As US Empire Fails, Trump Enters a Quagmire

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Kevin Zeese

A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”

During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he tweeted, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Now, we see a president who carries on the interventionist tradition of US Empire.

While Afghanistan has been a never-ending active war since 9-11, making the 16-year war the longest in US history, the truth is the United States became directly involved with Afghanistan some 38 years ago, on July 3, 1979. As William Rivers Pitts writes “On that day, at the behest of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter signed the first directive in an operation meant to destabilize the Soviet-controlled government of Afghanistan.” In fact when the US dropped the MOAB bomb, Trump was bombing tunnels built with the assistance of the CIA in the 1980′s for the mujaheddin and Bin Laden.

Trump’s Afghan policy is inaccurately described as a new approach but has only one element that is new – secrecy, as Trump will not tell us how many soldiers he will send to this war. His so-called new strategy is really a continuation of the permanent war quagmire in Afghanistan, which may be an intentional never ending war for the empire’s geopolitical goals. Ralph Nader reviews 16 years of headlines about Afghanistan, calling it a “cruel boomeranging quagmire of human violence and misery… with no end in sight.”

Another Afghan Review Leads To Same Conclusion: More War

During his campaign for president, Trump called for the US to pull out of Afghanistan. Early in his administration, President Trump announced a review of the Afghanistan war. This week when he announced escalation of the war, Trump noted this was his instinct. Unfortunately, the president did not trust his previous instincts and missed an opportunity to end the war.

We have seen how President Trump refuses to admit mistakes, so it is highly unlikely he will change course from this mistaken path. His rationale is so many US soldiers have given their lives that we must stay until the United States wins. This is the quandary – the US must continue the war until we win because soldiers have died but continuing the war means more will die and the US must stay committed to war because more have died.

After we read President Trump’s Afghanistan war speech, we went back and re-read President Obama’s Afghanistan war speech given in March 2009. It is remarkable how similar the two speeches are. When Russian president Putin was interviewed by filmmaker Oliver Stone as well as when he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly, he made a point proven by US policy in Afghanistan, “Presidents come and go, and even the parties in power change, but the main political direction does not change.”

Both presidents conducted a lengthy review early in their administration and both talked with generals and diplomats who convinced them to escalate rather than end the war. Both presidents put forward what they claimed was a new strategy but in reality, was just doing the same thing over again: more troops, building up Afghanistan’s military by working closely with them, using economic and diplomatic power and putting pressure on Pakistan not to be a safe haven for the Taliban and those fighting against the United States.

To ensure a quagmire both presidents said that decisions would not be based on a timeline but on conditions on the ground. Both promised victory, without clearly defining what it would mean; both raised fears of the Taliban and other anti-US militants using Afghanistan to attack the United States again. Trump had the advantage of knowing that President Obama’s approach had failed despite repeated bombings in Pakistan and working with Afghan troops, but that didn’t alter his course.

Afghanistan Victims of a February, 2012 US air strike that killed 8 children in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

Failure To Learn Lessons Ensures Repeating Them

According to Mike Ludwig, since President Obama approved a troop surge in 2009, the war in Afghanistan has claimed at least 26,512 civilian lives and injured nearly 48,931 more. In July, the United Nations reported that at least 5,243 civilians have been killed or injured in 2017 alone, including higher numbers of woman and children than previous in years. Trump seems less concerned than previous presidents with killings of civilians.

Trump noted that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region was now the densest part of the world when it comes to anti-US militants, saying there were 20 terrorist groups in the area. President Obama added tens of thousands of troops to the Afghanistan war, dropped massive numbers of bombs and the result was more terrorism. The US was killing terrorists but the impact was creating more anti-American militants. Trump failed to connect these dots and understand that more US attacks create more hatred against the United States.

After Obama failed to ‘win’ the war by adding tens of thousands of troops, with more than 100,000 fighting in Afghanistan at its peak, Trump should have asked his generals how adding thousands more (reports are between 4,000 and 8,000 soldiers) would change failure to success. Wasn’t there anyone in the room who would tell Trump there is nothing new in the Trump strategy that Obama and Bush had not already tried. Steve Bannon was the most opposed to war in the administration and reportedly fought against more war, but he was not in the room. Did anyone in the room stand up to the hawk-generals?

The policy of working more closely with the Afghan military in order to build them up ended in disaster in the Obama era. The New Yorker wrote in 2012: “We can’t win the war in Afghanistan, so what do we do? We’ll train the Afghans to do it for us, then claim victory and head for the exits.” But, the US discovered that it could not train the Afghans in the ‘American way of war.’ In 2012, the Obama administration ended the program of fighting alongside Afghan soldiers to train them because those soldiers were killing US soldiers. How many US soldiers will die because Trump was ignorant of this lesson?

Trump also took the wrong lesson from the Iraq war and occupation. He inaccurately described the so-called withdrawal from Iraq as hasty. He points to the rise of ISIS as created by the vacuum in Iraq when the US reduced its numbers of troops. Trump said the US “cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq.”

In fact, ISIS rose up because the killing of hundreds of thousands, some reports say more than a million, of Iraqis, displacement of more than a million more, the destruction of a functioning government as well as war crimes like the Abu Gharib torture scandal made it easy to recruit fighters. Furthermore, the training and supply of weapons to Sunnis during the ‘Awakening’ created armed soldiers looking for their next job.

It was US war and occupation that created ISIS. The seeds had been planted, fertilized and were rapidly growing before the US reduced its military footprint. Trump is repeating the mistake of more militarism, and in the end ISIS or some other form of anti-US militancy will thrive.

The US does not want to face an important reality – the government of the United States is hated in the region for very good reasons. Bush lied to us about 9-11 when he claimed they hate us for our freedoms. No, they hate the US because US militarism kills hundreds of thousands of people in the region, destroys functioning governments and creates chaos.

Victory Means Something Different to an Empire

In trying to understand why the US is fighting a war — a war that has been unwinnable for 16 years — it helps to look at a map and consider the resources of an area.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former adviser, predicts the US will be in Afghanistan for the next 50 years. Indeed, that may be the ‘victory’ the empire seeks. Afghanistan is of geopolitical importance. It is a place where the US can impact China’s ‘One Belt One Road’ to Europe where China can take the place of Russia and the United States in providing wealthy Europeans with key commodities like oil and gas. Just as the United States has stayed in Germany, Italy and other European states and Japan after WW II, and in Korea after the Korean war, the empire sees a need to be in Afghanistan to be well positioned for the future of the empire. Terrorism is not the issue, economic competition with China, which is quickly becoming the leading global economic power, is the real issue.

And, competition with Russia and China is at the top of the list of the bi-partisan war party in Washington. Pepe Escobar points out that “Russia-China strategic partnership wants an Afghan solution hatched by Afghans and supervised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (of which Afghanistan is an observer and future full member). So from the point of view of neocon/neoliberalcon elements of the War Party in Washington, Afghanistan only makes sense as a forward base to harass/stall/thwart China’s Belt and Road Initiative.”

Afghanistan is next to China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers that could pose military risks to the United States. Having multiple bases in Afghanistan, to allegedly fight terrorists, will provide the forward deployment needed to combat each of those nations if military action is needed.

Afghanistan also borders on Iran, which could be a near-future war zone for the United States. Positioning the US military along the Afghanistan-Iran border creates a strategic advantage with Iran as well as with the Persian Gulf where approximately 18.2 million barrels of oil per day transit through the Strait of Hormuz in tankers.

Afghanistan’s land contains $3 trillion in rare earth minerals needed for computers and modern technology including rich deposits of gold, silver, platinum, iron ore and copper. The US has spent $700 billion in fighting a failed war and President Trump and empire strategists are looking to make sure US corporations get access to those minerals. Since the US Geological Survey discovered these minerals a decade ago, some see Afghanistan as the future “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, a raw material used in phone and electric car batteries. US officials have told Reuters that Trump argued at a White House meeting with advisers in July that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.

Jeffrey St. Clair reminds us not to forget the lucrative opium trade. Afghanistan is the largest source for heroin in the world. He writes:

Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, opium production has swelled, now accounting for more than one-third of the wrecked Afghan economy. In the last two years alone, opium poppy yields have doubled, a narcotic blowback now hitting the streets of American cities from Amarillo to Pensacola. With every drone strike in the Helmond Province, a thousand more poppies bloom.

The decision on a never ending war — with no timetable for exit — is evidence that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are in charge of US foreign policy with Trump as a figurehead. Of course, the war also ensures immense profits for the war industry. St. Clair emphasizes that “in 2016, the Pentagon spent $3.6 million for each US soldier stationed in Afghanistan. A surge of 4,000 to 10,000 additional troops, either as ‘private military units’ or GIs, will come as a welcome new infusion of cash to the dozens of defense corporations that invested so heavily in his administration.”

The firing of Steve Bannon just before the meeting that decided Afghanistan’s future was not coincidence as he was the opponent of escalation. Glenn Greenwald writes in the Intercept that this permanent power structure has been working since his election to take control of foreign policy. He also points to the appointment of Marine General John Kelly as chief of staff and how National Security Adviser, General McMaster, has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy. The deep state of the permanent national security complex has taken over and the Afghan war decision demonstrates this reality.

With these geopolitical realities, staying Afghanistan may be the victory the Pentagon seeks — winning may just be being there. The Intercept reported this week that the Taliban offered to negotiate peace, but peace on the terms of the Taliban may not be what the US is seeking.

Call for an End to War for Empire

It would be a terrible error for people to blame Trump for the Afghanistan war which began with intervention by Jimmy Carter, became a hot war after 9-11 under George Bush, escalated under Obama and now continues the same polices under Trump. The bi-partisan war hawks in Congress for nearly 40 years have supported these policies. Afghanistan is evidence of the never ending policy of full spectrum dominance sought by the US empire. The bi-partisans warriors span the breadth of both parties, Jeffrey St. Clair highlights the Afghanistan war cheering by Senator John McCain and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Throughout recent decades the United States has failed to show what Kathy Kelly called the courage we need for peace and continues the cowardice of war. In fact, many ask why are we still at war in Afghanistan: Osama bid Laden is dead, other alleged 9-11 attack attackers are caught or killed. This shows that calling Afghanistan the longest running Fake War in US history is right — fake because it was never about terrorism but about business. If terrorism were the issue, Saudi Arabia would be the prime US enemy, but Saudi Arabia is also about business.

We share the conclusion of human rights activist and Green vice presidential candidate in 2016 Ajamu Baraka who wrote for the Black Alliance for Peace that:

In an obscene testament to U.S. vanity and the psychopathological commitment to global white supremacy, billions have already been wasted, almost three thousand U.S. lives lost and over 100,000 dead. It is time to admit defeat in Afghanistan and bring the war to an end. Justice and common sense demand that the bloodletting stop.

When we understand the true motives of US Empire, that conclusion is even worse — to steal resources from a poor nation and put in place permanent bases from which to conduct more war. US hegemony is costly to millions of people around the world and at home it sucks more than 54% of discretionary spending from the federal budget and creates an empire economy that only serves the wealthiest corporate interests that profit from transnational military dominance while creating a record wealth divide where most people in the United States are economic slaves. It is not only time to end the Afghanistan war but to end US Empire.

How mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media pump their government’s lies to deceive the public

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Intrepid Report

Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end.

On July 19, a neoconservative Democratic Party newspaper, the Washington Post, headlined one of their many anti-Trump news-articles, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” Their angle on this (actually momentous and constructive) action by Trump to abandon ‘the rebels’ (almost all of whom are, in fact, jihadists), was that this Republican president had done that in order to please Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (who defends Syria’s government, which secular government is knee-jerk-vilified in this and all American newspapers), and the WP article quoted neoconservatives who criticized the move by Trump to end the program.

The August 7 issue of a neoconservative Republican Party magazine, The Weekly Standard, headlines “Trump Got This One Right: Shutting down the CIA’s ghost war in Syria,” and doesn’t attack the previous, Democratic, president for having initiated and run that “ghost war,” and doesn’t make clear what it was, or why it was being waged, but does say hostile things against the leaders both of Russia and of Syria, such as that “Putin . . . has the blood of many Syrian civilians on his hands,” and allegations also against the Syrian government, such as:

Russian and Syrian jets have indiscriminately and repeatedly bombed civilian targets. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which Trump himself objected to, bombing a Syrian airfield in response. The United States cannot endorse these war crimes by allying itself with the perpetrators of mass murder in Syria.

Besides the fact that at least some of those assertions are demonstrably false, the United States government has actually (and often) done such things as that propaganda-article alleges Russia and Syria to have done, but nothing is said in this far-right magazine about that; readers of The Weekly Standard don’t get to see even a mention of this reality. The publication fools its readers, instead of informs them.

What’s even more important to take note of here, however, is that the article does not so much as even just mention the key fact: that Russia’s forces were invited into Syria by Syria’s secular government, in order to defend it against the jihadist gangs America was assisting, and that America’s forces weren’t invited by Syria’s government, but are instead invaders there, trying to overthrow that government, and are not only trying to help to defeat the ISIS jihadists who have also invaded Syria in order to overthrow Syria’s secular government. The crucial fact, that the Obama administration was insistent that Russia in Syria not bomb Al Qaeda forces in Syria and that that insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda there was the key reason why Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to reach an agreement with Russia about Syria had failed (they were actually sabotaged by his own boss, President Obama), is ignored by The Weekly Standard. (Also ignored by this far-right magazine is that the U.S. government has the blood of at least as many “Syrian civilians on its hands” there, as does the Russian government or any other participant in the war. That magazine’s playing to this false ‘us’-against-‘them’ prejudice, insults the intelligence of its readers, but is done in order to divert their duped reader’s attention away from the reader’s real enemies, which include the owners of that magazine, who want to manipulate, instead of to inform, their readership, for the benefit of Republican aristocrats. Those aristocrats need these dupes to remain duped.)

This shows that even when Republican ‘news’ media defend a Republican president who is reversing an imperialistic policy of his Democratic predecessor, it’s done in such a way, so it’s designed to keep the American public still deceived about the actual ugly history, which indicts both of America’s political parties—indicts the U.S. government itself, at its highest levels, where both parties are united together, in order to conquer the entire planet (including Syria, including Russia), for the benefit of America’s aristocrats.

Instead of reporting this crucial truth, The Weekly Standard says:

Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, and the timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, in March, the “Army of Conquest” took over the northwestern province of Idlib. This rebel coalition was no band of moderates. It was led by Nusra and included its closest Islamist and jihadist partners. The Army of Conquest was on the march, threatening the Assad family’s stronghold of Latakia on the coast.

The message the magazine is trying to convey to its conservative American readership, is that Russia there was defending “the Assad family,” and not defending Syria’s sovereignty over Syria’s own territory—not defending the independence of the Syrian government, from the demands of the U.S. aristocracy (which are mainly concerned with building oil and gas pipelines through Syria in order to replace Russia as the main energy-supplier to the world’s biggest energy-market, the EU, by the U.S. and its royal Arab allies as the main energy-suppliers there).

This is an imperialistic war, and the only way for the U.S. aristocracy to win it, is militarily (and/or via coups such as it did in Ukraine) to break apart Russia’s foreign alliances, in order to grab control of Russia’s assets (including that oil and gas)—but the U.S. oligarchs are also going after China’s assets, and Iran’s assets, and the assets of any well-armed government that’s not yet a vassal-nation to the U.S. aristocracy (vassals such as Europe, Japan, and all other U.S. allies).

America (with the assistance of the Sauds, and of the U.S. aristocracy’s other fundamentalist-Sunni business-partners in the Middle East) uses jihadists to serve as those “boots on the ground,” against secular governments such as Syria and Russia, because that’s a lot cheaper to do than to re-institute the U.S. military draft and to send tens of thousands of American soldiers out to overthrow, or at least to weaken, the ‘enemy’ government. It’s much cheaper “boots on the ground,” to grab new territory via these proxies, than via U.S. troops.

The supreme international issue in our time is sovereignty—the independence, or freedom, of nations. It’s international democracy, which is really at stake, in all of this. The alternative (which the U.S. government leads) is international fascism. It’s a vast program, not composed merely of invasions (the ‘Defense’ Department) and of coups (the State Department, etc.).

Now that (after 24 February 1990) the United States has been committed to world-conquest, there is, regarding international news-reporting in the United States, nothing that is fundamentally true that’s reported in the U.S. ‘news’ media, regarding international relations—it’s all based upon a shared lie by both wings of the U.S. aristocracy, Republican and Democratic, saying that the U.S. government supports freedom and democracy around the world, and that the nations which the U.S. government is trying to conquer, do not favor international freedom and democracy. The standard American account (that it supports, instead of opposes, democracy around the world) is the exact opposite of the truth.

For example: How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when twice in one day the secretary general of the United Nations said that the U.S. president’s insistence upon having a veto-power regarding who would, and who would not, be allowed to become Syria’s next president, was “totally unfair and unreasonable” and that instead “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” No publicity for those statements. None at all. The fact (that the U.S. president refused to accept that “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people”) was shocking. But it wasn’t reported to the American people. Americans never knew about it.

How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when the U.S. government was one of only three governments in the entire world to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution to condemn racism, fascism, and denial of the Holocaust? None. None at all. The fact was shocking. But it, too, wasn’t reported.

And: How many Americans know that on the night of 24 February 1990, the U.S. president secretly told the chancellor of West Germany that all of their statements to Soviet President (soon to become only Russia’s president) Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. and its alliances would end the Cold War on their side if the Soviet Union and its alliances did on theirs, had been mere lies and that the Cold War would henceforth continue to be waged on the Western side until Russia itself would be conquered?

How can a nation be a ‘democracy,’ while its government (and its ‘news’ media) hides the most important parts of history, and pumps instead lies, to its people, regarding international relations? Who is the actual sovereign in the United States—its public, or its aristocracy?

And how many U.S. news media will carry this article, which is submitted to all of them, to publish free-of-charge? For any of them that has a large audience, to publish it, could precipitate an unprecedented revolution within the U.S. aristocracy itself (a revolution against their lies), because it would, in effect, officially acknowledge that the existing ‘history’ is founded upon lies. But, if this fact is not publicly recognized in the U.S. now, then when will the truth about these matters be allowed to be published here? Or, will it ever? Or will it never.

The Washington Post’s article said that “a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said: “Putin won in Syria.” The anonymous source didn’t say: “The Syrian people won in Syria.”

Western-sponsored polls in Syria showed that 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to remain as president, and 82% of Syrians blamed America for the presence of jihadists in Syria trying to overthrow Assad.

Are the U.S. ‘news’ media hopeless—beyond salvaging? Is democracy in America beyond salvaging? Is 1984 here locked-in? What would that mean for the future of the world?

‘News’ media in the countries that are allied with the U.S. are just as trashy. For example, here’s an article from a brilliant blogger ripping to shreds an August 1 article from Britain’s Reuters ‘news’ agency, about the war in Yemen. That Reuters ‘news’-report could just as well have been published by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Maybe ‘news’ media now are that rotten all over the world. But any mainstream ‘news’ medium in the U.S., or its allied countries, has no realistic basis for criticizing ‘news’ media in other nations. Yet they do criticize the press in those nations, constantly. That’s just another lie, from ‘news’ media that might as well be pure lies.

The presumption when reading the ‘news’ should therefore be: What are they really trying to sell, and to whom? In a world dominated by lies, the thing that’s actually more important than anything else, is the motives. And nothing should then be believed on the basis of trust. In international relations, everything now is war, and the first victim of war is truth. And that is the reality today.

The Warmongers Handpicked By Deep State

Posted on August 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The Security Council met to discuss the alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike on 4 April in the Khan Shaykhun area of southern Idlib, Syria. Nikki Haley, United States Permanent Representative to the UN and President of the Security Council for April, addresses the meeting.

By State of the Nation and Antonius Aquinas

Source: State of the Nation

There’s a very well established pattern of appointments of women and/or minorities to 3 powerful positions in the US Federal Government. This calculated hiring policy has been trending since the election of Bill Clinton. The American people have seen a number of these highly placed individuals quickly morph into warmongers shortly after their terms began.

Why women and minorities are routinely selected for 3 key positions in the US Gov’t

The Secretary of State, US Ambassador to the United Nations and Attorney General positions have been quite deliberately filled with either a woman or person of color. This tactic has been executed by purposeful design. When they stand up in the United Nations to advocate war, or speak to the nation from their high office, they are not suspected to be the warmongers that they truly are.

KEY POINT: The primary reason that so many women and minorities are put in these powerful positions is that they are utilized to deceive the world community of nations. The world has already seen enough rich white man selling war over the centuries, especially during the age of colonization. Foreign governments will more readily accept the push to war from this highly deceptive group of Deep State agents. (All of them have been carefully programmed over the course of their professional lives.) Women and minorities are also much easier to manipulate in that most will never get the opportunity to rise to such heights. Hence, turning them into warmongers is as easy as dressing a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

What follows is a list of the more notorious warmongers who have occupied these critical posts. They are listed in chronological order beginning with the most recent.

Nikki Haley — US Ambassador to the United Nations

Samantha Power — US Ambassador to the United Nations

Hillary Clinton — Secretary of State

Susan Rice — US Ambassador to the United Nations

Zalmay Khalilzad — US Ambassador to the United Nations

Condoleezza Rice — Secretary of State

Colin Powell — Secretary of State

Alberto Gonzales — Attorney General

Janet Reno — Attorney General

Madeleine Albright — Secretary of State
(Source: Why Highly Flawed ‘Minority’ Leaders Are Always Chosen To Greatly Advance The NWO Agenda)

Of course, there was also Barack Hussein Obama who, as POTUS for 8 long years, wreaked havoc across the entire planet. That’s why they chose such a “smiley face”: to promote war to the many countries who incorrectly saw him as a peacemaker. Which is also why TPTB cynically gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize that he did not deserve. Even the Nobel Peace Prize committee has admitted to the deception.

Nobel Peace Committee Wants Obama To Return Peace Prize

The article posted below lays bare Deep State’s latest disastrous selection of Nikki Haley for the UN ambassadorship. However, the real question here is: Why did President Trump fall for such a transparent ploy, especially in view of his promises to make peace, not war?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nikki Haley: Warmonger Extraordinaire!

Antonius Aquinas

It must now be a prerequisite of those who become an American ambassador to the UN to possess certain characteristics and traits, the most important of which are rabid warmonger, child killer, and outright liar.

Remember it was Madeleine Albright when asked about the US blockading Iraq which prevented medicine and medical equipment from entering the country that resulted in the estimated death of a half a million children who coldly responded: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” Then there is Colin “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Powell who told a bald-face lie about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities which paved the way for the US destruction of the country.

In her brief tenure as UN ambassador, Nikki Haley is fulfilling these requirements quite nicely. Her latest crazed outburst came on the heels of the bizarre White House press release about another supposed Syrian government gas attack which warned President Assad that he would “pay a heavy price” if carried out.*

While the State and Defense Departments were apparently caught off guard by the White House action, Ambassador Haley was not (probably given advanced notice) and issued an even more provocative tweet:

“Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.”*

— Ambassador Nikki Haley

Not only has Haley appointed herself judge, jury and executioner of the Assad regime, but her wild accusation includes reprisals to the neocons’ ultimate targets of Russia and Iran. Her ridiculous statement has now given Syria’s enemies the green light to conduct another gas attack which will be blamed on Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran. Nice work, Nikki!

From a diplomatic perspective, the entire affair was bungled and amateurish, confirming once again that the Trump Administration is out of its league in conducting foreign policy.

That Haley was even chosen to become part of the Trump Administration has been odd from the beginning, but as things have unfolded quite telling. Haley was a vociferous critic of the future president. She, and the likes of another war-monger and Russophobe, Lindsey Graham, were consistently attacking candidate Trump for being “soft” on Russia and his immigration stance especially his wildly popular border wall proposal. To Haley and Graham, Donald Trump was out of step with the Republican Party’s values such as diversity as represented by Haley who, herself, is of Indian heritage.

Yet, despite all of the vitriol heaped at candidate Trump, the newly elected president, in a surprising and ominous move, decided to make the South Carolina governor, UN ambassador. This, and a number of other selections to foreign policy posts, signaled that President Trump would abandon his promises and vote-garnering campaign talk of peaceful coexistence with Russia, a reduction of US presence in the Middle East, and in other hot spots across the globe.

While Haley has been an ardent warmonger from the start, President Trump did not have to select her for the post. There were other more competent and surely less belligerent candidates available. More than likely, the choice was probably a nod to his “advisor” daughter Ivanka, to curry favor among feminists.

While President Trump’s pick of Haley was an implicit betrayal of a large segment of his base, his foreign policy actions since becoming chief executive have been an explicit rejection of putting America first which he spoke of at his inaugural. From escalating tensions with puny North Korea, dropping the mother-of-all-bombs on Afghanistan for no apparent reason, to making multi-billion dollar armament deals with the despots of Saudi Arabia among other troubling endeavors, Trump’s foreign policy is little different than his infamous predecessors.

While it looks like President Trump may have won the war, at least temporary, over the press and the anti-Trump Congressional forces about the fake Russian election involvement, he and his bellicose UN ambassador are now using the same underhanded methods to instigate a conflict to depose President Assad. While the alternative media rightly showed how the mainstream press and politicos made up and manipulated stories to undermine President Trump, it should now be intellectually honest and call out the president and his UN ambassador for what they are doing in Syria. In doing so, it may prevent the outbreak of WWIII.

*Tyler Durden, “Syria Denies Plans For A Chemical Attack As Russia Slams US Warning As ‘Unacceptable.’” Zero Hedge. 27 June 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-27/syria-denies-plans-chemical-attack-russia-accuses-us-provocation

**Ibid.

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https://antoniusaquinas.com/2017/07/03/nikki-haley-warmonger-extraordinaire/

U.S. War Justification Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

The idea that the United States has a problem with war propaganda is typically scratched in a bad-apples manner with a story that the U.S. has set up a new propaganda agency, such as the Global Engagement Center, or hired a company, such as the Lincoln Group, to plant articles in foreign media. Or we’ll read a report that former generals are secretly picking up their talking points from the Pentagon and their income from weapons companies while appearing as objective commenters on television. Or occasionally we’ll hear the recognition that some particularly obvious or disproven set of lies (such as those regarding Iraq in 2003) were the result of a well-meaning slip-up.

But how do we explain the failure of any significant section of the population in the foreign country involved to start believing the planted articles? The U.S. public would have believed them. They were printed in the newspaper and looked completely official. How do we explain that the former generals quietly on the take are indistinguishable from any of the other “experts” discussing foreign affairs on CNN? If those bribed to promote war sound just like everyone else, is the bribery the primary problem? How do we come to terms with President George W. Bush’s pre-war proposal to Tony Blair that they paint a plane with UN colors and fly it low hoping to get it shot at, or his post-war remark that it really didn’t matter if any of the claims made about Saddam Hussein were true or not? If that’s a well-meaning slip-up, what does all-out malevolence look like?

When the Rendon Group manufactured the story of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch, it looked just like all the Hollywood movies made in collaboration with the Pentagon, and also just about like virtually all of the Hollywood movies made without any such input. When Donald Trump threatens to bomb some more people, the “journalists” who fall in love with him are falling for adherence to a familiar, expected, and accepted role.

Could it be that we need a 12-step program that begins with the recognition of a deeply entrenched problem, minus the 7 steps that amount to relying on a deity to clean up our mess?

I think so. I think belief in war lies is an addiction, and that those who get hooked do so not so much because of the quality of the lies as because of a predisposition to believe them. War lies have been around for millennia. I wrote a book categorizing them, called War Is A Lie. But why did Colin Powell’s package of war lies at the United Nations look like such obvious fakery to much of the world and appear so solemn and convincing to so many in the United States? War propaganda’s success is not primarily determined by the quality of the propaganda, any more than drug addiction rates are determined principally by the quality of the drugs available. Rather, as logic and scientific studies bear out, basic attitudes produced by fundamental educational practices predispose people to believe or not believe in war lies.

Let’s begin with the obvious. Belief in the justification of a war is quite openly irrational. Unlike other questions of belief, on which people urge us to consider facts, with war we are quite often urged to believe as a matter of duty, obedience, patriotism, and citizenship. Promoters of war lies shamelessly appeal to any existing tendency to believe on command. An insistence on reviewing the facts of the matter is often characterized as support for a designated enemy in the desired war. Asking for evidence that Syria used chemical weapons or Russia attacked Ukraine or Libya threatened a massacre is not met with a presentation of evidence so often as with an accusation of believing that the Syrian, Russian, or Libyan government is a saintly manifestation of heaven that should be assisted in its longstanding goal of slaughtering every U.S. citizen.

When someone accused the coffee corporation Starbucks of not supporting a war, the company went to great lengths to prove that it supported “the troops” and to conflate that with supporting the war, without ever mentioning the slightest justification for or benefit from the war. As thoughtless participation is expected of members of the military, thoughtless war support is the duty of any business not wishing to face the wrath of the warmongers. Asked why it had a coffee shop at the U.S. torture camp at Guantanamo, Starbucks replied that not to have one there would constitute a political statement.

Further evidence that belief in war lies is generally irrational is found in the total disregard by war makers and war supporters for consequences, the desire to blow things up for the sake of blowing them up. A humanitarian war, if such a thing existed, would consider the human costs of the war and calculate how they might be outweighed by some imagined human benefit of the war. Instead, even knowing the costs of a war is widely considered to constitute a demand to end the war and opposition to ever having started it. “We don’t do body counts!” explained General Tommy Franks.

A rational decision to drop a giant bomb on Afghanistan would be part of some sort of plan to accomplish something or other beyond purely dropping the bomb. When Hillary Clinton laughed about having killed Muamar Gadaffi, she wasn’t expressing some rational decision of necessary evil for the greater good, but an irrational urge — and the consequences for the people of Libya and the world be damned. When Madeleine Albright claimed killing a half-million children was “worth it” she clearly meant that anything at all was “worth it,” not that she’d figured out a way to save 500,001 or more kids by killing 500,000 of them. When Donald Trump proposes to kill more families, it is not because there exists any evidence of anything humanitarian or even profitable resulting from such action. The point is purely and simply to kill more families, or at least to start speaking more about all the families being killed.

War lies are not only accepted as a matter of duty, but identified with as a matter of pride in a conception of one’s self. Freedom isn’t free, these colors do not run, I support the troops, and this brain will not tolerate opposition to mass murder when that sacred crime is committed by the U.S. military. Remember that believers in Iraq WMDs were shown evidence to the contrary, and as a result strengthened rather than weakened their beliefs in the WMDs. Rationality was not at work here, rather identity — and faith.

A further hurdle for any claim that war justifications can be rationally argued for, or that they are accepted on their own merits, lies in the fact that the claims made regarding atrocities or weapons possession are typically completely irrelevant to any legal, moral, or practical case for the war advocated. If every lie about Iraq or Libya or Syria had been perfectly true, there would have been zero justification for those wars. The United States possesses WMDs, commits atrocities, and uses weapons most of the world has banned or shunned, none of which would justify anyone in bombing the United States. Nor would bombing the United States do any good for anyone living in the United States. (And yet war opponents go on focusing on doubts that the Syrian government really used chemical weapons, rather than opposing the supreme crime of launching war, a crime whose illegality and immorality remain untouched by anyone having used or not used chemical weapons.)

Then there is the problem of acceptance of carefully selected partial and ahistorical information. If your kid comes home from school, your wonderful noble and beloved child, and says “Michael jumped on me and hit me and called me names,” you are likely to ask, without yet drawing any conclusions: “What started that? Did you do anything to make him mad at you?” It’s a logical, almost inevitable question. It doesn’t rely on acceptance of Michael’s violence. It doesn’t assign blame or innocence. It just suggests that the universe is often comprehensible, that effects often have identifiable causes. But when North Korea builds a nuclear weapon or test fires a missile, it is almost a patriotic duty in the United States to banish from one’s mind any question of context.

Certainly we can blame the U.S. propaganda system for its careful omission of context and selection of news. That North Korea complied with an agreement to halt its nuclear weapons program until U.S. President George W. Bush tossed that agreement out and declared North Korea part of an axis of evil, and destroyed another member of that axis, might have been missed because you were shopping at the time or because U.S. media outlets were focused on the exciting destruction of Iraq. That North Korea has repeatedly proposed to halt its nuke program if the U.S. and South Korea will stop practicing to bomb the North hasn’t been widely reported. What the U.S. did to North Korea during the Korean War or that the war has never been officially ended or that the U.S. has been building up all kinds of weaponry in South Korea that North Korea and China see as threatening may be easy to miss. But not to even ask is inexcusable. The U.S. tests missiles all the time. Yet when North Korea tests a missile the U.S. media loses its collective mind. Why not ask for an explanation of the double standard? Why not ask what motivated, rightly or wrongly, North Korea to commit such an outrage? Not to ask is to want to not know.

This is a typical progression of information. The United States arms and props up a dictator, outsources torture to him, and buys his fossil fuels for years. But you’re watching football or busy working, so you miss most of that. Then the U.S. begins threatening an overthrow, and you’re in support of that but want to know a good reason in order to make the peaceniks see the light. The dictator makes all sorts of pleas for nonviolent resolution, the rule of law, a chance to stay in power and alive. But there’s a U.S. election on, so you can’t be expected to notice. Then the U.S. accuses the dictator of having killed his own people with an uncivilized weapon or of having repressed women’s rights or of having devised a doomsday machine. Instantly you’re a fully informed pundit on world affairs prepared to denounce any request for independent verification of the claims and to explain that, as former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese put it in a domestic context, if you’re accused of a crime then you’re not innocent.

While supporters of war can often be spotted waving flags and shouting in ecstasy, they will almost universally tell you that each war is a last resort. This is true even among the vast majority of them in the United States who cannot list for you each of the current U.S. wars. In fact, it’s proven quite easy for Youtube to fill up with videos of good Americans solemnly informing us that bombing some fictional nation they’ve been asked about is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. Spy magazine once asked Congress Members if Freedonia needed to be bombed. Jay Inslee was one Congress Member who assured them that it did.

Studies have found that U.S. citizens typically assume, quite nonsensically as well as falsely, that any war has been launched only after having exhausted all alternatives. This is nonsensical because it is always possible to propose another alternative. It’s false because arriving at an actual war requires actively fending off every opportunity for peace — and fending off recognition or understanding of doing so.

In the case of Syria, the United States has spent years sabotaging U.N. attempts at peace, while on the contrary fueling the war. To imagine the U.S. riding in to rescue the hopelessly violent (and somehow armed with U.S.-made weapons) from themselves requires avoiding any knowledge that the United States dismissed out of hand a Russian peace proposal for Syria in 2012, as it had done others before it. Supposedly the United States is killing people with drones as a last resort, even though in that minority of cases in which the United States knows the names of the people it is aiming for, many (if not all) of them indisputably could have been easily arrested. Before it could attack Libya in 2011, the U.S. had to fend off a plan for peace advanced by the African Union.

Prior to the 2003 attack on Iraq, the Iraqi government had approached the CIA’s Vincent Cannistrato to offer to let U.S. troops search the entire country. The Iraqi government had offered to hold internationally monitored elections within two years, and offered Bush official Richard Perle to open the whole country to inspections, to turn over a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to help fight terrorism, and to favor U.S. oil companies. Hussein offered, in the account that the president of Spain was given by the U.S. president, to simply leave Iraq if he could keep $1 billion. Similar accounts of avoiding peace at all costs can be given for the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in 2001 or the First Gulf War or the war on Vietnam or that on Mexico or that on the Spanish empire and the Philippines, etc.

Then there’s the problem of wars that don’t happen. They’ve also always been marketed as a last resort. But when they’re prevented — as was the proposed bombing of Syria in 2013 — some other resort is pursued instead. Numerous U.S. Congress Members said in 2015 that the nuclear deal with Iran needed to be rejected and Iran attacked as a last resort, until the deal wasn’t rejected. No mention was made in 2015 of Iran’s 2003 offer to negotiate away its nuclear program, an offer that had been quickly scorned by the United States.

Are you yet persuaded that war support requires not a type of thinking but the absence thereof? Consider that each new war depends on having learned no lessons from any of the previous ones. Find a supporter — it’s not hard — of the idea that the U.S. government lies from morning to night about all non-war topics, and ask them for an explanation of how the topic of war functions as a truth serum. Or do this: review the opinion polls on a war that hasn’t yet happened (as was at the time the proposal to bomb Syria in 2013) and something that has already been done (such as the U.S. bombing of an air strip in Syria in 2017). When something has already happened, millions of people find that they support it, regardless of any coherent rationale, even as the same people tell pollsters that they don’t want any more bombing to occur.

Or consider this: statistically, women are less supportive of wars than are men. Nobody has explained this as the result of greater or lesser intelligence or information or insight or wisdom. Rather it is indisputably, as common sense and studies I’ll come to in a second both establish, a question of levels of acceptance of war in general playing out on the question of a particular war.

Or consider the important role played by fear. In 2013 millions of people across the U.S. political spectrum opposed bombing Syria, many objecting to the U.S. entering (as if not already in it) a war on the same side as al Qaeda. In 2014, following the release of frightening ISIS videos, millions of the same people supported escalating U.S. involvement in that war, despite the official explanations from the U.S. government making clear that it was participating in the war on both sides. Fear appears to increase acceptance of war and of illogic in general.

Or observe the growing opposition in the U.S. public to Israeli wars that is not matched by any similar consideration of the problem of U.S. wars. A similar gap can be found between the war support of many Americans when the U.S. president belongs to one party and when he (or a hoped-for she) belongs to another. Asking many supporters of bombing a predominantly dark-skinned country where a terrorist incident has occurred whether they’d support bombing a European country in similar circumstances can be equally revealing.

Richard C. Eichenberg and Richard Stoll recently published an academic article titled “The Acceptability of War and Support for Defense Spending: Evidence from Fourteen Democracies, 2004–2013,” put into straightforward English by the War Prevention Initiative. In addition to other studies reviewed, people in 14 countries were asked annually “Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following—Under some conditions war is necessary to obtain justice.”

“In survey responses from all countries, when paired against current events or short-term threats, people’s attitudes towards war were more strongly and consistently related to their fundamental values and life experience. As an example, although respondents considered the extent to which they viewed the Iran nuclear program or China, for instance, as military threats, these threat assessments did not play as important a role in the formation of their attitudes on war and defense spending as did their beliefs, values, and experiences. Gender was also a strong factor. . . . The United States was found to be the . . . society whose citizens accepted war as an instrument of their foreign policy the most.”

This lines up with a 2013 Gallup poll in dozens of countries that found a relatively high percentage of respondents in the United States claiming that they “would” fight in a war for their country (as if there weren’t a half-dozen wars available to join if they really wanted to).

It also lines up with the geographic and academic presence of the alternative system of facts known as “just war theory.” I wrote a book rejecting that whole field, called War Is Never Just, and sent it with friends to discussions at the Vatican of whether the Catholic Church should finally reject one of its most destructive creations. The most interesting feedback I received was the report that members of the Catholic Church from outside the Western world had never actually heard of “just war theory” — a creation, after all, of empire.

The skillful propagandizing of the U.S. public, with many of those techniques dating back to the government propaganda effort during World War I has, no doubt, played a major role. Yet I suspect that, not only is the general culture and the system of childhood education more at fault than particular propaganda in any given case, but the problem also dates to much earlier than World War I in a country that grew out of colonies founded on the basis of war.

The lesson to be drawn by the fact-based community from the irrationality of war support is not that all is hopeless, but that

the danger is greater than might be imagined, as much war support knows no limits — a danger that grows with every day that the U.S. government works toward the deployment of more and smaller and “more usable” first-strike nuclear weapons; and
key to building resistance to each particular war is educating young and old people to oppose the entire institution of war.

I recently spoke to a college class and asked them to name some justified wars. It absolutely made my day that for the first time in my experience nobody said “World War II.” But they did say “the revolution” as if there had only ever been one, and “the civil war” as if these young people had had the good fortune to be born into the one country where both of the justifiable wars in world history had happened. This line of thinking is no different from imagining one’s parents, by virtue of being one’s parents, to have possessed and bestowed on you the one true religion.

When a Florida school district this past year announced that it would evict from its sporting events anyone who failed to properly honor the U.S. flag, it was engaging in a policy of holy excommunication, and it was doing as much or more for the support of coming wars as any forged documents that any future Karl Rove might commission.

Wonder Woman Is a Hero Only The Military-Industrial Complex Could Create

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jonathan Cooke

Source: TruePublica

For a while I have been pondering whether to write a review of the newly released Wonder Woman, to peel back the layers of comic-book fun to reveal below the film’s disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.

There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up, it’s only a movie!” – as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically.

My argument is that this much-praised Gal Gadot vehicle – seemingly about a peace-loving superhero, Wonder Woman, from the DC Comics stable – is actually carefully purposed propaganda, designed to force-feed aggressive western military intervention, dressed up as humanitarianism, to unsuspecting audiences.

In short, this is straight-up propaganda for the military-industrial complex. It would have looked and sounded identical had it been scripted by a joint team from the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces.

My reticence to review the film has lifted after reading the latest investigations of Tom Secker and Matthew Alford into the manifold ways the U.S. military and security services interfere in Hollywood, based on a release of 4,000 pages of documents under Freedom of Information requests.

In their new book National Security Cinema, the pair argue that the Pentagon, CIA and National Security Agency have meddled in the production of at least 800 major Hollywood movies and 1,000 TV titles. That is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, as they concede:

“It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld.”

They write that their book “details how U.S. government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes.”

The need for Pentagon toys

This isn’t just about minor adjustments, but wholesale collusion between film-makers and the military: “If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DoD [Department of Defense] don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts — Production Assistance Agreements — which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.”

The fact that script-writers, producers and directors on these mega-budget pictures know their film may never make it into production if it does not get a thumbs-up from the Pentagon inevitably influences the choice of subjects, the political and military premises of selected films, and the story lines.

One movie, Countermeasures, was ditched after the military objected to a script that “included references to the Iran-Contra scandal … Similarly Fields of Fire and Top Gun 2 were never made because they couldn’t obtain military support, again due to politically controversial aspects of the scripts.”

One can imagine just how stringent the conditions imposed by the Pentagon must be, if it felt compelled to reject a movie like Top Gun 2, the sequel to the “flyboys with toys” killing fest that starred a young Tom Cruise.

The two authors add: “The documents also record the pro-active nature of the military’s operations in Hollywood and that they are finding ways to get involved during the earliest stages of development, ‘when characters and storylines are most easily shaped to the Army’s benefit’.”

Bad apples, not bad institutions

In addition, film-makers are pressured into changing scripts that suggest institutional or systemic problems in the U.S. security agencies.

The two authors observe that producer Jerry Bruckheimer has admitted that the script of the film Enemy of the State was changed under pressure from the NSA so that the wrongdoings at the heart of the film would be the responsibility of a single individual, not the agency itself.

“This idea of using cinema to pin the blame for problems on isolated rogue agents or bad apples, thus avoiding any notion of systemic, institutional or criminal responsibility, is right out of the CIA/DOD’s playbook,” they observe.

So not only are movies critical of U.S. and western politics and militarism almost certain to be off-limits for a big-budget production, but that void is certain to be filled by film proposals the studio is confident will win approval from the Pentagon, CIA and NSA.

And this is, of course, on top of the fact that the Hollywood money-men are themselves part of a larger globalized financial elite that depends on the proceeds of the homeland security industry, arms manufacturers and war profiteers. These financiers are certain to prefer funding films that support a neoliberal worldview at home and a neoconservative policy of warmongering abroad.

As Secker and Alford conclude: “In societies already eager to use our hard power overseas, the shaping of our popular culture to promote a pro-war mindset must be taken seriously.”

Gal Gadot and the IDF

All of this is the context for deciphering the egregious propaganda in favor of western military violence, and the portrayal of peace-seeking as “appeasement”, that is Wonder Woman.

There has been plenty of guffawing at Middle East countries, including Lebanon, for seeking to ban Wonder Woman because it stars Gal Gadot, an Israeli beauty queen turned actress.

In fact, it is understandable that the Lebanese might object to a film heavily promoting Gadot as the world’s savior, given that she served in the Israeli army, one that brutally occupied parts of their country for two decades, until 2000, and continues to maintain a belligerent occupation of the Palestinians.

But there is also an undeniable irony to Gadot playing an Amazonian goddess who opposes the militarism of men, and cannot bear to see the suffering of children in war, when in real life she publicly cheered on the Israeli army’s massive bombardment in 2014 of the imprisoned population of Gaza, which led to the killing of some 500 Palestinian children there.

But more importantly, it is not just that Gadot, a former IDF soldier, is now the face of Wonder Woman; it is that the film’s superhero character too almost perfectly embodies the shared militaristic values of the IDF and the Pentagon. If there is one film whose script suggests it was jointly engineered by the Pentagon and Israeli army, it is Wonder Woman.

Hillary Clinton as Wonder Woman?

The film is set near the end of the First World War, a cataclysmic confrontation between two colonial powers, Britain and Germany, each trying to assert its dominance in Europe. The film-makers blur their focus sufficiently to gloss over the problem that there were no good guys in that “war to end all wars”. Instead in true Hollywood fashion, the First World War is presented simply as a prelude (or prequel) to the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis.

The Germans are murderous villains, while the British are the flawed – until Gadot shows them the error of their ways – defenders of humanity. In fact, the film prefers to cast the anti-German side as “Allies”, the humane members of the world community, represented by the U.S. – Chris Pine is the male lead and Gadot’s love interest – and a ragtag support group that includes a Scot, a native American, and a generic Arab, presumably symbolizing “moderate” Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

The British leadership is trying to find ways to make peace and bring the war to an end, but is stymied by an evil presence. A German super-general, Erich Ludendorff (Danny Huston), believes he can win the war decisively by developing a horrifying gas that will wipe out men, women and children, forcing the British to surrender on his terms. To demonstrate his power, he tests the gas on innocent villagers on the front lines in Belgium.

All of this might sound disconcertingly familiar to anyone who has been following the western media-scripted coverage that has for several years now been trying to promote more aggressive “humanitarian intervention” in Syria – and before that, in Libya and Iraq.

Is Ludendorff supposed to be Bashar Assad, the evil Syrian president who – as long as we discount the dissenting voices of some experts – has twice used the chemical weapon sarin against innocent civilians?

Are the British leaders, seeking a peace deal with the Germans, supposed to be those “appeasers” in the West who have stood in the way of “intervention” in Syria, blocking no-fly zones and bombing runs that could bring down the Syrian government?

And in an even more disturbing, if now outdated, parallel, given the film’s insistent identity politics, is Wonder Woman – the Amazonian who brings peace through overpowering military violence – a stand-in for Hillary Clinton? When the movie was in production, the filmmakers must have assumed it would be released as Clinton was enjoying her early months in office as the first female U.S. president.

The use of Wonder Woman to justify Clinton’s well-documented blood lust–the woman who laughed as “our rebels” murderously sodomized Libya’s Col Gaddafi, saying: “We came, we saw, he died” – would have proved timely had the U.S. election turned out differently.

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength

Those who have not seen the film, and take it seriously as entertainment, may wish to skip this section, which includes a significant spoiler.

The source of man’s evil in Wonder Woman is the only surviving Greek god, Ares, who is hiding somewhere in the human world. Wonder Woman believes she can end all war and human suffering only if she can locate Ares and kill him – before he kills her.

No one in the human world, of course, believes Wonder Woman, and foolishly they dismiss her ideas as lunacy. And for a while Wonder Woman makes a terrible mistake in thinking the German Ludendorff (Saddam / Gaddafi / Assad) is Ares. It is late in the film that she discovers she has been on the wrong scent.

Humankind’s ultimate enemy is not Ludendorff, but the kindly Sir Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis), the British leader who has spent the entire film counseling for negotiations and peace with the Germans.

The ultimate evil, the wolves in sheep’s clothing, Wonder Woman finds, are those among us who preach fraternity, compassion and turning the other cheek. They make possible the killing of the innocents.

Those who appear to care, those who seem to offer a route out of bloodshed and war – those who defeat the aims and threaten the profits of the military-industrial complex – are in truth nothing more than appeasers. Their efforts are certain, even intended, to lead to greater suffering.

Militarism, superior firepower, and an absolute belief in the justness of one’s cause, as Wonder Woman is reminded by her Amazonian tutors during her childhood Krav Maga training (Gadot was herself an Israeli army combat trainer) are the way to save mankind from the evildoers.

There is no time to delay, to stand back, to question or to negotiate. Wonder Woman is outraged by the dithering of the men around her. She wants to be at the front line as soon as possible, to kick ass.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – and all of it is good for business, the film Wonder Woman concludes in truly Orwellian fashion.

A veneer of identity politics

Of course, this story – like all effective propaganda – is supposed to work its magic at a subconscious level, where it cannot be interrogated by our reason and our critical faculties. But even so, a few critics – themselves enthusiastic liberal interventionists – seem to have intuited the movie’s message.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a reviewer with the clearest sense of how the film panders to the pro-war sentiments and identity politics of many liberals is the film critic of the conservative Washington Free Beacon.

Sonny Bunch applauds the way the film “highlights the need for the strong to intervene on behalf of the weak and the oppressed, and treats as villains quislings who sue for a peace that will bring only more destruction.”

But he also understands how the film has been crafted to make its war-mongering more palatable to liberals. Wonder Woman, he writes, proves “you could slap an identity politics veneer on just about any neoconservative policy and progressives would lap it up. … Liberal interventionism is back, baby!”

Drooling from liberals

And sure enough, the community of largely liberal film reviewers has mostly drooled over Wonder Woman. Despite dire acting from Gadot, preposterous dialogue and a risible screenplay, the film has racked up an astounding 92 percent approval rating from critics on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Here is a brief selection of their assessments:

Dana Stevens, of Slate: “This is a movie about battling evil that pauses to ask what evil is and whether it’s necessary to understand its nature in order to defeat it.”

Mick LaSalle, of the San Francisco Chronicle: “What lingers … is the feeling of hope that the movie brings, that it someday might be possible for female rationality to defeat male brutality.”

Richard Brody, of the New Yorker: Wonder Woman is “an entry in the genre of wisdom literature that shares hard-won insights and long-pondered paradoxes of the past with a sincere intimacy.”

A. O. Scott, of the New York Times: “Her sacred duty is to bring peace to the world. Accomplishing it requires a lot of killing, but that’s always the superhero paradox. … Unlike most of her male counterparts, its heroine is not trying to exorcise inner demons or work out messiah issues. She wants to function freely in the world, to help out when needed and to be respected for her abilities. No wonder she encounters so much resistance.”

The paradoxes of power

Wonder Woman grapples with the paradoxes of military power every American interventionist and Israeli patriot understands. To save the “beautiful children”, she must sometimes rush to intervene and kill with extreme prejudice, even if the other side’s children are among those who are sacrificed.

Wonder Woman wants to “function freely”: she must enjoy the right to go wherever her interests take her. She cannot be shackled by borders in her quest for justice. She is there to “help out” others in trouble, even if she alone gets to decide who needs help and what counts as trouble. And she needs “respect”, and is prepared to force others to accord it to her, through her superior strength if need be.

She will face “much resistance” because others are jealous of her power and her freedoms. They are the evildoers, and they must and will be defeated.

Is it any surprise that in the Hollywood-Pentagon-IDF world of Wonder Woman, the values of a female superhero sound exactly like those of the military men who run the West’s wars?

Now roll on “Wonder Woman 2: Time to Intervene (Humanely)”.

Recordings Reveal FBI Gave Man a Rifle, Urged Him to Carry Out Mass Shooting to ‘Defend Islam’

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

It’s become a near-weekly occurrence. Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they’ve foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives. However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who’ve been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents. Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.

But what happens when they take it too far? What happens if the FBI actually tells someone to conduct a mass shooting? Well, in Milwaukee, WI, we are seeing this unfold first hand.

A little over two years ago, Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 25, found himself in the midst of an FBI sting. Little did he know that he was being groomed for terrorism by the same government who claims to fight terrorism.

Hamzeh was born in the U.S. but lived much of his childhood in Jordan before moving to Milwaukee when he was 19. For four years, Hamzeh lived an entirely normal life, until one day, he was contacted by people who wanted to radicalize him and give him weapons.

The group, entirely controlled by the FBI was plotting to shoot up the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center during an event.

In February of 2016, the FBI announced they had foiled a terror plot by a man who was planning to kill at least 30 people to “defend Islam.” Americans cheered, and everyone felt safer — the FBI had saved us from extremists once again.

However, that’s not how things actually happened.

For months, two corrupt FBI informants goaded Hamzeh into obtaining weapons. According to his attorneys, hundreds of hours of recorded conversations show the FBI pressed Hamzeh into getting these weapons and eventually began pushing him to carry out a mass shooting.

Despite the intense peer pressure from people pretending that they were mass murderers, Hamzeh resisted. He didn’t even want the guns. Now, his attorneys have filed a motion to get him released on bond because they say he’s been set up.

The informants, the motion states, “frequently lobbied Hamzeh to get a machine gun despite his repeated protests that all he wanted was a legal handgun to protect himself.”

In spite of the FBI claiming Hamzeh was going to carry out a mass shooting — they were attempting to force him to do — the recordings, according to his attorneys, show he resisted and adamantly refused to ever participate in violence.

Even after the FBI announced their foiled terror plot, they were unable to charge Hamzeh with anything other than possessing a machine gun and a silencer. And even these items had been essentially shoved into his lap by the FBI.

As the Journal-Sentinel reports, a psychiatrist who evaluated Hamzeh in jail concluded he does not fit a profile of someone who would kill strangers and “has a strong moral code with a very prominent conscience and empathy.”

“There is also no evidence that Hamzeh ever made any plans or was doing anything other than making empty boasts to express his resentment about Israel or to gain attention,” reads their brief in support of the bond motion.

Hamzeh has now been in jail for a year and a half because the FBI tried to make him carry out a mass shooting that he didn’t want to do. And, he could be there much longer as each of the charges for the weapons — that he also did not want — carry 10 years a piece.

If Hamzeh never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the weapons were forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Hamzeh would’ve actually carried out this shooting that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit to forcing him to accept weapons?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

THE MADNESS OF WAR

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

It is essential to constantly remind ourselves, that war, apart from a very few exceptions, is a symptom of madness. Yet war is a disease which is largely taken for granted; considered ‘normal’ and unless it involves a large swathe of humanity, ignored. How did we allow ourselves to be trapped by such insanity?

In 2017, wars are as prevalent as ever. They are being manifest in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, and in a lesser form, in almost all countries of the World. They are the result of a failure to recognize that killing another is actually killing one’s self. A failure to grasp that humanity is a collective made up of millions of individuals, all of whom share a common ancestry and, on a subconscious plain, a common aspiration and destiny.

There is no victory in war. War is an admission of defeat. When humans resort to mass killing of each other we see an expression of failure, never success. Not so long ago war was glorified and, for the victor, held up as an expression of supreme national pride. In fact, such an attitude was predominant in the species for thousands of years.

However two World Wars put an end to the hubris. The levels of destruction were so great and so many millions died brutal and ugly deaths, that a kind of ‘war weariness’ set-in amongst the survivors, and a new sense of the futility of it all became integrated into societies which had undergone the experience. The world looked like it might have learned its lesson; people had pounded each other, and the natural environment, into a sickening pulp, and there was no glorious aftermath. Just a sense of what ‘peace’ could actually mean.

There were, and are, still some who find war ‘exciting’, whose own lives are too dull and routine to find any thrill in the act of daily living. They look-on at wars in foreign territories as extensions of their own angst and frustrations. Such individuals find temporary comfort in watching others die.

This condition is more prevalent than many might realize; it is symptomatic of a world crushed by meaningless routine and managed by those lacking any manifest vision of something more deeply fulfilling to awaken starved imaginations.

Of course, a history of war will reveal that whole civilizations were born and dissolved via victory and defeat on the battlefield. It was believed that these blood baths were a price worth paying for the great accumulation of national wealth which followed them, if one was on the winning side. It is sobering to reflect that much of the fine architecture of old Europe is a result of plundered wealth.

War is made no less destructive by the fact that it can now be carried out by people sitting in air-conditioned ‘cockpits’ in Houston. People trained to kill ‘at a distance’. People whose chance of being themselves attacked by those they target, being pretty much nil. This type of killing is one step away from the ‘robotic soldier’, the envisioned battle field of the future and a direct of extension of the war games kids (and adults) play on their electronic gizmos.

But look, it’s still the same underlying disease. It’s still the fascination with the idea of somehow ‘coming out on top’ and having it over ‘an inferior’. It’s still reveling in destruction, on all planes of planetary life.

Children play war games. I used to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’. I was indoctrinated into ‘war thinking’ from a very early age. It was just after World War Two, and life in Britain was steeped in stories of heroism carried out by ‘our boys’ against the Nazis. Toy soldier armies ranged against each other across the sitting room floor as parents looked on with quiet acceptance. We soon graduated on to ‘cap guns’ and staged mock battles around the garden bushes and trees.

But nobody got killed in these ‘war games’ and the ground wasn’t turned into a sea of craters and toxic mud by our childhood antics. Other matters eventually attracted our curiosity and interest, and the guns and bows and arrows were dumped, unlikely to be seen again.

If mankind would only grow up, the same situation would repeat around the world. Adult individuals, blessed with a little responsibility and the slimmest glimmer of wisdom, would ‘move on’ to areas of interest that expressed an eagerness to support the planet, and not destroy it. A wish to explore new horizons of consciousness, and not to regress into thoughtless thuggery. A desire to meet and enjoy the company of other races and nationalities, and not to put a gun to their heads.

How can this madness have gone on so long? How can war still ‘be taken for granted’ in 2017?

Even those who argue vociferously for cutting back excessive CO2 emissions on the planet, don’t call for an end to war and ‘war games’ that are responsible for a large part of these emissions. They fail to realize that here is to be found the single largest transmission of toxic CO2 when set against any other global activity. I’m including a brief summary of the US position in 2013, just to illustrate the point:

“According to its own study, in 2013 the Pentagon consumed fuel equivalent to 90,000,000 barrels of crude oil. This amounts to 80% of the total fuel usage by the federal government. If burned as jet fuel it produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of CO2. And the Pentagon’s figures do not include carbon produced by the thousands of bombs dropped in 2013, or the fires that burned after the jets and drones departed. ” (Counter Punch).

Most environmentalists and climate change campaigners also ‘take war for granted’, it seems. It has been etched into our bones by an endless indoctrination process. A process whose symptoms can also be found in the way we are urged to be ‘aggressive’ and ‘competitive’ in order to make progress within the demands of the status quo. How much of what is called ‘education’ is about bringing out our creative potential instead of our aggressive potential? And how much is about cramming us with the means to ‘succeed’ in the mostly cut throat world of business and indeed, almost all professions?

We see the symptoms of aggression in daily life, and fail to question it. Is it any wonder that we fail to question war?

War is the most favored tool of the controlling powers. It supplies the coffers of the military industrial complex with an endless demand for production of weapons. The state then gets the pay-off and looks for another war to keep the cycle of death going. It is also a valuable diversionary tool for distracting the general public, while unpopular and controversial issues are pushed through the system, with only a few noticing.

Of course a great prize for warmongers in general, is anticipation of the breaking out of mother of all wars. And indeed, the ever looming threat of genocide never seems far off at the hands of those who play with power the way children play with their toy guns and swords, but without any of the child’s creativity. Today, in the USA in particular, megalomania has become wedded with a sort of Russian Roulette approach to who might present the next useful target for a bombing run or drone attack.

Witness how high the stakes get set in this fiendish game. Witness the Russian Federation and President Putin being ever further provoked by the West to take an aggressive step that could trigger a mega war scenario. The vicious taunting, without a shred of evidence to give it credence, is a mark of the madness which all too often grips those in power. Those who are determined to diminish all of life to a poisoned arrow of fabricated fear, which, if ever launched, would take all of humanity with it.

Let us be sure to keep a close eye on those whom we elect to administer our countries. The intoxication which comes with power is a very dangerous addiction, particularly when the play things at such people’s disposal are weapons of mass destruction. We need, more than ever, to be able to recognize the symptoms of megalomania and not confuse it with ‘strong leadership’. It is a major weakness in the delivery of what is called democracy, that so many people are still so easily fooled by those ‘standing for election’.

We are being pushed by ‘anti-life’ forces, some of whose origins are less than human, to see the planet and its people as expendable. To accept lies, deception and crude power-play as something akin to ‘normal’. To feel that it is not in our powers to bring deep change to a washed-out and degraded status quo. To believe that war is an ‘acceptable’ way of shifting around the totems of power.

It’s time we not only woke up, but got out of bed too. The hour is late, and this should add a significant degree of urgency to our endeavors. Mankind is blessed with deep powers of positive potential and these powers are far greater than the force which drives the war mongering anti-life minority. We are close to a tipping point in the growth of conscious awareness amongst caring human beings.

The key will be to channel this awareness into taking measures to regain control of our destinies.

To rid this world of those who hold its fate in their numb, insensitive hands. To act in unison and to defy all efforts to divide and conquer our growing sense of purpose and endeavor.

We can and we will, put an end to the madness of war. We must not wait for war to put an end to us.

Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK Organic farming, a writer, actor, social entrepreneur and international activist. During the 1970’s he worked in experimental theatre as actor and assistant director, co-founding the The Institute for Creative Development, in Belgium, teaching holistic thinking and dramatic art. In the 1980’s he returned to the UK to take over the family farm and convert it to an organic system. His experience as a leader in reviving rural economies throughout the 1990’s, led him to be invited to join the advisory board of the South East of England Development Agency, and the Country Land Owners Association. He also served on the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership and was founder-chairman of The Association of Rural Businesses in Oxfordshire. In 2,000 he led an innovative project to revive regionally important market towns as centres of vibrant local activity and hubs for rejuvenated local food initiatives.

Julian is a prolific writer and broadcaster, his articles appear in a wide diversity of journals and on-line sites. Visit www.julianrose.info to find out about Julian’s highly diverse life and acclaimed books ‘Changing Course for Life’ and ‘In Defence of Life’.

The Unifying Force of War Abolition

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

Remarks at United National Antiwar Coalition in Richmond, Virginia, on June 18, 2017.

It’s not unusual for an activist, focused on one of the millions of worthy causes out there, to try to recruit other activists to that particular cause. That’s not exactly what I want to do. For one thing, if we are going to succeed we are going to have to recruit millions of new people into activism who are not now active at all.

Of course I do favor types of activism that eliminate the need for more activism, such as campaigns to make voter registration automatic or to index the minimum wage to the cost of living. But for the most part I want everyone to keep doing what inspires them. Only, I think I know a way to shift our emphases and unite out movements, a way that doesn’t usually occur to us.

It’s not unusual for an activist to think that their particular field is the unifying top priority.

For example:

If we don’t get the money out of politics how can we enact or enforce any laws not favored by money? We’ve legalized bribery for godsake! What else matters until we fix that?

Or:

If we don’t create credible democratic independent media, we can’t communicate. Door knocking can’t defeat television. We only know that Cindy Sheehan went to Crawford or Occupyers went to Wall Street because corporate television chose to tell us. Why have elections if we can’t tell the truth about the candidates?

Or:

Excuse me, the earth is cooking. Our species and many others are losing their habitats. If it’s not already too late, now is the time to decide whether we will have great grandchildren at all. If we don’t have any, what will it matter what kind of elections or television networks they have?

One can go on and on in this vein, as well as in claiming that one societal evil precedes and causes another. Racism or militarism or extreme materialism is the disease and the others are the symptoms.

All of this is also not exactly what I want to do. I want us to work on everything and use every means of unifying. I want us to recognize how each problem contributes to others and vice versa. Hungry scared people can’t end climate change. A culture that puts a trillion dollars a year into mass-killing of distant dark-skinned people can’t build schools or end racism. Unless we redistribute wealth, we cannot redistribute power. We can’t create media unless we have something important to say. We can’t protect the earth’s climate while steadfastly ignoring the top consumer of petroleum on earth because criticizing the military would be inappropriate. But we will go on ignoring it if we don’t create good media. We have to do it all, and there are various ways in which we can become more united, more strategic, and potentially more effective.

The way that I think we don’t pay enough attention to lies in developing a focus on complete and total war abolition, elimination of all weapons and militaries, all bases, all aircraft carriers, missiles, armed drones, generals, colonels, and if necessary all senators from Arizona.

Why war abolition? I’ll give you 10 reasons.

It actually makes sense. The reasonable position of opposing some wars and cheering for others, but cheering for the troops even in the bad wars doesn’t attract a lot of energy because it doesn’t make any sense. Jeremy Corbyn just won votes by pointing out that wars generate terrorism, they are counter-productive on their own terms, endangering us rather than protecting us. They need to be replaced with diplomacy, aid, cooperation, the rule of law, the tools of nonviolence, the skills of de-escalation of conflict. Claiming that wars are sort of good but shouldn’t be overdone makes no sense at all — what is the point of them if not to win them? And if wars make murder OK, why is torture so unacceptable? And if bombs dropped by piloted planes are OK, what’s wrong with drones? And if Anthrax is barbaric, why are White Phosphrous and Napalm civilized? None of it makes any sense, which is one reason the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. You know how to properly love the troops, end all war and give them life options that don’t make them want to kill themselves.
Nuclear apocalypse is a growing danger on a par with climate chaos and will continue to grow unless war abolition succeeds.
The biggest destroyer of water, air, land, and atmosphere that we have is militarism. It’s war or planet. Time to choose.
War kills first and foremost by removing resources from where they are needed, including from famines and disease epidemics created by war. Any activism that seeks funding for any human or environmental needs has to look to ending war. It is where all the money is, more money every single year than could be taken once and only once from the billionaires.
War creates secrecy, surveillance, classification of public business, warrantless spying on activists, patriotic lying, and illegal actions by secret agencies.
War militarizes local police, making the public into an enemy.
War fuels, just as it is fueled by, racism, sexism, bigotry, hatred, and domestic violence. It teaches people to solve problems by shooting guns.
War divides humanity at a time when we must unite on major projects if we are to survive or prosper.
A movement to abolish all war, all weapons, and all atrocities that flow out of war can unite opponents of the crimes of one government or group with the opponents of the crimes of another. Without equating all crimes with each other, we can unite as opponents of war rather than of each other.
War is the primary thing our society does, it sucks down the majority of federal discretionary spending, its promotion permeates our culture. It is the very foundation of the belief that ends can justify evil means. Taking on the myths that sell us war as necessary or inevitable or glorious is an ideal way of opening our minds to rethinking what we’re doing on this little planet.

So let’s not work for an environmentally sensitive military into which women have the equal right to be drafted against their will. Let’s not oppose the weapons that are wasteful or don’t kill well enough. Let’s build a broad multi-issue movement in which one of the unifying factors is the cause of eliminating in its entirety the institution of organized mass murder.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: war on terror

As US Empire Fails, Trump Enters a Quagmire

The Warmongers Handpicked By Deep State

Nikki Haley: Warmonger Extraordinaire!

“Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.”*

— Ambassador Nikki Haley

Nikki Haley: Warmonger Extraordinaire!

“Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.”*

— Ambassador Nikki Haley

In their new book National Security Cinema, the pair argue that the Pentagon, CIA and National Security Agency have meddled in the production of at least 800 major Hollywood movies and 1,000 TV titles. That is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, as they concede:

“It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld.”

The need for Pentagon toys

Bad apples, not bad institutions

“This idea of using cinema to pin the blame for problems on isolated rogue agents or bad apples, thus avoiding any notion of systemic, institutional or criminal responsibility, is right out of the CIA/DOD’s playbook,” they observe.

Gal Gadot and the IDF

Hillary Clinton as Wonder Woman?

War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – and all of it is good for business, the film Wonder Woman concludes in truly Orwellian fashion.

A veneer of identity politics

Drooling from liberals

The paradoxes of power