as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Arthur Silber, Alfred McCoy, Richard Seymour, Fred Anderson and Andrew Clayton, and far too many more to mention. And beyond these overviews and works of synthesis, there are the innumerable, highly detailed articles, studies, monographs, and full-scale scholarly works produced by historians in every field of specialty: political, economic, legal, cultural, military, and so on.

A war crimes trial of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their chief minions would be a public spectacle of perhaps unprecedented scope. Millions of people all over the world would be riveted to it every day; the American public especially would be hanging on its every word. To mount such a defense, on such a powerful platform, would devastate the myth of American exceptionalism like nothing else imaginable. Horrific atrocity, brutal arrogance, deadly ignorance -- again, by both direct and collateral hand -- would all be brought into the glaring light. The principle of violent domination -- continuous, accepted, celebrated, legitimized, institutionalized -- would stand revealed as a core value, if not the core value, of the American way.

Only through such a spectacular act of non-violent "creative destruction" could we hope to sweep away the false narrative that is drummed into every American from birth until it becomes an integral part of their own self-image and their understanding of the outside world: the false narrative of righteous exceptionalism that underpins and "justifies" the monstrous violence of empire. This myth performs a kind of psychic and moral alchemy in the minds of Americans, transmutating the reality of bloodsoaked murder, repression and suffering into benign acts of "liberation" and "humanitarianism."

Removing these blinders would give us a chance to at least begin effecting genuine change and reform in a system that has poisoned its own people and wrought destruction and chaos around the world. It would not restore "the shining city on the hill" -- which never existed, and never can exist, given the manifold imperfections, confusions, and contradictions of human nature; but it might, just might, clear the ground for the construction of a better polity: more enlightened, more just, more humane. That is a noble endeavor I would be glad to join, whatever form it took -- even if that form happened to be the defense of George W. Bush at a war crimes trial.

Not that I believe Bush and his gang of gilded thugs are innocent; they are not. They are sadistic murderers at the outer reaches of depravity. But neither are they aberrations of the system that has produced them. Rather, they are its quintessence, its exemplars, its inheritors and continuers -- and they have, in turn, bequeathed the core value of violent domination to their successors, who have freely and eagerly embraced it. If the Bush gang stands trial, then the entire system must be put on trial; otherwise, their prosecution would be nothing but a show trial, a scapegoating designed to perpetuate the system while appearing to cauterize and cleanse it of a limited, aberrant evil, as Arthur Silber has argued in his powerful series, "Against Prosecution."

Thus the evils inevitably and inescapably produced by a system of violent domination would go on and on, gaining new strength from the reinvigoration of the national myth that has justified so much horror for so long: "See? We got rid of the bad apples; everything is fine now, the system is good now, we're exceptional again, the hill is shining once more." And the righteous bombs of humanitarian liberation would keep falling on the bodies of innocent people.

But we all know there will be no such trial, and certainly no such defense. As we have seen in the last few months, the American political class and its media sycophants have rallied 'round the flag to defend the system's core values. They have made it abundantly clear that they do not consider torture and military aggression to be criminal offenses when these actions are carried out by the American government. Instead, such things are regarded as affairs of state -- matters of policy and politics, subject to factional quibbling over their execution and extent, perhaps, but certainly not a question of law, or justice, or morality.

And so the system and its horrors keep churning on, regardless of the liberal credentials of its current managers. An overseer of a torture chamber and director of death squads, Stanley McChrystal, has now been put in charge of the "good war" in Afghanistan and its inexorable spread into Pakistan. The war crime in Iraq continues unabated, with an increasingly shattered army of desperate, doped-up, burned-out soldiers still loose in a crumbling, broken land, while vast permanent bases are being expanded to house the tens of thousands who will remain behind even after a still- uncertain "withdrawal" plan is completed. The "disease of permanent war," as Chris Hedges terms the swine flu of militarism that rages so virulently through the imperial system, will keep driving the nation, and the world, to one disaster after the next. As Silber puts it:

Intervention always leads to more intervention: the first intervention leads to unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences, which are then used as the justification for still further intervention. That intervention in turn leads to still more unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences, which are then used as yet another justification for still further intervention. The process can go on indefinitely, and the ultimate consequences are always disastrous in the extreme.

A genuine trial of George W. Bush -- and a genuine defense, which, as outlined above, would lead to an indictment of the entire system -- perhaps could have broken this cycle. But each day's news -- each echo from the charnel houses that sustain the empire's exalted position -- makes it clear that we have not yet supp'd full with horrors.