Wouldn’t it be lovely if a new year’s resolution for 2011 for the U.S. would have been to end war?
FAT CHANCE.
Sometimes I am startled by the reflection in the mirror in the ladies’ restroom at work of my black armband that I started wearing a year and a half ago with a first, very deep breath, assuming I would be called on often to explain it. It would afford opportunities to share my moral outrage at the international and civil lawless conduct of my government.
I forget I have it on now. In all that time only two people have inquired about it. Some haven’t, undoubtedly assuming I am mourning a more personal loss. Others know the reason, office gossip being what it is, but see it more as a sign of my taking-politics-way-too-seriously eccentricity -- the workplace inappropriate for such a discussion.
Their affinity to political correctness. My affinity to calling out moral incorrectness. Massive amoral U.S. policy madness. Thank God cyber-communities such as this one, and IRL communities like the Green Party and The World Can’t Wait offer me fellowship with those with more awakened and outraged consciences.
When I first donned the black armband, during what must have been the “bargaining” stage of my five stages of grief post Obama’s election -- he just wasn’t responding to the war and torture horrors FAST enough I told myself, but would get there -- I thought my reasons to wear it would be short-lived. Habeas corpus of course would be restored. How could it not be? I mean it had been established as a human right in England since before the 1300s, hadn't it? Insane “pre-emptive military aggression” rationales would no longer prevail. I didn’t realize that for Obama, the U.S. Congress, the Pentagon, and the corporate media REALITY AND HUMANITY would remain “off the table” no matter what vast numbers of the citizenry presumed.
Obama, the magician President who used the spirit of Martin Luther King to get elected and thereafter ruled with the agenda of Dick Cheney. The magic comes in his getting so many people not to mind. Getting so many people to rationalize we are safer and more moral with him at the helm than with those war-mongering Republicans. Denial -- not just a river in Egypt -- a country pretending it is a democracy.
The incredible fact is there is NO national conversation about the insanity of the wars and black ops operations and illegal detentions and Wikileaks revealed deceptions, blatant and massive violations of the Geneva Conventions, along with the insanity of massively-debilitating US military budgets being passed UNDISCUSSED AND UNCHALLENGED by a supposedly two-party Congressional system that Nader warned years ago had been thoroughly pimped out by the corporations.
The Military Industrial, and now, “Security” Complex is a monster, with a terrible in-motion inertia -- killing killing, killing -- lying, lying, lying. Sucking up our tax dollars for evil. Stealing, maiming, killing and ALWAYS LYING. Creating poverty in America and the likely chance of our being attacked a la 9/11 again and again due to our unjustified war-like aggressions that the stupor of American exceptionalism among many of the citizenry and a callous, obsequious corporate media and sociopathic and/or cowardly “let’s not be called soft on terrorism” ambition-over-honor politicians enable, enable, enable.
Fred Branfmanwrites:
"Both the Wikileaks Iraqi and Afghan War Logs, in short, have revealed that the entire U.S. Executive is a "vast lying machine", as journalist David Halberstam described the U.S. military in his affadavit for the CBS vs. Westmoreland trial. It must be understood that “truth” vs. “lies” is not even an operational category within the Executive Branch or military. The purpose of communicating with the public is not to provide them with truthful information but rather to advance “the mission”. People who communicate with the public obtain their jobs and are promoted on the basis of their ability to mislead, deceive, “spin” and lie. There is no recorded case where Executive Branch officials have been rewarded for telling the truth to the American people, and many where they have been punished or lost their jobs for doing so. And nothing so epitomizes the degradation of democracy in America that the fact the public expects Executive Branch officials to lie to them, and that mass media journalists even betray their profession by defending Executive secrecy and excoriating those who reveal their lies like Julian Assange.
[snip]
It is thus impossible to overstate the importance of the Wikileaks documentation of these lies to the American people. When a journalist reports a U.S. government misdeed, government officials automatically deny it and many Americans are unsure whom to believe. But Wikileaks has revealed official government documents that prove U.S. leaders’ lying and commission of crimes of war. The fact that the U.S. has covered up its mass murder of civilians, and that this is contributing to its losing the war, is thus no longer open to serious question. ...
[snip]
As you read these words countless Afghan and Pakistani villagers are huddling in their homes, terrorized by U.S. war-making, as General Petraeus's brutal offensive into southern Afghanistan, met by an increase in the Taliban's resort to roadside bombs and assassination, has caused the Red Cross to issue an unusual alarm saying that conditions are at their worst for Afghan civilians in 30 years, i.e. as bad as during the Russian invasion. A Canadian press report indicates that Kandahar's main hospital is overflowing with civilian casualties, and that "on some days, the floor is red with blood".
[snip]
If we can free our minds of a lifetime of official propaganda identifying the U.S. Executive with the American people, the evidence is overwhelming that in foreign and military policy the U.S. Executive Branch is an undemocratic institution that does not represent its own citizens. It operates largely independent of Congress, the Judiciary or a mass media which has largely become an arm of Executive power, broadcasting its lies far more often than it exposes them.
A few months before President Obama's December 2009 decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, for example, only 24% of Americans wanted to send more and 43% wanted to decrease the number. Their wishes were ignored, as are the opinions of Americans today who, by a margin of 63 to 32, oppose U.S. war-making in Afghanistan. And, Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars revealed, even the President is largely a figurehead when it comes to Executive war-making. Woodward documents how the military thwarted Obama’s clear desire to begin a major pullout from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. Last month, Obama was humiliated by being forced to endorse a hypothetical 2014 pullout date.
[snip]
These Wikileaks documents thus raise the most fundamental question citizens can ask themselves: to what extent to citizens of a democracy owe their allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain the consent of their citizens through massive duplicity? And to what extent can they trust either their judgement or their decency?
[snip]
But that is a long-term question. The key question now is whether Americans can hear the sound of suffering their leaders are causing abroad, as at this very moment innocent men, women and children are being murdered and maimed in what the Red Cross describes as the greatest civilian carnage since the Russians invaded 30 years ago.
[snip]
Just as the Taliban is far stronger today after the U.S. has wasted $300 billion and thousands of American lives over the last 10 years, Petraeus's tactics are strengthening not weakening America's enemies over the long run. If he murders enough people in southern Afghanistan, the General may be able to claim some short-term successes there. But there is no serious question that his tactics are sowing a long-term whirlwind which not only threatens the stability of the Afghan and Pakistani governments, but pose a long-term threat to Americans at home."
Tom Engelhardtgives a compelling summary of how this “New World Order” massively violent regime came about:
"Previously, the “arms race,” like any race, had involved at least two, and sometimes more, great powers. Now, it seemed, there would be something new under the sun, an arms race of one, as the U.S. prepared itself for utter dominance into a distant, highly militarized future. The military-industrial complex would, in these years, be further embedded in the warp and woof of American life; the military expanded and privatized (which meant being firmly embraced by crony corporations and hire-a-gun outfits of every sort); and the American “global presence” -- from military bases to aircraft-carrier task forces -- enhanced until, however briefly, the United States became a military presence unique in the annals of history.
Thanks to the destructive acts of 19 jihadis, the urge to surge would with finality overwhelm all other urges in the fall of 2001 -- and there would be a group ready for just such a moment, for (as the newspaper headlines screamed) a “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.”
To take full stock of that group, however, we would first have to pilot our time machine back to June 3, 1997, the day a confident crew of Washington think-tank, academic, and political types calling themselves the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) posted a fin de siècle “statement of principles.” In it, they called for “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.” Crucially, they were demanding that the Clinton administration, or assumedly some future administration with a better sense of American priorities, “increase defense spending significantly.”
The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types. After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Aaron Friedberg, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida. (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)
This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank. In either case, more than 13 years later, the success of that group can still take your breath away, as can both the narrowness -- and scope -- of their thinking, and of their seminal document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published in September 2000, two months before George W. Bush took the presidency.
This crew of surgers extraordinaires was considering a global situation that, as they saw it, offered Americans an “unprecedented strategic opportunity.” Facing a new century, their ambitions were caught by James Peck in his startling upcoming book, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights, in this way: “In the [Reagan] era, Washington organized half the planet; in the [Bush era] it sought to organize the whole."
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.” It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons. In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone."
Please indulge me one last, provocative quote I came across from an article by Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist, who had this to say, imploring the British government not to honor its 2003 Extradition Treaty with the U.S. and emphasizing the tragic situation of Bradley Manning:
"Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old US Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months, despite not having been convicted of any crime.
Manning has been kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, barred from exercising in that cell, deprived of sleep, and denied even a pillow or sheets for his bed. Unsurprisingly he now relies on anti-depressants to cope with the effects of isolation. No date for a court hearing has been set.
Make no mistake, this sort of treatment is torture and we, as a civilised nation can not send anyone in to the hands of the US judicial system which openly tortures its own citizens as well as others.
By the time his brains are completely scrambled and he’s addicted to his medication I'm sure some sleazy, government prosecutor will offer him a plea bargain which is another disgraceful and routine feature of US justice. In exchange for dishing the dirt, real or imagine, on Julian Assange, Manning will be pressurised to cut a deal.
[snip]
I would urge the British Prime Minister to tear up the 2003 extradition treaty now, tell Obama to get stuffed and instruct the Foreign Office to issue a travel warning advisory for any UK citizens contemplating a trip to America."
America may still be a legend in its own collective, delusional mind. It’s a rogue, international criminal nation to many looking on, many living in justified TERROR of it.
Black armband, anyone?
[cross-posted at correntewire, sacramento for democracy and world can't wait]
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