Category Archives: war

The Real Story Behind the Republicans’ Iran Letter

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By Gareth Porter

Source: Middle East Eye

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican Senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Cotton and his colleagues were inviting inevitable comparison with the 1968 conspiracy by Richard Nixon, through rightwing campaign official Anna Chenault, to encourage the Vietnamese government of President Nguyen Van Thieu to boycott peace talks in Paris.

But while Nixon was plotting secretly to get Thieu to hold out for better terms under a Nixon administration, the 47 Republican Senators were making their effort to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks in full public scrutiny. And the interest served by the letter was not that of a possible future president but of the Israeli government.

The Cotton letter makes arguments that are patently false. The letter suggested that any agreement that lacked approval of Congress “is a mere executive agreement”, as though such agreements are somehow of only marginal importance in US diplomatic history. In fact, the agreements on withdrawal of US forces from both the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq were not treaties but executive agreements.

Equally fatuous is the letter’s assertion that “future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time”. Congress can nullify the agreement by passing legislation that contradicts it but can’t renegotiate it. And the claim that the next president could “revoke the agreement with the stroke of a pen”, ignores the fact that the Iran nuclear agreement, if signed, will become binding international law through a United Nations Security Council resolution, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has pointed out.

The letter has provoked the charge of “treason” against the signers and a demand for charges against them for negotiating with a foreign government in violation of the Logan Act. In a little over 24 hours, more than 200,000 people had signed a petition on the White House website calling such charges to be filed.

But although that route may seem satisfying at first thought, it is problematic for both legal and political reasons. The Logan Act was passed in 1799, and has never been used successfully to convict anyone, mainly because it was written more than a century before US courts created legal standards for the protection of first amendment speech rights. And it is unclear whether the Logan Act was even meant to apply to members of Congress anyway.

AIPAC marching orders

The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government. The premise of the Senate Republican reflected in the letter – that Iran must not be allowed to have any enrichment capacity whatever – did not appear spontaneously. The views that Cotton and the other Republicans have espoused on Iran were the product of assiduous lobbying by Israeli agents of influence using the inducement of promises of election funding and the threat of support for the members’ opponents in future elections.

Those members of Congress don’t arrive at their positions on issues related to Iran through discussion and debate among themselves. They are given their marching orders by AIPAC lobbyists, and time after time, they sign the letters and vote for legislation or resolution that they are given, as former AIPAC lobbyist MJ Rosenberg has recalled. This Israeli exercise of control over Congress on Iran and issues of concern to Israel resembles the Soviet direction of its satellite regimes and loyal Communist parties more than any democratic process, but with campaign contributions replacing the inducements that kept its bloc allies in line.

Cotton’s loyalty to Israel

Rosenberg has reasoned that AIPAC must have drafted the letter and handed it to Senator Cotton. “Nothing happens on Capitol Hill related to Israel,” he tweets, “unless and until Howard Kohr (AIPAC chief) wants it to happen. Nothing.” AIPAC apparently supported the letter, but there may be more to the story. Senator Cotton just happens to be a protégé of neoconservative political kingpin Bill Kristol, whose Emergency Committee on Israel gave him nearly a million dollars late in his 2014 Senate campaign and guaranteed that Cotton would have the support of the four biggest funders of major anti-Iran organisations.

Cotton proved his absolute fealty to Likudist policy on Iran by sponsoring an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013 that would have punished violators of the sanctions against Iran with prison sentences of up to 20 years and extended the punishment to “a spouse and any relative, to the third degree” of the sanctions violator. In presenting the amendment in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Cotton provided the useful clarification that it would have included “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids”.

That amendment, which he apparently believed would best reflect his adoption of the Israeli view of how to cut Iran down to size, was unsuccessful, but it established his reliability in the eyes of the Republican Likudist kingmakers. Now Kristol is grooming him to be the vice-presidential nominee in 2016.

So the real story behind the letter from Cotton and his Republican colleagues is how the enforcers of Likudist policy on Iran used an ambitious young Republican politician to try to provoke a breakdown in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The issue it raises is a far more serious issue than the Logan Act, but thus far major news organisations have steered clear of that story.

– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

 

The ISIS Truth We Hide From

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Isis fighters, pictured on a militant website verified by AP.

By Bob Hennelly

Source: WhoWhatWhy

Identifying Terrorist Enemy No. 1—the Islamic State militants—is easy now, after a spate of horrific videos of beheadings and burnings.

But what’s hard for Western governments and the mainstream media is figuring out the popularity of this terror group among young western Muslims. Why do these people choose to leave the relative comforts of home and take up arms with IS militants? It’s as if these young people are from another planet.

Even after President Obama’s three-day White House Summit on Violent Extremism, few establishment “experts” and commentators seem ready to consider one possible answer: that it is the extreme militarism of the U.S. and its allies that helped spawn IS, and al Qaeda before that.

On the PBS NewsHour segment covering the White house confab, panelists were asked “why people are drawn to the kind of extremism we are seeing today?” The assembled pundits identified “local grievances” like “access to education and job opportunities” and faulted recruiting for “extreme ideology through books and social media.”

Yet there was no mention of U.S. drone strikes, prisoner rendition, torture, and the thousands of dead and wounded Muslim civilians. All of those factors have been exploited by ISIS and other violent groups to make their case that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam.

After several decades of self-proclaimed “nation building” and “exporting democracy” in the Middle East and its environs, the results are all too clear. There are shattered nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed states in Yemen, Libya and Syria, and more than a dozen African nations that the U.S. State Department concedes are under constant threat of attack by well-armed and organized terrorists.

Is it possible that what the U.S. has actually been doing in these hot spots is “terrorism building” and “exporting chaos”? Is this the awful truth the United States cannot bring itself to admit?

Massaging History

It would seem so, since instead of changing course, the U.S. is in the process of doubling down on its mistakes. How else to explain that the new GOP presidential hopeful, Jeb Bush, nonchalantly told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that “mistakes were made” in Iraq. He then proceeded to lay out his own plan for becoming the new global sheriff in town.

Here’s a jaw-dropping statement from that speech:

There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction was not—turns out not to be accurate.

Watching his brother’s back, Jeb wove out of thin air a phony consensus that “everybody” signed on for the rationale for the Iraq war. That’s despite a vote in Congress in which 23 U.S. Senators and 133 House members opposed it.

You see, if “everybody” was wrong, then nobody was right. It should come as no surprise that Jeb’s team of policy wise men includes many Bush II veterans, among them the unrepentant Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

His Own Man, With an Old Plan

As much as Jeb Bush insists he is his own man, the audience in Chicago could hear echoes of his brother George’s cowboy-like approach. When Jeb was asked about how he would handle IS, he said he would develop a “global strategy” that would “tighten the noose” so he and the posse could “take them out.”

During Bush’s remarks, he took aim at the Obama administration for being too quick to disengage from the world and Iraq. He blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum that set the stage for the rise of IS and Iranian influence.

Yet an examination of President Obama’s new National Security Strategy, his proposed military budget and his request for his own War Powers re-authorization all indicate an administration that is prosecuting a global war on terror with unfettered latitude as to where and whom it targets.

Could it be that this “global war on terror,” whether it be the Bush 1.0 or Obama 2.0 version, may actually be what is proliferating the very thing it was aimed to eradicate?

One policy expert who dares to look deeper is Graham Fuller, a career CIA agent and analyst who was vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Fuller says it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set the stage for IS. By creating an endemically corrupt central government in Baghdad, notes Fuller, the American occupation provided a focal point to unite disparate opposition groups. As for the high-profile effort to train a new Iraqi army, that “security” force collapsed the moment its U.S. handlers left. (In an odd twist to an already bizarre security meta-narrative, Fuller’s former son-in-law is the uncle of accused Boston Marathon Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.)

***

In linking Washington’s Middle Eastern policies to the rise of terrorist groups in the region, MIT professor Noam Chomsky takes it even further back. He says the roots start with the U.S. support of Iraq in its brutal war with Iran in the 1980s, and include the draconian economic sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In Chomsky’s view, these sanctions punished Iraqi civilians while reinforcing Saddam’s dictatorial control.

In his 2006 book Devil’s Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, longtime Nation correspondent Robert Dreyfuss documents how the U.S., as early as the 1950s, backed the Muslim Brotherhood in exchange for help fighting communism.

Peace’s Deadliest Year

One way to justify failed policies is to pretend that they have worked as advertised. Nowhere was this disconnect between rhetoric and reality more on display than in President Obama’s updating this month of his National Security Strategy.

In presenting this new security game-plan, the president exhibited excessive confidence in declaring that the United States was heading “home” and “moving beyond” ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his mini-version of Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ statement, he asserted that “the threat of catastrophic attacks” against the U.S. had “diminished.”

But even as the president describes a winding-down of combat operations, anything but peace is taking hold in those places.

The sectarian violence has resulted in record numbers of civilian deaths and injuries. The UN reported last month that more than 12,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan, the UN Assistance Mission counted close to 3,200 civilians killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year since America’s longest war started.

Providing a sharp contrast to the president’s own assertion that peace is almost at hand, he has sent troops back into Iraq. And just a few days ago, his new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said the U.S. might end up sticking around in Afghanistan after all.

What the Administration and a cheerleading media refuse to acknowledge is that the two U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at ending terrorist threats in the region, have done the exact opposite. They not only caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties but hardened the resolve of yet another generation to seek revenge against their perceived Western oppressors.

Bottom Line

While details of how the president plans to use his refreshed war powers are still vague, the price tag is not.

In the name of defending the country and fighting terrorism, the president’s proposed 2016 budget calls for adding $38 billion in regular defense spending and another $58 billion for so-called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” These expanded outlays would come on top of the more than half a trillion dollars the U.S. is already spending on the military.

Even under the sequester restrictions, says one specialist, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

“If you can’t protect the nation with $500 billion dollars,” then something is amiss, according to Veronique deRugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She notes that even under the sequester restrictions, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

The failures are especially pronounced, says deRugy, when one takes into account that in the years since 9/11, Washington’s extra expenditures, labeled “emergency” war funding, have topped Pentagon budgets by tens of billions annually.

And so under presidents from both parties, who were supposedly ‘conservative’  and ‘liberal’,  the “emergency” continues to spread.

US War on ISIS a Trojan Horse

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In America’s coming war, don’t be surprised if everything in Syria is destroyed except ISIS.

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: Land Destroyer Report

In August of 2013, even as the words came out of US President Barack Obama’s mouth regarding an “impending” US military strike against the Syrian state, the impotence of American foreign policy loomed over him and those who wrote his speech for him like an insurmountable wall.  So absurd was America’s attempt to once again use the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify yet another military intervention, that many believed America’s proxy war in Syria had finally reached its end.

The counterstroke by Russia included Syria’s immediate and unconditional surrendering of its chemical weapons arsenal, and with that, so evaporated America’s casus belli.

Few would believe if one told them then, that in 2015, that same discredited US would be routinely bombing Syrian territory and poised to justify the raising of an entire army of terrorists to wage war within Syria’s borders, yet that is precisely what is happening. President Obama has announced plans to formally increase military force in Iraq and Syria “against ISIS,” but of course includes building up huge armies of “rebels” who by all other accounts are as bad as ISIS itself (not to mention prone to joining ISIS’ ranks by the thousands).

All it took for this miraculous turn in fortune was the creation of “ISIS,” and serial provocations committed by these Hollywood-style villains seemingly engineered to reinvigorate America’s justification to militarily intervene more directly in a war it itself started in Syria beginning in 2011.

ISIS could not be a more effective part of America’s plans to overthrow the Syrian government and destroy the Syrian state if it had an office at the Pentagon.

Having failed to achieve any of its objectives in Syria, it inexplicably “invaded” Iraq, affording the US military a means of “easing into” the conflict by first confronting ISIS in Iraq, then following them back across the border into Syria. When this scheme began to lose its impact on public perception, ISIS first started executing Western hostages including several Americans. When the US needed the French on board, ISIS executed a Frenchman. When the US needed greater support in Asia, two Japanese were beheaded. And just ahead of President Obama’s recent attempt to formally authorize the use of military force against “ISIS,” a Jordanian pilot was apparently burned to death in a cage in an unprecedented act of barbarity that shocked even the most apathetic.

The theatrics of ISIS parallel those seen in a Hollywood production. This doesn’t mean ISIS didn’t really burn to death a Jordanian pilot or behead scores of hostages. But it does mean that a tremendous amount of resources and planning were put into each murder, except apparently, the effect it would have of rallying the world behind the US and its otherwise hopelessly stalled efforts to overturn the government of Syria.

Could ISIS have built a set specifically to capture dramatic shots like a flame trail passing the camera on its way to the doomed Jordanian pilot, planned crane shots, provided matching uniforms for all the extras on their diabolical movie set, but failed to consider the target audience and how they would react to their production? Could they have, just by coincidence, given exactly what the United States needed to continue its war on Syria in 2015 when it otherwise had effectively failed in 2013?

The answer is obviously no. ISIS’s theatrics were designed specifically to accomplish this. ISIS itself is a fictional creation. In reality the legions of terrorists fighting across the Arab World under the flag of “ISIS” are the same Al Qaeda militants the US, Saudi Arabia and others in an utterly unholy axis have been backing, arming and exploiting in a variety of ways for decades.

Just as the “Islamic State” in Iraq was exposed as a fictional cover for what was also essentially Al Qaeda (as reported by the NYT in their article, “Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says“), ISIS too is just the latest and greatest re-visioning yet.

The fighters are real. Their atrocities are real. The notion that they’ve sprung out of the dunes of Syria and Iraq, picked their weapons from local date trees and have managed to wage war regionally against several collective armies is entirely fantasy. Required to maintain ISIS’ ranks would be billions in constant support. These are billions ISIS simply cannot account for from hostage ransoms and black market oil alone. The only source that could prop ISIS up for as long as it has allegedly existed and to the extent it allegedly exists, is a state or collection of states intentionally sponsoring the terrorist enterprise.

Those states are of course the chief benefactors of ISIS’ atrocities, and we can clearly see those benefactors are the US and its partners both in Europe and in the Middle East. The US would claim that the threat of ISIS necessitates them to intervene militarily in Syria (when lies about WMDs were flatly rejected by the American and international public). Of course, before the serial headline atrocities ISIS committed, the US attempted to sell this same lie but without affect. Now that sufficient blood has been split and the public sufficiently riled, the US is once again trying to move forward its agenda.

Don’t be surprised, if the US manages to succeed, that everything in Syria is left destroyed except for ISIS. A Hollywood villain this popular and effective is surely destined for a sequel in neighboring Iran or southern Russia, coincidentally where the US would like to create strife and carnage the most.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

ISIS 101: What’s really terrifying about this threat

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By John Chuckman

Source: RINF

ISIS certainly is not what a great many people think that it is, if you judge what they think by what our corporate press proclaims incessantly.

Judging by what ISIS actually does and whom its acts benefit, its clandestine associates, and the testimony of some witnesses, ISIS is a complex intelligence operation. Its complexity reflects at least in part the fact that it serves the interests of several countries and that it has more than one objective. Its complexity reflects also the large effort to reinforce a false image with disinformation and staged events such as a video of a beheading which could not have been a beheading unless they’ve discovered a bloodless method until now unknown to science.

The subject of ISIS is not without brief glimmers of humor. The image of bands of men, swathed in Arabic robes and bumping their way around the desert in Japanese pick-up trucks with Kalashnikovs raised in the air for every picture has elements of Monty Python. The idea of modern, trained and well-armed military units turning and running from them resembles a war scene in a Laurel and Hardy comedy such as the one with Hardy stuck upside down in a WWI tank turret kicking his legs the whole time Laurel drives towards the German positions managing accidentally to round-up a whole trench-full of prisoners with some wire fencing that becomes snagged on the tank.

Despite the tiresome stupidities we see and hear about it, ISIS unquestionably does kill people and destroy things, that being its purpose, and there is no humor in that.

ISIS appears to have served several tasks so far. First, it frightened Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, out of office in Iraq, a man America and Israel grew very much to dislike owing simply to his good relations with Iran, one of the unintended consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq being expanded Iranian influence in the region. No doubt al-Maliki was terrified not so much by ISIS approaching in their pick-up trucks as he was by his own military’s tendency, as if on cue, to turn and run from ISIS, often leaving weapons behind. The message was clear: you won’t be protected.

Second, America’s highly selective “air war” against ISIS somehow manages to attack infrastructure targets inside Syria with the feeble excuse that they are facilities helping ISIS. We’ve seen what American bombing can do when it’s undertaken seriously, and somehow I have a hard time imaging the men in Japanese pick-ups lasting long when faced with what hit the Taleban in Afghanistan or Gadhafi’s forces in Libya. The air strikes are partly a show for the world – after all, how can America be seen not to be fighting such extremely well-advertised, super-violent terrorists, guys putting out videos regularly from a studio trailer they must haul around with one of their pick-up trucks?  The air strikes’ main purpose appears to be a way of hurting Assad and assisting those fighting Syria’s army without coming into conflict with Russia, as they would with a large, direct campaign. They likely also punish elements of ISIS which have exceeded their brief and serve as a reminder to the rest of what could happen to them if they stray too far from their subsidized purpose once the war comes to an end.

Three, in some of the ground fighting in Iraq where we’ve read of Iraqi units fighting ISIS, the units are often Kurdish, and sometimes the press uses expressions like “Iraqi and Kurdish troops.” But the Kurdish region is still part of Iraq legally, although it has been given a good deal of autonomy by the central government. The Kurdish region of Iraq is the country’s prime oil-producing area, and in the estimation of many observers, an area both the United States and Israel would very much like to see severed from Iraq in the way Kosovo was severed from Serbia after America’s devastating air war there. This would not only permanently assure Iraq’s weakness, it would create a rather grateful and more willing oil supplier.

Where does ISIS get its technical equipment and the know-how to produce videos and run Internet sites? These are not qualities commonly found among fanatical fundamentalists anywhere; indeed most true radical fundamentalists tend to eschew technology. A supply of advice, technical assistance, and equipment comes from somewhere. Where does ISIS get the money for food, gasoline, clothes, ammunition, and Japanese pick-up trucks? And I wonder, did one of those wild-looking jihadi types just show up one day at an Iraqi car dealership and order a fleet of Japanese pick-ups? Were they delivered out on the desert or did a gang of jihadists march in, waving their Kalashnikovs, to drive them away?

The effort to destroy the Syrian government, whether by means of ISIS or anyone else, is warmly and generously supported by Saudi Arabia and its buddy Qatar – another oil-rich, absolute monarchy where political parties are banned – both these counties’ primary interest being the defence of their immensely privileged situations against creeping threats of all progressive developments such as equal human rights or democracy or indeed against revolt led by external forces. The payments we now know the Saudi royal family long made to Osama bin Laden before 9/11 were simply bribes to keep him and his anti-establishment work out of the country. They really didn’t care a lot about what the money bought elsewhere, but since 9/11 and its many Saudi connections – 15 of the perpetrators plus the past financing plus the many members of the royal family and bin Laden family secretly flown out by American officials at the time – the Saudi authorities were genuinely fearful of how America might respond and have become far more responsive to what America wants in the Middle East and now apply their money to such projects. What America wants in the Middle East is, invariably, what Israel wants, so there is now extensive, secret cooperation where once there was complete official hostility.

We have reports from plane-spotters in the region of daily flights of mysterious planes from Israel to Qatar. We have several eye-witness reports and photographs of supply bundles dropped from unknown planes into ISIS territory. Maybe ISIS has its own air force now? We know Turkey has served both as an entry point for countless terrorists into Syria and as a place of retreat and refuge when fighting with the Syrian army becomes too hot for them, the volumes of such activity having been too great to keep secret. We have reports of Turkish supply flights. A Jordanian official recently told a reporter that ISIS members were trained in 2012 by American instructors working at a secret base in Jordan.

If ISIS is what our corporate news pretends that it is – a fanatical Muslim extremist group that sprang suddenly from the desert sands much like Jack’s bean stalk – one blindingly obvious question is, why does it not attack Israel or Israeli interest? Isn’t that what one would expect from such a cast of characters? But it has not done so, undoubtedly because Israel is an important covert benefactor and supplier.

We might equally ask why ISIS has not attacked Saudi Arabia or its interests, for although the Saudi royal family officially professes a strict and conservative form of Islam, Wahhabism, in fact many of them are very worldly people who spend a good deal of time and money at the world’s great pleasure palaces. Perhaps even more damning for a genuine fanatical fundamentalist, the Saudis now often secretly cooperate and make plans with Israel where mutual interests exist.

No, there is something highly suspicious about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who avoid such interests while managing to brutally kill poor Syrian soldiers just doing their jobs along with the odd foreign journalist or aid worker who may just have seen something they shouldn’t have seen. Of course, we have Edward Snowden himself having described ISIS as an operation intended to protect Israel. Despite the fact that some news sources have said the interview in which this was revealed never took place, my instincts tell me it likely did. Snowden has never refuted it, and the news sources saying it did not are highly suspect on such a subject.

The way ISIS serves Israeli and American interests is by providing a focus point for extremists, attracting them from various parts of the world so that they can be recorded and kept track of. Also the tracks back to the various countries from which they come provide security services with leads to places where there might be some festering problems. In the meantime, ISIS serves the interest of helping to bring down President Assad, a goal dear to the hearts of Israelis. Please remember that black operations, even the ones about which we know, show little consideration for lives or property. Just think of Israel’s attack on an American spy ship in the Mediterranean during the Six Day War, its pilots knowingly shooting up and bombing for two hours the well-marked ship of its ally and benefactor, no explanation worth hearing ever having been offered.

Just read conservative mainline sources (pretty much a redundant pair of adjectives) about the harm Snowden has done: claims of everything from his revelations about American intelligence having served to help ISIS avoid detection (!) to his revelations having set up the United States for another 9/11! You might think intelligent people would be ashamed of making such asinine public statements, but, no, there are almost no limits to trying to discredit those revealing murderous, dark operations.

We’ve had many reports of officials in various countries, including Canada as I write, concerned about the odd individual or small group running off to join ISIS. Now why should that be a concern? A few flaky people going abroad just removes them from your country, something I should have thought was a complete gain from a security point of view. Even if they were ever to return in future, you would know exactly who they are. Where is the basis for serious concern? But the psychological advantages of noise and hype to scare people about obscure dangers and “lone wolves” and “home-grown terrorists” outweigh completely good sense and intelligence.

Finally, there are numerous reports that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a nom de guerre, not his real name), the leader of ISIS, is a Western intelligence asset. What little we can learn about him makes that entirely plausible. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has said that the man is a Mossad agent, a claim supported supposedly by documents revealed by Edward Snowden. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is by all accounts a secretive man who speaks directly with few people, and even his birth place, given as Samarra, Iraq, is not sure. Records of his past, as those from his period of American captivity (always a great opportunity to “turn” someone to serving two interests), are not available. He was once reported killed but is still alive. He is said to have received intensive training from Mossad and the CIA, and some sources give his real name as Simon Elliot (or, Elliot Shimon), but few details can ever be certain in such dark operations.

The truly terrifying aspect of ISIS and other forces fighting with it in Syria is that the United States and Israel have approved and supported such wanton destruction in so beautiful and formerly-peaceful a place as Syria. Millions of lives destroyed and countless historic places damaged as though they were all nothing more than a few pieces moved on a geopolitical chessboard. I think it fair to describe that as the work of psychopaths.

People as Livestock: The Cult of Fundamentalist Materialism and the Cheapening Life

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Farm to Fork

“I first encountered the term “Fundamentalist-Materialism” in the work of Robert Anton Wilson; it appears in several of his non-fiction works, including “The Cosmic Triggger” series. As far as I know R.A.W. was the originator of this philosophical designation.”

Is there any inherent value to an individual human life? 

By Dan Mage

Source: OpEdNews.com

Authoritarians of the left, libertarians of the right, objectivists, conservatives and even liberals and progressives fixated on “jobs” and “rehabilitation” of the socioeconomically dysfunctional give the answer “no; ” sometimes directly (as in the case of the Stalinist and the American conservative) and other times through actions, policies, and preferences (as in the case of elements of the “occupation” movement distancing themselves from “homeless bums,” “drug users,” and “ex-cons”).

Most of all, those with the power to set wages, prices, working conditions and societal expectation for those who have nothing left but their time and “docile bodies”*(Foucault) to sell, control and trade in human lives as commodities. While most of the supposedly civilized world frowns on chattel slavery (although a good bit of it goes on, especially in the sex trade, where prosecution of traffickers is the exception rather than the rule), the legal technicality of ownership is superfluous to the trade in human lives, time, labor, and in Reichian terms orgones.

What do Stalinism, objectivism, authoritarian capitalism, and global corporatism all have in common ? They are in my opinion fundamentalist-materialist cults that value the inanimate over the living, the concrete over the abstract and have effectively reduced the vast majority of the human race to livestock, or wild beasts to be hunted down, captured, contained, broken, or in the alternative, simply slaughtered and destroyed.

I have been told that it has always been thus, and perhaps in terms of humanity’s historical failings this is true. There is however no historical precedent for the establishment of a global value system through electronic multi-sensory media. Even the best efforts of the Catholic Church, Protestant missionaries and Islamic holy-warriors do not equal the technology and level of sophistication in the application of “industrial psychology.”

The message remains the same though, as it has been throughout history: “Obey or suffer.” Individual disobedience or even mere failure to “produce” in spite of the individual’s best efforts will result in stigmatization, marginalization, a degrading dependency on the state and, as state support for the economically disengaged is cut back and removed, starvation, homelessness and imprisonment; even the fact of homelessness is defined as a criminal offense by more local jurisdictions with each passing year.

The fact is that life is cheap; the idealistic visions of humanitarians are swept aside by those advocates of “austerity” and “tough choices,” whose calculations in service of usury on a global scale will determine the level of human suffering in each nation up to and including death by starvation, disease, and the inevitable outcome of manufactured scarcity, war.

The blurry and dim imagery of the concretes of suffering fades from vision in the glare of the deadly abstractions; political ideologies, religions, money that does not exist anywhere other than in the record keeping of the money lenders remains in clear focus. The conclusion returns stark, glaring and obvious: human life is a commodity, the value of which is consistently decreasing. The devaluation of an individual human life to a unit of production and consumption, which therefore can be discarded if determined to have no economic value, is all that is required for the machinery of mass exterminations and genocide to be set in motion.

Arguing about wages, prices, social systems and ways of arranging economies, even in cases where “progress” is made, will be useless. The dominance of the fundamentalist-materialist cults, as well as the authoritarian religions that create legitimacy for them in the eyes of the masses (and even Stalin, the ultimate fundamentalist-materialist, allowed for the return of religion as an adjunct of the state when he realized its value) will continue to crush and compress human life, until the perverted and inverted values themselves are overthrown, shattered, burned and buried.

When will the biocentric (life centered) ethos replace the thanatocentric (death centered) ethos as the dominant culture’s value system? I cannot answer even the “if” of this question, let alone the question itself. The fact that the power to collect interest on nonexistent money and the lifestyles that such usury on a global scale supports is presented, and apparently accepted, as an immutable law of nature rather than as an imposition of culture’s order on the true nature of humanity seems by way of this very acceptance to be a “natural law.” Images of vultures waiting for starving children to crawl to their deaths and mothers weeping over infants at the bottoms of pits do not move the master manipulators of numbers. If anything, only the fact that the die-offs are not more extensive is cause for lamentation.

Do we care anymore? I’m not speaking of our little “jobs” and “futures,” and relative degree of comfort/discomfort in oppression that seems to be everyone’s primary concern. I’m demanding of myself, of you and above all of those who have declared themselves to be “leaders;” what is it that matters to you? Do you feel anything at all? Can we set aside all calculations save for those needed to ease human suffering? The primary demand of all protests, occupations, strikes, boycotts and further actions of increasing effect and extremity will be “Life First!”

The life of one human being hanging on the edge of death, in suffering, is too high a price to pay, for all the glorious achievements of the fundamentalist-materialist cults, their leaders and their adherents. The cult of power, authority, war, and property as a weapon of coercion has, for all its trillions of dollars and stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, a single and fatal vulnerability; to function it depends on obedience. For obedience to be guaranteed, the “obey or suffer” directive must be enforceable. This directive is only enforceable if the doctrine of fundamentalist-materialism enjoys continued acceptance as a “fact of life,” rather than the monstrous fraud that it is.

*The term “docile bodies” is a chapter title in Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” 1977, Random House, NY, NY.

 

Domestic Fear Is the Price of Empire

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By Sheldon Richmond

Source: The Future of Freedom Foundation

If you find no other argument against American intervention abroad persuasive, how about this one? When the U.S. government invades and occupies other countries, or when it underwrites other governments’ invasions or oppression, the people in the victimized societies become angry enough to want and even to exact revenge — against Americans.

Is the American empire worth that price?

We should ask ourselves this question in the wake of the weekend news that al-Shabaab, the militant Islamist organization that rules parts of Somalia ISIS-style, appeared to encourage attacks at American (and Canadian) shopping malls.

Maybe the Shabaab video was just a prank to scare us. Maybe it was an attempt to plant violent thoughts in the minds of Somalis living in the United States. No one believes that the organization itself is capable of attacking Americans where they live, but that doesn’t mean Shabaab-inspired violence is impossible.

At any rate, it’s unsettling to be advised to watch out for terrorism when we shop at the mall.

Here’s the thing: We don’t have to live this way. The empire is just not worth it. We must understand that people in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia who subscribe to fringe militant interpretations of Islam would not be wishing us harm except for the violence the U.S. government has inflicted or helped to inflict on Muslim societies for many decades. In fact, those militant interpretations wouldn’t be nearly so attractive without the American empire and its ally Israel.

Why won’t the media describe this context? It’s because their job, despite what they say, is to be the government’s megaphone, not its adversary.

Let’s look at Somalia, where the latest threat originated.

U.S. intervention goes back to 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent the military into a civil war there. Among the military’s activities was the suppression of the Somalis’ use of the intoxicant khat, which has been part of their culture for millennia.

That’s right. The U.S. government imposed a war on the Somali drug of choice.

President Bill Clinton withdrew the forces after two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, but that was not the end of U.S. intervention. After the September 11 attacks, Somali warlords seeking American largess played on the George W. Bush administration’s concerns about al-Qaeda. The CIA obliged the warlords with suitcases of cash. As a result, everyday life became intolerably violent. So when the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) — a relatively moderate coalition of Sharia courts in the capital, Mogadishu —drove out the warlords and produced a measure of peace and stability, the Somali people were relieved.

That should have been deemed satisfactory, except that the warlords and their American backers were unhappy with the new situation, as Jeremy Scahill reported in 2011. “Most of the entities that made up the Islamic Courts Union did not have anything resembling a global jihadist agenda,” Scahill wrote. “Nor did they take their orders from Al Qaeda.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. government was determined to oust the ICU. To achieve that goal the Bush administration in 2006 backed a military invasion by Ethiopia, Somalia’s long-time Christian adversary, which overthrew the ICU.

“The Ethiopian invasion was marked by indiscriminate brutality against Somali civilians,” Scahill wrote.

Ethiopian and Somali government soldiers secured Mogadishu’s neighborhoods by force, raiding houses in search of ICU combatants, looting civilian property and beating or shooting anyone suspected of collaboration with antigovernment forces.… If Somalia was already a playground for Islamic militants, the Ethiopian invasion blew open the gates of Mogadishu for Al Qaeda. Within some US counterterrorism circles, the rise of the Shabab in Somalia was predictable and preventable.

To make things worse, the U.S. government has waged a drone war, with civilian casualties, and special operations against the Somalis. According to Scahill, the CIA also operates a secret prison and other facilities there.

So the U.S.-sponsored intervention sowed the ground for the most militant group in Somalia, al-Shabaab. Had the ICU been left to govern, we might never have heard of these young Islamists, whom the Obama administration now uses to scare American shoppers.

We can live without the fear of terrorism — but only if the U.S. government stops antagonizing foreign populations that have never threatened us.

Sheldon Richman is vice president of The Future of Freedom Foundation and editor of FFF’s monthly journal, Future of Freedom. For 15 years he was editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York. He is the author of FFF’s award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax; and Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Calling for the abolition, not the reform, of public schooling. Separating School & State has become a landmark book in both libertarian and educational circles. In his column in the Financial Times, Michael Prowse wrote: “I recommend a subversive tract, Separating School & State by Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank… . I also think that Mr. Richman is right to fear that state education undermines personal responsibility…” Sheldon’s articles on economic policy, education, civil liberties, American history, foreign policy, and the Middle East have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Washington Times, The American Conservative, Insight, Cato Policy Report, Journal of Economic Development, The Freeman, The World & I, Reason, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Liberty magazine, and other publications. He is a contributor to the The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. A former newspaper reporter and senior editor at the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies, Sheldon is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia. He blogs at Free Association. Send him e-mail.

Chicago’s Abu Ghraib

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By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

In April 2004, the world was shocked and horrified by the release of photographs of sadistic torture carried out by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees at the prison, most of them locked up for opposing the US military occupation, were beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and killed.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site explained that the crimes revealed in the photos and the psychology underlying them could be understood only in relation to the brutality of social relations in the United States, together with the dirty colonial aims of the war itself.

The WSWS further warned that “such a military, accompanied by a growing army of professional ‘civilian’ mercenaries, represents a danger not only to oppressed peoples in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, but to the democratic rights of the population in the US.”

A decade later, this assessment has been fully borne out. On Tuesday, the Guardian newspaper revealed the existence of what it describes as a “black site” on the West Side of Chicago, where police detain, beat and torture prisoners, while keeping their whereabouts secret from their families and attorneys.

The newspaper writes: “The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.”

Among those detained at the facility was Brian Jacob Church, one of the “NATO 3” who were entrapped by Chicago police in 2012 in connection with protests against the US-led military alliance, which was meeting in Chicago.

Church was taken to the secret facility and handcuffed to a bench for 17 hours. Along with two other protestors, he was set up by police on terrorism charges and subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

Vic Suter, another participant in the protests, said that she was taken to the facility and interrogated while shackled to a bench for eighteen hours before she was allowed to see a lawyer.

The Guardian writes that detainees taken to the facility report having been beaten and otherwise tortured by police. In 2013, one detainee was found unconscious in an interview room at the facility. He later died.

On Thursday, the Intercept corroborated the Guardian’s account, interviewing another torture victim at the facility who was handcuffed across a bench and hit in the face and groin until he agreed to provide false testimony to police.

The revelations follow the report last week by the Guardian that Richard Zuley, one of the lead torturers at the Guantanamo detention center, used similar techniques to secure false confessions from murder suspects when he was a detective with the Chicago Police Department.

Chicago has a long history of police violence. It is also the political home of Barack Obama and has been run since 2011 by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff.

The Obama administration, far from repudiating the horrific and criminal actions of its predecessor, has deployed the apparatus of police violence ever more directly against the American people. A series of events has marked the increasingly open application within the borders of the United States of the murderous methods of the “war on terror” tested out and perfected in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.

· In September 2010, the Obama administration ordered raids on the homes of leaders of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Minneapolis and Chicago on charges of “providing material support to terrorism.”

· In May 2012, Chicago police arrested the “NATO 3,” charging them with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

· In March 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the president had the right to kill American citizens without a trial or any legal due process, including within the borders of the United States.

· Just one month later, in April 2013, the city of Boston was placed under de facto martial law following the Boston Marathon bombings, with residents told to “shelter in place” while armored vehicles and helicopters patrolled the streets and police carried out warrantless house-to-house searches.

· In June 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.” The ACLU reported that the Defense Department had transferred $4.3 billion in military hardware, including armored vehicles, helicopters, and belt-fed machine guns, to local police departments.

· In August 2014, the authorities responded to protests against the police murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown with a military/police crackdown. Hundreds of peaceful protesters were arrested, shot with rubber bullets or exposed to tear gas, and over a dozen members of the press were detained.

The Obama administration is presently seeking a new Authorization for Use of Military Force, nominally to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but with no geographical boundaries defined. On Wednesday, three Brooklyn residents were arrested in connection with this new war on ISIS, clearly raising the potential for this second “war on terror” to become an occasion for police-military operations within the US “homeland.”

These developments express the growing convergence of militarism abroad with the attack on democratic rights within the US. What ties these two processes together are the class interests of the financial aristocracy and the criminal methods it employs in the defense of its wealth and power.

In pursuit of these aims, the ruling class seeks to mobilize the most backward and reactionary sections of the population, including sadistic prison guards and fascist-minded police detectives. But the ultimate responsibility for these crimes rests with forces at the highest levels of the state.

It is worth recalling that late last year the Senate released a report implicating the Bush administration in a brutal torture regime carried out at Guantanamo and CIA “black site” torture centers throughout the world. Far from anyone being held accountable for these crimes, those who ordered and carried them out have defended their actions, while the Obama administration has sought to block any prosecution of those responsible.

The actions of the ruling class express the character of American capitalism, which is based on parasitism, fraud, criminality and an economic order in deep decline. The American ruling class has no response to the crisis of its system and the inevitable growth of social opposition other than violence and repression.

Related Article:

Total Mainstream Media Blackout of Chicago Secret ‘Black Site’ at Homan Square (By Nick Bernabe, Antimedia.org)

The Difference Between the Death Star and the Pentagon

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By Carey Wedler

Source: The Anti-Media

The Imperial Death Star from Star Wars and the Pentagon have much in common. It is not difficult to observe the similarities between the two behemoth structures and what they represent-especially in recent years.

For one, both used to be part of representative republics and both represent the military wings of the empires in power. In 2007, Alternet reported that the U.S. had 737 bases, 38 of which were “major,” and that

“…perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty.”

The desire of the military’s operatives to exert control over regions all over the world parallels the desire of the Emperor and Vader to rule the galaxy.

Another similarity is the desire of both the Death Star’s leaders and those at the Pentagon to weed out dissent. One of the main objectives of the dark side’s adherents is to find the rebels and eliminate them.

Though the Pentagon hasn’t quite started assassinating political dissidents (or entire planets, though Hiroshima and Nagasaki are an earthly comparison to Alderaan), it has made its views crystal clear: protesters are a form of terrorist and anyone deemed associated with terrorism may be denied his or her rights.

Still another commonality between the two ministries of war and destruction is the level of decadence afforded to the galactic and American agencies. The Death Star was a moon-sized, laser-clad behemoth for the Dark Side. The Pentagon employs 23,000 people in a floor space three times the size of the Empire state building and spawns doomsday technology. In both societies, the resources devoted to violence far outweigh those dedicated to promoting peace or the well-being of humanity (or alienhood).

It is easy to compare the Death Star and the Pentagon as manifestations of evil that seek power and rule by force. But there exists at least one stark difference:

In the Washington Post this week, it was revealed that the Pentagon is looking for someone to fill its “Yoda” position.

The job ad for “Director of the Office of Net Assessment” currently reads:

“The Director’s primary function is to develop assessments that compare the standings, trends and future prospects of U.S. military capability and military potential with that of other countries.”

The job was founded and held by longtime analyst Andrew W. Marshall, who recently retired. Because of his wisdom and knowledge throughout the years, he came to be known as “Yoda.”

And therein lies the difference between the rulers of the Death Star and the rulers of the Pentagon: at least Darth Vader, the emperor and their cohorts knew they were evil.

Vader repeatedly spoke of the powers of the Dark Side, of the great benefit of crossing over into evil. In the Empire Strikes Back, he tempted Luke to join the dark side to rule the galaxy with him:

“Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny, join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.”

He iterated the slavery of being on the dark side in Return of the Jedi:

“You don’t know the power of the dark side. I must obey my master.”

Considering the empire practices what is called the “dark side” of the force, its members knew exactly what they signed up for.

But to a clearly significant portion of employees at the Pentagon, the irony is lost. It has gone over their heads that working for the world’s biggest, arguably most vicious military, is not working on the side of morality, peace, or freedom.

By calling a man who works for the Pentagon “Yoda”-a virtuous practitioner of the force- it is clear that many who work for the Pentagon believe they are working for a “force” of good. It’s scary. It’s scarier that the Pentagon likely has employees who know of its evil and yet continue to work there.

May all Pentagon employees recognize its evil, quit their jobs at the American Death Star, and work to promote the true meaning of the “force” (the same goes for soldiers of governments around the world). As the real Yoda said:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

This is exactly how violent governments keep their people and foot soldiers under control and realizing this is the first step to achieving freedom and peace.