Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

Neocons and Other Malignancies in the American Body Politic

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They will never give up until we’re all dead

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

It is interesting to observe how, over the past twenty-five years, the United States has become not only a participant in wars in various places on the planet but has also evolved into being the prime initiator of most of the armed conflict. Going back to the Balkans in the nineteen-nineties and moving forward in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia there is almost always an American leading role where there is bombing and killing. And where there is no actual war, there are threats and sanctions intended to make other nations come to heel, be they in Latin America like Venezuela, or Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea in Asia. And then there is the completely senseless act of turning major competitors like Russia and China, as we are now seeing, into enemies, with a proxy war raging in Ukraine, threats over Taiwan, and the world moving one step closer to a nuclear disaster.

It seems to me that the transition from an America bumbling its way into war and the current situation where wars are pursued as a matter of course coincides with a certain political development in the United States, which is the rise of neoconservatives as the foreign and national security policy makers in both major parties. This has developed together with the evolution of the view that the United States can do no wrong by definition, indeed, that it has a unique and God-given right to establish and police the globe through something that it invented, exploits and has dubbed the “rules based international order.”

Who would have thought that a bunch of Jewish student-activists, mostly leftists, originally conspiring in a corner of the cafeteria in the City College of New York would create a cult type following that now aspires to rule the world? The neocons became politically most active in the 1960s and eventually some of them attached themselves to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, declaring their evolution had come about because they were “liberals mugged by reality.” The neoconservative label was first used to describe their political philosophy in 1973. Since that time, they have diversified and succeeded in selling their view to a bipartisan audience that the US should embrace an aggressive interventionist foreign policy and must be the world hegemon. To be sure their desire for overwhelming military power has been strongly shaped by their tribal cohesion which has fed a compulsion to have Washington serve as the eternal protector of Israel, but the hegemonistic approach has inevitably led to expanding conflict all over the world and a willingness to challenge, confront and defeat other existing great powers. Hence the support for a needless and pointless war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” and a growing conflict with China over Taiwan to do the same in Asia. To make sure that the Republicans do not waver on that mission, leading neocon Bill Kristol has recently raised $2 million to do some heavy lobbying to make sure that they stay on track to confront the Kremlin in Europe.

One of the leading neocon families is the Kagans, who have successfully penetrated and come to dominate the establishment foreign policy centers in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Victoria Nuland nee Nudelman, the wife of Robert Kagan, is entrenched at the State Department where she is now the Deputy Secretary, the number two position. Up until recently, she was one of the top three officials at State, all of whom were and are Jewish Zionists. Indeed, under Joe Biden Zionist Jews dominate the national security structure, to include the top level of the State Department, the head of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Intelligence, the President’s Chief of Staff, and the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nuland’s hawkish appeal is apparently bipartisan as she has served in senior positions under Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. As adviser to Cheney, she was a leading advocate of war with Iraq, working with other Jewish neocons Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at Defense and also Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office. As there was no actual threat to the US from Saddam Hussein she and her colleagues invented one, the WMD that they sold to the media and to idiots like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nuland is also considered to be close to Hillary Clinton and the recently deceased ghastly former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. All of her government assignments have included either invading or severely sanctioning some country considered by her and her colleagues to be unfriendly. She particularly hates the Russians and anyone who is hostile to Israel.

Apparently, Nuland’s record of being seriously wrong in the policies she promoted has only served to improve her resume in Washington’s hawkish foreign policy establishment and when Biden came into the presidency she found herself appointed to the number three position at the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her return to power with the Democrats might also be due in part to the activism of her husband Robert, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, who was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Robert famously has never seen a war he disapproved of and, while urging Europe to do more defense spending, commented that “When it comes to use of military force “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.” Robert’s brother Frederick, a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and Frederick’s wife Kimberly, who heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War, are also regarded as neocon royalty.

Nuland is particularly well known for her being the driving force behind the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 that replaced the fairly-elected but friendly-to-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych with a selected candidate more accommodating to the US and Western Europe. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has been unstable ever since and the current war, also initiated by interference from the US and UK, has brought about the deaths and wounding of an estimated half million Ukrainians and Russians.

Nuland was recently in Africa, stirring up developments in Niger, which has experienced a recent military coup that removed a president who was corrupt but also a friend of the US and France, both of which have troops stationed in the country. As I write this, a number of African nations (ECOWAS) friendly to US and French interests in the region are gathering together their own military force to reverse the coup, but there is little enthusiasm for the project. We will see how that turns out, but predictably Nuland is advertising a possible intervention as a “restoration of democracy.”

And there is more over the horizon with neocons like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Nuland in charge of US foreign policy and supported by most of congress and a Jewish dominated media and entertainment industry. Joe Biden is too weak and too much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby to pursue any policies that would be beneficial to the American people in general, so the course will be set by the current crop of zealots, just as Donald Trump was guided by his Christian Zionist advisers.

If you want to understand just how what remains of our republic is in a bus being driven over the cliff by a group that has no regard for most of the citizens of the country that they reside in, one only has to read some of what passes for neocon analysis of what must be done to make America “safe.” Not surprisingly, it also involves Israel and a war on behalf of the Jewish state.

One astonishingly audacious article that appeared on August 13th in The Hill entitled “If Israel strikes Iran over its nuclear program, the US must have its back,” gives Israel the option of starting a war for any or no reason with the United States compelled to join in in support. It was written Michael Makovsky, a well-known Jewish neocon, and Chuck Wald. Makovsky is President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) while Wald is a former general who also is affiliated with that group as a “distinguished fellow,” which means he is getting paid generously to serve as a mouthpiece providing credibility for the group. For those unfamiliar with The Hill, it is an inside the beltway defense contractor funded online magazine that pretends to be serious but which is actually an integral part of the status quo Zionist and war-on-demand network. That the Jewish Institute for National Security is “of America” is, of course, a characteristically clever euphemism.

The article begins with “The Biden administration should learn from its unpreparedness for the Russia-Ukraine war and begin to prepare for a major Israel-Iran conflict. The administration needs to set aside its differences with the Israeli government, overcome its aversion to conflict with Iran, and begin to work closely with Jerusalem to prepare for the growing likelihood that Israel will feel it has no choice but to initiate a military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. In ‘No Daylight,’ a new report from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)…retired senior military officers and national security experts explain that whatever differences the US might now have with Israel over Iran policy, our two countries’ interests will be aligned after an Israeli strike. Consequently, in preparing its response, the U.S. guiding principle should be ‘no daylight with Israel,’ to ensure Israeli military success, mitigate Iranian retaliation and limit the scope of the conflict — vital interests for both countries.”

That war with Iran is a “vital interest” for the United States is, of course, not really explained as the point is to let Israel to decide on the issue of war and peace for the United States. The article then trots out the old “credibility” argument, i.e. that if we don’t go to war no one will ever trust our security guarantees: “A US betrayal of its close Israeli ally, at a time of great peril for the Jewish state, would be ‘one of the greatest catastrophes ever,’ an Arab leader told us privately recently. Because Israel is widely perceived as a close American ally, the US stance as Israel risks thousands of casualties in defense of its very existence, will resound broadly. Strong American support will reassure allies from Warsaw to Abu Dhabi and Taipei; American equivocation will shred Washington’s credibility and embolden adversaries from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing.”

One would love to know who the anonymous Arab leader so concerned about Israel is and, of course, the Jewish state is not in fact an American ally apart from in the fertile imaginations of congressmen, the media and the White House. And Israel will, of course, need more weapons and money from the US taxpayer to include “expediting delivery to Israel of KC-46A tankers, precision-guided munitions, F-15 and F-35 aircraft, and air and missile defenses…. Washington should accelerate building integrated regional air, missile and maritime defenses against persistent Iranian threats.” And America must be prepared to expand the war: “Privately, Iranian and Hezbollah leadership should be warned that heavy retaliation against Israel…will prompt severe Israeli and/or American responses that could threaten their very grasp on power. Upon commencement of an Israeli strike, the United States should promptly resupply Israel with Iron Dome interceptors, precision-guided munitions, ammunition and spare parts, and deploy Patriot air defenses to Israel…”

So the United States must be prepared to turn over its national security to Israel in exchange for what gain for Americans? In part it would apparently involve “finding a permanent solution to Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program” which is based on a lie even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for over 20 years that Iran is only six months away from a weapon. Both the CIA and Mossad have confirmed that Iran has no such program while Israel does have a secret illegal nuclear arsenal built using enriched uranium and nuclear triggers stolen from the US. The article concludes with another reference to the non-existing program, claiming “the most effective way to address Iran’s nuclear program already has been articulated by President Biden and communicated by America’s ambassador in Jerusalem: ‘Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with it, and we’ve got their back.’”

Supporting Israeli war crimes is not the way to go. As Chris Hedges puts it correctly, there is no compelling American interest in damaging itself by supporting Israel blindly, quite the contrary: “The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of US dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless. Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars.”

And, of course, while Israel engages in slaughter and torture it always portrays itself as the victim only engaged in fighting against “terrorists.” I have a better idea for where we should go with all of this. President Joe Biden should be impeached for ignoring war powers legislation and indicating that he is willing to sacrifice US interests and kill American soldiers, few or plausibly none of whom will actually be Jewish since it is not an occupation that attracts them, to please and support a manifestly evil foreign government. And Donald Trump should also be punished for having done much the same type of pandering to a foreign country while in office. Meanwhile, haul Makovsky and Wald together with their buddies at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) down to the Justice Department and put them in jail for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) in that they are willfully acting as agents of a foreign government and are operating corruptly to serve the interests of that government. The criminals at AIPAC are already using their associated PACs to oust targeted members of Congress up for re-election in 2024 who have in any way been critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian. And while you’re at it Mr. Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, please have Mr. Blinken and Ms. Nuland pop by for a chat just for starters and see how far you can make the laws apply to those in power. There is some confusion evident here as Israel is not part of the United States, no matter how politically dominant and wealthy its lobby might be. Time to put an end to this nonsense and call it out for what it is – it is treason.

Neocon Warmonger Advocates Nukes to Nazis in Ukraine

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Violent Russian-hating Nazis wouldn’t nuke Moscow, would they?

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Maybe you may remember Michael Rubin. He worked with Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a neocon pro-war outfit set-up in the Pentagon by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The OSP’s objective was to create a series of false pretenses to invade Iraq in 2003.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer, the Office of Special Plans represented a “subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.”

Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney used the OSP to publicize “hot garbage” from a cast of dubious characters produced by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, including “Curveball” (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German intelligence asset pretending to be an Iraqi chemical engineer).

The lies that killed over a million Iraqis were dismissed as “intelligence failures” and swept under the rug. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rubin, and other neocons were never held responsible for the massive war crimes they perpetuated.

On June 9, Rubin, a “senior fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (and former “fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations), penned “Can Biden Deter a Russia Nuclear Attack on Ukraine? Yes, if He Gives Ukraine Tactical Nukes.”

Rubin demands the nazified post-coup government of Ukraine receive nukes. Rubin believes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (exchanging Soviet-era nukes deployed to Ukraine in exchange for sovereignty) was a monumental error. “The simple fact is this: United States maintains nuclear weapons because they are an effective deterrent against other nuclear states. Ukraine should have the same right,” Rubin writes.

Rubin and his neocon co-conspirators are not interested in “an effective deterrent” in Ukraine; they are interested in destroying the Russian state, the same as they destroyed the Iraqi state. However, Iraq, despite neocon lies, never had nuclear weapons (and the chemical weapons they did possess were supplied US corporations). Russia controls the largest arsenal of nukes in the world.

The non-proliferation mafia might howl with outrage, but the West must gear its nuclear policy toward reality, not wishful thinking or an empty façade of a treaty regimen by which revisionist states no longer abide.

Please read between the lines. According to this entitled “senior fellow,” the neocon “reality” envisions nuclear war as the most effective way to overthrow Putin and dismember the Russian Federation. Rubin, of course, does not call directly for nuclear war. However, his demand that Ukraine be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons will result in precisely that outcome. Imagine Ukraine’s Azov Battalion neo-nazis using nukes to target the Kremlin instead of hit-or-miss drones.

Rubin’s clarion call for nuclear destruction was crossposted on 19FortyFive, a “center-right” website that has produced neocon propaganda subsequently picked up by The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Hill, Reuters, and Voice of America (CIA propaganda), among others. It should be noted that 19FortyFive was until very recently a “regional defense publication.”

With the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway, the threat that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons is increasingly a likelihood. It would be unfair to blame Kyiv. There is no moral equivalence. Russia invaded Ukraine; not the other way around. So long as Ukraine was on the verge of victory, Putin would arrive at this point of nuclear retaliation.

Nonsense. Zelenskyy’s “counter-offensive” has thus far failed miserably, a fact even the war propaganda media is obliged to admit. Thus, Russia does not need to use nuclear weapons. Rubin, however, is able to make his bogus claim thanks to the fiction of Russian desperation over defeat, a false narrative telegraphed daily by a mendacious and cynically fantasist corporate propaganda media.

As should be expected, Rubin completely ignores the fact Russia went into eastern Ukraine to prevent the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of ethnic Russians. For the neocons, responsible for massive war crimes in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya), human life is expendable. Disease, malnutrition, infant mortality, DU-produced cancer—these are the preferred tools for regime change and the destruction of targeted societies resistant to neoliberal serfdom.

Rubin believes the prospect of USG nukes handed over to Russian-hating neo-nazi ultranationalists in Ukraine will save the day and prevent military action “not only against Ukraine but also against Moldova and the Baltic States,” a claim that is utter BS.

Meanwhile, more rational Americans, while small in number, are increasingly concerned about the escalatory behavior of the USG, under the sway of vicious and murderous neocons, which will put an end to not only civilization but all life on planet Earth.

The Lords of Chaos

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The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

We’re Number One – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice. I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the CIA, that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history. It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard. I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

The death threats towards me exploded when my stance became public in numerous interviews and talks I gave across the country. They were either mailed in by anonymous writers or expressed by irate callers who would daily fill up the message bank on my phone with rage-filled tirades. Right-wing talk shows, including Fox News, pilloried me, especially after I was heckled and booed off a commencement stage at Rockford College for denouncing the war. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial attacking me. Bomb threats were called into venues where I was scheduled to speak. I became a pariah in the newsroom. Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion. I was issued a written reprimand by The New York Times to cease speaking publicly against the war. I refused. My tenure was over.

What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power. They continue to promote permanent war, including the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, as well as a future war against China. 

The politicians who lied to us — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to name but a few — extinguished millions of lives, including thousands of American lives, and left Iraq along with Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen in chaos. They exaggerated or fabricated conclusions from intelligence reports to mislead the public. The big lie is taken from the playbook of totalitarian regimes. 

The cheerleaders in the media for war — Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Richard Cohen, George Packer, William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Bill Keller, Robert Kaplan, Anne Applebaum, Nicholas Kristof, Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, David Brooks and Michael Ignatieff — were used to amplify the lies and discredit the handful of us, including Michael Moore, Robert Scheer and Phil Donahue, who opposed the war. These courtiers were often motivated more by careerism than idealism. They did not lose their megaphones or lucrative speaking fees and book contracts once the lies were exposed, as if their crazed diatribes did not matter. They served the centers of power and were rewarded for it.

Many of these same pundits are pushing further escalation of the war in Ukraine, although most know as little about Ukraine or NATO’s provocative and unnecessary expansion to the borders of Russia as they did about Iraq. 

“I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there,” George Packer writes in The Atlantic magazine. “I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”

Packer views war as a purgative, a force that will jolt a country, including the U.S., back to the core moral values he supposedly found amongst American volunteers in Ukraine.

“I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know,” he writes of two U.S. volunteers. “Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things — to be free and live with dignity — became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.”

The Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East cost a total of some $8 trillion. The occupation created Shi’ite and Sunni death squads, fueled horrific sectarian violence, gangs of kidnappers, mass killings and torture. It gave rise to al-Qaeda cells and spawned ISIS which at one point controlled a third of Iraq and Syria. ISIS carried out rape, enslavement and mass executions of Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities such as the Yazidis. It persecuted Chaldean Catholics and other Christians. This mayhem was accompanied by an orgy of killing by U.S. occupation forces, such as as the gang rape and murder of Abeer al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl and her family by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne. The U.S. routinely engaged in the torture and execution of detained civilians, including at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. 

There is no accurate count of lives lost, estimates in Iraq alone range from hundreds of thousands to over a million. Some 7,000 U.S. service members died in our post 9/11 wars, with over 30,000 later committing suicide, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. 

Yes, Saddam Hussein was brutal and murderous, but in terms of a body count, we far outstripped his killings, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country, devastated its modern infrastructure, wiped out its thriving and educated middle class, gave birth to rogue militias and installed a kleptocracy that uses the country’s oil revenues to enrich itself. Ordinary Iraqis are impoverished. Hundreds of Iraqis protesting in the streets against the kleptocracy have been gunned down by police. There are frequent power outages. The Shi’ite majority, closely allied with Iran, dominates the country. 

The occupation of Iraq, beginning 20 years ago today, turned the Muslim world and the Global South against us. The enduring images we left behind from two decades of war include President Bush standing under a “Mission Accomplished” banner onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier barely one month after he invaded Iraq, the bodies of Iraqis in Fallujah that were burned with white phosphorus and the photos of torture by U.S. soldiers. 

The U.S. is desperately attempting to use Ukraine to repair its image. But the rank hypocrisy of calling for “a rules-based international order” to justify the $113 billion in arms and other aid that the U.S. has committed to send to Ukraine, won’t work. It ignores what we did. We might forget, but the victims do not. The only redemptive path is charging Bush, Cheney and the other architects of the wars in the Middle East, including Joe Biden, as war criminals in the International Criminal Court. Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him. 

Many of the apologists for the war in Iraq seek to justify their support by arguing that “mistakes” were made, that if, for example, the Iraqi civil service and army were not disbanded after the U.S. invaded, the occupation would have worked. They insist that our intentions were honorable. They ignore the hubris and lies that led to the war, the misguided belief that the U.S. could be the sole major power in a unipolar world. They ignore the massive military expenditures spent annually to achieve this fantasy. They ignore that the war in Iraq was only an episode in this demented quest. 

A national reckoning with the military fiascos in the Middle East would expose the self-delusion of the ruling class. But this reckoning is not taking place. We are trying to wish the nightmares we perpetuated in the Middle East away, burying them in a collective amnesia. “World War III Begins With Forgetting,” warns Stephen Wertheim.

The celebration of our national “virtue” by pumping weapons into Ukraine, by sustaining at least 750 military bases in more than 70 countries and by expanding our naval presence in the South China Sea, is meant to fuel this dream of global dominance.

What the mandarins in Washington fail to grasp is that most of the globe does not believe the lie of American benevolence or support its justifications for U.S. interventions. China and Russia, rather than passively accepting U.S. hegemony, are building up their militaries and strategic alliances. China, last week, brokered an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish relations after seven years of hostility, something once expected of U.S. diplomats. The rising influence of China creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who call for war with Russia and China, one that will have consequences far more catastrophic than those in the Middle East.

There is a national weariness with permanent war, especially with inflation ravaging family incomes and 57 percent of Americans unable to afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republican Party, who peddled the lies about Iraq, are war parties. Donald Trump’s call to end the war in Ukraine, like his lambasting of the war in Iraq as the “worst decision” in American history, are attractive political stances to Americans struggling to stay afloat. The working poor, even those whose options for education and employment are limited, are no longer as inclined to fill the ranks. They have far more pressing concerns than a unipolar world or war with Russia or China. The isolationism of the far right is a potent political weapon.

The pimps of war, leaping from fiasco to fiasco, cling to the chimera of U.S. global supremacy. The dance macabre will not stop until we publicly hold them accountable for their crimes, ask those we have wronged for forgiveness and give up our lust for uncontested global power. The day of reckoning, vital if we are to protect what is left of our anemic democracy and curb the appetites of the war machine, will only come when we build mass anti-war organizations that demand an end to the imperial folly threatening to extinguish life on the planet. 

Generation of Vipers: The Original Sin and Continuous Crimes of America’s Involvement in Afghanistan

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By Chris Floyd

Source: Empire Burlesque

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? – Matthew 12:34

I.
People need to understand something about Afghanistan, and the debacle we’re witnessing there. America’s involvement in Afghanistan didn’t begin in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks. It began in the last years of the Carter Administration, when he and his advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski set out to “give the Soviets their own Vietnam.” They did this by funding and arming an international cohort of violent fundamentalist extremists and training them in terror tactics. (Osama bin Laden was one of those who joined this jihad army supported by the US, Saudia Arabia and Pakistan.)

At that time, there was a modern, secular regime in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a paradise. It was ridden by internal factionalism, sometimes violent. It was supported by the Soviet Union. It was beset by fundamentalist extremists. It had repressive features. But it was a secular regime. Women were emancipated; many held high positions. Children, including girls, were educated. Science was honored and promoted. Religion was tolerated, albeit uneasily.

Carter and Brzezinski decided to empower the extremist militias attacking the regime, hoping to induce so much chaos that the Soviets would intervene militarily to help their client state. Again, as Brzezinski himself put it, they wanted to give the USSR “its own Vietnam.”

Think about this for a moment. What Carter and Brzezinski wanted was to subject the Afghan people to the years of suffering and death that the Vietnamese had experienced. They WANTED Afghanistan to suffer this fate, and they ACTED to make sure it happened. And it did. If you like, it was one of the great successes of US foreign policy in the post-war period. They deliberately plunged Afghanistan into blood-soaked chaos; and the Soviets – after fierce debate in the Politburo – did send in troops to try to stabilize the country. What followed was year after year after year of horror and death. Again, please note: this was the stated INTENTION of US policy: mass death, terrorism and suffering.

When Carter lost in 1980, Reagan took up his policy in Afghanistan and magnified it. More arms and money to religious extremists. More terrorist training, with CIA manuals. The US even produced textbooks for Afghan children lauding fundamentalist extremism and jihad terror. (All of this was reported in the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets.) Reagan invited the precursors of the Taliban to the White House, where he called them the “moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” and “freedom fighters.” These men were dedicated to undoing the emancipation of women, destroying all vestiges of secular society and imposing the most harsh and hidebound fundamentalist strictures imaginable.

These were the people who were armed, trained, funded, lauded and supported by the United States government for years on end. The Taliban would not exist if not for these long-running, bipartisan policies of the United States.

II.
At last, the Soviets were bled dry, as Carter and Reagan intended, and pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving ruin and chaos behind. There followed years of civil war between atrocious warlords who tortured and looted the Afghan people. The Taliban arose from the midst of the extremists backed by the United States. They managed to take over the country in the early 1990s. They were then supported by the United States once again. Taliban members came to Texas seeking business deals under then-Governor George W. Bush. They sent representatives to Washington, meeting mostly with Republican leaders. When Bush was president, he hooked up with the Taliban in drug eradication efforts.

As noted, Osama bin Laden had been part of the US-backed extremist jihad against the secular regime. However, when the US stationed troops in his homeland of Saudi Arabia during the first Iraq War, he and other fundamentalists regarded this as a profanation of the holy land and vowed to drive American troops from Saudi Arabia. This was the main purpose behind al-Qaeda’s terror attacks, which culminated on 9/11: an attack carried out almost entirely by Saudi nationals, with no involvement of the Taliban or any Afghan citizens.

Bin Laden, a hero of the extremists’ triumph over the USSR, was by now back in Afghanistan. After the 9/11 attacks – which the US itself has said occurred without any foreknowledge by the Taliban – the Taliban offered several times to turn Bin Laden over to international justice in some accredited forum. Bush adamantly refused to even entertain the offer, and launched a full-scale military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

As is well known, just after the attack, the Bush Administration launched a frantic, extraordinary effort to spirit many top Saudi figures out of the United States. It could be noted here that the Bush family had long-standing business ties with the Saudis, including the Bin Laden family. (Indeed, Osama bin Laden’s father died in a plane crash in Texas while doing business there.)

In any case, the war was on. Although bin Laden and his forces were seemingly trapped in their mountain fortress early on, somehow they managed to escape to Pakistan, where bin Laden lived untroubled for many years.

By 2002, the Taliban regime had fallen. But the “nation-building” efforts of the United States very soon took a backseat to the goal that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (and Jeb Bush, among others) had publicly announced before Dubya’s election: war on Iraq. A Cheney-Rumsfeld group called “Project for the New American Century” laid out its plans before the 2000 election, calling for massive new military expenditures, extensive new military operations overseas and war on Iraq. The PNAC document clearly stated that they realized it would be very difficult to achieve this wholesale militarization of US society and policy, unless – their words, in 2000 – the American people were “catalyzed” by a “new Pearl Harbor.”

In 2003, massive military resources and political attention were shifted from Afghanistan to the real war that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted: Iraq. It would be tedious to recite all the deceptions they practiced to perpetrate their deliberate, knowing lie about “Iraqi WMDs” or the collusion of Democrats like Biden in furthering the war fever. The war came and we all know what happened. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died, the whole region became destablized, thousands became radicalized by the death and torture visited upon their lands, and vast, almost incomprehensible levels of corruption attended every aspect of the long, bloody American occupation.

Meanwhile, the “backwater” of Afghanistan became little more than a long exercise in war profiteering. The “government” installed by the Americans looted the country on an almost incomprehensible scale. American and Afghan officials colluded with the Taliban to ship drugs and money out of the country. At one point, US and NATO officials were actually paying the Taliban to allow shipments of supplies through their checkpoints. Bombings went on, drone strikes went on, civilians were slaughtered by both the occupiers and the Taliban: a long, pointless hell that so radicalized the populace that in the end, as we saw this week, there was no longer any resistance to the Taliban and the order they promised – however harsh and brutal it will be.

The “Afghanistan Papers” of official US documents leaked a few years ago showed that the top US military and political officials had no idea what they were doing in Afghanistan. There was no real mission, no focus, no goal; it was essentially just a perpetual motion machine of death, suffering, procurement, profiteering and corruption. The Taliban had long since regained control of most of the country. The Afghans, which down through the centuries had defeated Alexander the Great, the British Empire and the Soviet Union has now defeated the United States as well.

III.
But again we must go back to the beginning of the current situation. It started when the United States and its allies created an army of Islamic extremists in order to impose years of Vietnam-style hell on the Afghan people – as part of the “Great Game” of geopolitics, which uses innocent lives, and whole nations, as dispensable pieces on a chessboard. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan WANTED to create vast, hellish civil war in Afghanistan to ensnare the Soviets; that was their stated goal, and they spent vast amounts of US taxpayer to money to make it happen. They WANTED thousands of people to die in horrific conditions – Afghan civilians, Soviet conscripts, anyone, they didn’t care – as long as the Soviets “got their own Vietnam.” To me, this is a monstrous crime of near-demonic proportions: to deliberately work to create such an outcome. But they did work at it. And they succeeded.

Later, George W. Bush decided to throw the lives of US soldiers into the mix by invading a country that nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, as he well knew. Obama, with the eternal anxiety of Democrats not to look “weak” in the eyes of the morally depraved “foreign policy establishment,” then launched a pointless “surge” in Afghanistan that killed many more thousands of people (including US and allied soldiers). Again, as the “Afghanistan Papers” showed, all this was done with no real plan or aim, and with rampant corruption at every turn.

After this, the US largely stepped back from direct actions on the ground, and let the Afghan army do the dying, while the US concentrated on bombing and droning. Yet still the war went on, year after year, as tens of thousands were radicalized by their suffering and joined or supported the Taliban, which controlled most of the country outside the major cities. Finally Trump decided to cut a hasty and ill-thought out deal with the Taliban that ensured they would take over the country the moment the Americans pulled out – which immediately leeched away any remaining support for the corrupt and inept American-installed government. (Of course, if that government had promised to build a big Trump hotel in Baghdad, he probably would’ve sent in 30 divisions to keep it in power until he got his loot.)

This was the deal Biden inherited. But instead of treating it as what it really was – the inevitable handover of Afghanistan to the only local force capable of forming a government – Biden pretended that the Potemkin state installed by the Americans could somehow survive after the American withdrawal … at least long enough to save some face. Instead of spending six months in a negotiated, orderly transfer of power, the US simply kept up the 20-year farce for a time then bugged out, literally in the dead of night, in most cases without even telling the Afghan forces what was happening.

The Afghan forces knew the jig was up last year when Trump freed the co-founder of the Taliban, who then duly appeared with Mike Pompeo for a cozy photo-op. The Afghan soldiers knew it was only a matter of time before the Taliban was in power again. So when the Americans bugged out, the Afghan army began negotiating with the Taliban to avoid needless destruction and bloodshed. Thus city after city was surrendered without a pointless fight: a grim but humane course taken by Afghan soldiers in these dire circumstances.

But Joe Biden, seeking to avoid blame for his vastly inept mishandling of the inevitable takeover by the Taliban, is now blaming the Afghan people themselves, and the Afghan military forces in particular, for not wanting to “fight for their country.” This is a moral obscenity. Although he, like Trump, was absolutely correct in saying that the woebegone US occupation of Afghanistan had to end, he would not acknowledge the truth of how we got to this point, or why the Taliban even exists in the first place: because of deliberate US policy choices going back more than 40 years, all the way to the “original sin” by Carter and Brzezinski of empowering a global network of religious extremists that has given rise to the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS and others.

In none of these policies – from Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump and Biden – has concern for the lives and welfare of the Afghan people played the slightest part. The good Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter WANTED to create hell on earth like Vietnam in Afghanistan. He WANTED thousands upon thousands of innocent people to die, so that the Soviet Union could be “bled dry” in a geopolitical game. I know it’s hard to get one’s head around this, that this gentle, soft-spoken old man, who lives frugally, built houses for the poor and fought for free elections in other countrie ,etc., made the deliberate choice to inflict unimaginable grief, pain and suffering on multitudes of innocent people. But he did. This is what actually happened in our history.

Ronald Reagan extended this policy (which he also practiced in Central America, aiding the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people by the repressive regimes he supported and armed.) George W. Bush then plunged American forces directly into the fray, stupidly, callously and corruptly replicating “Russia’s own Vietnam” of endless warfare against an extremist insurgency, while tens of thousands innocent civilians died at the hands of all the forces involved.

Now this 40-year chapter of American involvement has come to an end. But unless we actually know how we got here – and the absolutely fundamental role the US has played in these decades of death, destruction and radicalization – we will simply be waiting for the next monstrous, long-running atrocity to arise, with the same horseshit rationalizations (“Liberty! Freedom! Emancipation!”) that our leaders – all of them, every one – have used to cover up their deliberate policies of mass murder, war profiteering and corruption.

Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today

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By challenging the official version of the 9/11 attacks, Thierry Meyssan opened a worldwide debate. But the essence of his book on the subject was a political science study predicting the evolution of the United States after these crimes. The problem is not how the attacks were committed, but why the US reacted that day by violating its own Constitution, why it implemented in the following days very deep reforms of its institutions that changed its nature. Thierry Meyssan had predicted the transformation of the American Empire that we are seeing with the planning of the fall of Kabul. Everything he predicted has been confirmed over the last twenty years.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

At the end of 2001, I published a series of articles on the attacks of September 11, 2001, followed by a book in March 2002 [1]. The book was translated into 18 languages and opened a worldwide debate questioning the veracity of the official US narrative. However, the international press refused to discuss my arguments and launched a campaign accusing me of “amateurism” [2], “conspiracy theory” [3], and “denial” [4].

Above all, the US authorities and their supporters reduced my work to the first few pages of my book: the challenge to the official version of the attacks. But it is a work of political science aimed at denouncing what these false-flag attacks would make possible: the surveillance of Western populations and the endless war in the wider Middle East. In this article, I will therefore review what has been learned about these attacks over the past 20 years, but more importantly, I will check whether my predictions from 2002 were correct or not.

THE BLACK HOLE OF 9/11

If we are asked what happened on 9/11, we will all visualise the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We have forgotten many other things, such as the insider trading in the shares of the affected airlines, the fire in the Old Eisenhower Building, or the collapse of a third tower in the World Trade Center.

What is most astonishing is that almost no one remembers that at 10am, Richard Clarke triggered the ’Continuity of Government Plan’ [5]. At that very moment, President Bush and Congress were suspended from office and placed under military protection. President Bush was taken to an air base in Nebraska where the CEOs of the upper floors of the Twin Towers had been since the previous evening [6]; and Congress to the Greenbrier megabunker. Power fell into the hands of the “Continuity Government”. It was in the Raven Rock Mountain megabunker (’Site R’) [7]. Power was not returned to the civilians until the end of the day.

Who exactly were the members of this ’Continuity Government’ and what did they do during the time they were in power? We still don’t know. The members of Congress who asked the question were not allowed to hold a session of their assembly on the subject.

Please understand that until we have clarification, the 9/11 controversy will continue. The procedure implemented on September 11 was designed by President Eisenhower at a time when nuclear war was feared. If he, the Speakers and a majority of Congress were killed, there would be no constitutional powers. The military would logically have to assume the continuity of government. But this was obviously not the case on that day. Not one elected official was dead. The transfer of power was therefore unconstitutional. It was strictly speaking a coup d’état.

THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11

In my book and afterwards, I hypothesised about what really happened on that day. But this is irrelevant to my point. The people who perpetrated this crime wanted to create a shock comparable to Pearl Harbor, as the members of the Project for a New American Century wrote earlier, so that they could change the way the United States lives and functions. So they told us a tall tale that we swallowed without flinching. But :

• To this day, there is no evidence of the 19 designated hijackers on board the hijacked planes. They were not on the lists of passengers on board the planes released by the airlines on the same day. The videos of the hijackers at the airport were not taken in New York, but at other airports where they were transiting.

• To date, there is no evidence that the 35 telephone communications between passengers on the hijacked flights and the ground existed [8]. This applies both to the conversation attributed to the brave passenger who allegedly attacked the hijackers on UA 93, and to the conversation testified to by US Solicitor General Theodore Olson with his wife on AA 77. In contrast, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (accused of being the 20th hijacker who would not have boarded the plane), the FBI testified that none of the planes had phones in the armrests, that passengers should have used mobile phones, that cell phones at the time could not work at altitudes above 5,000 feet, and that the records provided by the phone companies did not show any of the communications mentioned – including that of Attorney General Olson.

• To date, there is no physical explanation for the collapse of three of the World Trade Center towers onto their own footprints (i.e. vertically). The Twin Towers were hit by two planes, but were not shaken. However, their fuel would have run down the vertical beams and melted them. A third tower was destabilised by the fall of the first two to its side. It too would have collapsed, not laterally, but vertically. It should be noted that no explanation was given for the lateral explosions heard by the firemen and widely filmed, nor for the vertical beams that were severed and not melted; two pieces of evidence attesting not to an accidental but to a controlled demolition. It should also be noted that no collapse of skyscrapers has ever been observed, either before or after 9/11, following a large-scale fire… and that no one has learned the lessons of this attack and therefore changed the way such buildings are constructed to prevent such a catastrophe. Finally, the photographs taken by firefighters of “pools” of molten steel and those taken by FEMA (the disaster management agency) of the melting rocks in which the foundations were built are inexplicable according to the official version.

• To date, there is no evidence that an airliner hit the Pentagon. Already the next day, the fire brigade had given a press conference at the Pentagon during which they had attested that they had not found anything suggestive of a plane. The authorities, who had issued a vengeful statement against my book, announced that they had collected many parts of the plane and reconstructed it in a hangar. Then they stopped communicating on this subject. Moreover, the families of the passengers of the plane in question, after having been scandalised by my words, changed their minds when they were given back funeral urns, claiming to have identified the bodies of their relatives thanks to their fingerprints (which would have been totally destroyed during fires at those temperatures). Some refused to sign the confidentiality agreement offered to them in exchange for large compensation payments.

WIDESPREAD SURVEILLANCE OF WESTERN POPULATIONS

In the days following the attacks, the Bush Administration had Congress vote on an anti-terrorist code, known as the USA Patriot Act. This is a very large piece of legislation that had been drafted over the previous two years by the Federalist Society (of which Solicitor General Theodor Olson and Attorney General John Ashcroft were members). It suspends the Bill of Rights in cases of terrorism.

At the time of the formation of the United States, there were two opposing groups. The first, around Alexander Hamilton, drafted the Constitution to set up a system comparable to the British monarchy, but with governors instead of nobles. The second, around Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, only accepted the Constitution after it had been amended to prevent the use of Reason of State. These 10 amendments are called the Bill of Rights. Their suspension challenges the balance on which the United States was founded. It gives power to the first group, the descendants of the ’Pilgrim Fathers’, the Puritans exiled from England. President Bush is a direct descendant of one of the 41 signatories of the “Mayfower Pact” (1620).

In order to implement the USA Patriot Act, a new department was created, the Homeland Security Department, which brings together various existing agencies. It has a political police force capable of spying on any citizen. According to the Washington Post, which revealed this in 2011, it has hired 835,000 civil servants, 112,000 of whom are secretly employed [9], making the United States the most Orwellian country on the planet. The way this department works was revealed in 2013 by Edward Snowden. Snowden not only provided information about the NSA’s foreign eavesdropping system, but also about domestic mass surveillance in the US. He now lives as a political refugee in Russia.

This system, although less documented, is gradually spreading to all Western states, through the ’Five Eyes’ [10] and Nato.

THE “ENDLESS WAR”: FROM 9/11 TO THE FALL OF KABUL

A month and a half after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation, which he entrusted to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. The idea was to change the very function of the Armed Forces. The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [11] is a reform as important as the creation of the Pentagon after the 1929 crisis. This time, it is about adapting to financial capitalism. From now on, the United States will no longer try to win wars, but on the contrary to make them last as long as possible; this is what President Bush’s expression “endless war” means. Their aim will be to destroy local state structures so that natural wealth can be exploited without having to endure political control; as Colonel Ralph Peters summed it up: “Stability is America’s enemy” [12].

This is exactly what has just happened in Afghanistan. The war started there just after 9/11. It was only supposed to last a few weeks, but it never stopped. The Taliban victory that we have just witnessed was organised by the United States itself in order to make the conflict last even longer. That is why President Biden has just said that the US did not go into Afghanistan to build a state, as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War. Joe Biden had, during his meeting in Geneva with Vladimir Putin, rejected the endless war. However, he has just relaunched it, aligning himself with the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine like Barack Obama.

None of the conflicts that began after 9/11 have ended. On the contrary, instability has taken hold in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. One can of course call these conflicts “civil wars” and accuse their leaders of being “dictators”, or explain nothing at all, but the fact remains that they were stable before Western intervention and that Gaddafi’s Libya and Aoun’s Lebanon were US allies when their misfortunes began.

Vice President Cheney had set up a secret group in the White House to design the development of the National Energy Policy. He was convinced that oil would run out in the medium term. This is why the United States destroyed states in order to be able to exploit their oil in the long term, but not now. Moreover, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine states that one should not fight globalised powers such as Russia and China. On the contrary, they should be given access to the natural resources they have conquered, but they should be forced to pay royalties to the US in order to exploit them.

By publishing a number of internal US military reports, Julian Assange has not revealed any sensitive information. But all these documents show that the Pentagon has never been interested in winning the post-9/11 wars. Assange was persecuted to the point of insanity.

To wage these wars, the Pentagon secretly created clandestine Special Forces: 60,000 soldiers without uniforms [13]. They are capable of assassinating anyone in any country without leaving any trace. Bob Woodward revealed the “Global Attack Matrix” operation, decided three days after the attacks [14]. Wayne Madsen published the names of the first victims in Papua, Nigeria, Indonesia and Lebanon [15].

CONCLUSION

All my predictions have been verified over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, few people have seen how the world has changed. Most refuse to make the connection between the revelations of one side and those of the other and to see the responsibility of the Western democracies for the crimes committed in the wider Middle East.

The problem remains the same: we cannot admit that the criminal is close to us.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] L’Effroyable imposture, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002). Second edition, revised and corrected L’Effroyable imposture suivie du Pentagate prefaced by General Leonid Ivashov (who was acting chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces on September 11, 2001), Demi-Lune, 2006. English Version : The Big Lie. Version en español : La Gran Impostura.

[2] According to my detractors, I had not been at the scene, as a ” true journalist ” would have had to. But the United States had banned access to the three “crime scenes” for reasons of ” national security ” and for years no journalist, from absolutely no media, had access to them. So the reproach of ” amateurism ” would have to apply not only to me but also to all the journalists who repeated the official version.

[3] The adjective ” conspiratorial ” began to be used in the 1960s to designate those who questioned the official thesis of the lone sniper who supposedly assassinated President Kennedy and denounced that what he did was a conspiracy. possible that assassination.

[4] Indeed, I deny the official version of the attacks of September 11, 2001. But the term ” denialism ” actually alludes to an extreme right-wing current – whose ideas I have always fought – that denies the will of the Nazis to perpetrate the genocide of the Jews in Europe.

[5] Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror, Richard Clarke, Free Press, 2004.

[6] Like every year, Warren Buffet – who was then the richest man in the world – gave a charity dinner in Nebraska. But, something that had never happened before, that day the annual dinner was not organized in a large hotel but … in a military base. The invited company bosses had given their New York employees the day off, which explains the relatively low death toll in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

[7] A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies, James Bamford, Anchor Books (2004).

[8] «¿Quién inventó las falsas llamadas telefónicas desde los aviones secuestrados el 11 de Septiembre?», por Giulietto Chiesa, Megachip-Globalist (Italia) , Red Voltaire , 28 de julio de 2013.

[9] Top Secret America : The Rise of the New American Security State, Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, Little, Brown and Company (2011).

[10] The “Five Eyes” or Five Eyes is the name of the alliance of services for eavesdropping and interception of global communications in which Australia, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and the United Kingdom participate. in 1941 by the Atlantic Charter.

[11] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[12] “Stabiliy American’s Ennemy”, col. Ralph Peters, Parameters #31-4 (winter 2001).

[13] “Exclusive : Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021.

[14] Saturday, September 15, At Camp David, Advise and Dissent, Bob Woodward & Dan Balz, Washington Post, January 31, 2002.

[15] «J’accuse – Bush’s Death Squads», Wayne Madsen, Makingnews.com, January 31, 2002.

Send the Mad Dog to the Corporate Kennel

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By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

Outgoing Defense Secretary Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis was famous for quipping, “It’s fun to shoot some people.” It remains a supreme irony that Mattis was widely considered the only “adult in the room” in the Trump administration. Compared to whom? John Bolton, the rabid neocon serving as national security adviser? That would be the epitome of “condemning with faint praise.”

With his ramrod-straight image, not to mention his warrior/scholar reputation extolled in the media, Mattis was able to disguise the reality that he was, as Col. Andrew Bacevich put it on Democracy Now! this morning, “totally unimaginative.” Meaning that Mattis was simply incapable of acknowledging the self-destructive, mindless nature of U.S. “endless war” in the Middle East, which candidate-Trump had correctly called “stupid.” In his resignation letter, Mattis also peddled the usual cant about the indispensable nation’s aggression being good for the world.

Mattis was an obstacle to Trump’s desire to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan (and remains in position to spike Trump’s orders). Granted, the abrupt way Trump announced his apparently one-man decision was equally stupid. But withdrawal of ground troops is supremely sane, and Mattis was and is a large problem. And, for good or ill, Trump — not Mattis — was elected president.

Marine Wisdom

Historically, Marines are the last place to turn for sound advice. Marine Gen. Smedley Butler (1881-1940), twice winner of the Medal of Honor, was brutally candid about this, after he paused long enough to realize, and write, “War is a Racket”:

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. …”

Shortly after another Marine general, former CENTCOM commander Anthony Zinni, retired, he stood by silently as he personally watched then-Vice President Dick Cheney give his most important speech ever (on August 26, 2002). Cheney blatantly lied about Iraq’s (non-existent) WMD, in order to grease the skids for the war of aggression against Iraq. Zinni had kept his clearances and was “back on contract.” He was well read-in on Iraq, and knew immediately that Cheney was lying.

A few years later, Zinni admitted that he decided that his lips would be sealed. Far be it for a Marine to play skunk at the picnic.  And, after all, he was being honored that day at the same Veterans of Foreign Wars convention where Cheney spoke.  As seems clear now, Zinni was also lusting after the lucrative spoils of war given to erstwhile generals who offer themselves for membership on the corporate Boards of the arms makers/merchants that profiteer on war.

(For an earlier critique of senior Marines, see: “Attacking Syria: Thumbing Noses at Constitution and Law.” )

Marine officer, now Sen. Pat Roberts, R, Kansas, merits “dishonorable mention” in this connection. He never rose to general, but did become Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at an auspicious time for Cheney and Bush. Roberts kowtowed, like a “good Marine,” to their crass deceit, when a dollop of honesty on his part could have prevented the 2003 attack on Iraq and the killing, maiming, destruction, and chaos that continues to this day.  Roberts knew all about the fraudulent intelligence, and covered it up — together with other lies — for as long as he remained Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman

Scott Ritter on Pat Roberts

Roberts’s unconscionable dereliction of duty enraged one honest Marine, Maj. Scott Ritter, who believes “Semper Fi” includes an obligation to tell the truth on matters of war and peace.  Ritter, former UN chief weapons inspector for Iraq, who in April  wrote in April 2005 “Semper Fraud, Senator Roberts,” based partly on his own experience with that complicit Marine.

Needless to say, higher ranking, more malleable Marines aped Zinni in impersonating Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby — not saying nuttin’.

It is conceivable that yet another sharply-saluting Marine, departing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, may be tapped by Trump to take Mattis’s job. If that happens, it will add to President Trump’s bizarre penchant for picking advisers hell bent on frustrating the objectives he espoused when he was running for office, some of which — it is becoming quite clear — he genuinely wants to achieve.

Trump ought to unleash Mattis now, and make sure Mattis keeps his distance from the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex, before he is asked to lead an insurrection against a highly vulnerable president — as Gen. Smedley Butler was asked to do back in the day. Butler said no.

Living in a PNAC World: The Toxic Legacy of 9/11

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pnac-criminals-2-1

By Chris Floyd

Source: Empire Burlesque

In September 2000, an advocacy group called “Project for New American Century,” led by Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others — published a “blueprint” for “transforming” America’s future. PNAC acknowledged that the “revolutionary” changes it envisaged could take decades to bring about — unless, they said, the United States was struck by “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” One year later, after the disputed election of George W. Bush, came the “catalyzing” event of the 9/11 attacks — which indeed “transformed” America’s future in many “revolutionary” ways.

Here are some of the changes PNAC called for in 2000, all of which came about after the “new Pearl Harbor” they had hoped for: An attack on Iraq. Vast increases in military spending. Planting new American bases all over the world. Embracing the concept of “pre-emptive war” and unilateral action as cornerstones of national strategy. Developing sophisticated new technologies to “control the global commons of cyberspace” by closely monitoring communications and transactions on the Internet. Pursuing the development of “new methods of attack – electronic, ‘non-lethal, biological…in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace and perhaps the world of microbes.”

Oddly enough, although “regime change” in Iraq was clearly a priority for PNAC, it had little to do with Saddam Hussein and his brutal rule. Instead, removing Saddam was tied to the larger goal of establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf in order to “secure energy supplies” and preclude any other power from dominating the vital oil regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. The PNAC report puts it quite plainly:
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

This is why the Bush Administration offered a constantly shifting menu of rationales for the impending attack on Iraq: because the decision to remove Saddam was taken long ago, as part of a larger strategic plan, and had little to do with any imminent threat from the broken-backed Iraqi regime, which at that time was constantly bombed, partially occupied (with U.S. forces already working in the autonomous Kurdish territories) and swarming with UN inspectors. If the strategic need for the attack “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein,” then almost any rationale will do.

The same desire to “secure energy supplies” and prevent any other power from gaining dominance in the oil regions also underlies current and recent US policies in Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. That’s why we see the same shifting rationales, see policies that on the surface seem to make no sense: we fight al Qaeda in Iraq, we support al Qaeda in Yemen and Syria; we say defeating ISIS is of supreme global importance, but we prevent other countries (Iran, Russia) from joining the fight; we push “regime change” to “liberate” Libya and Syria while partnering with one of most repressive, extremists nations on earth, Saudi Arabia, and arming other dictators like Sisi in Egypt. We are “fighting” terrorism while turning whole nations (Iraq, Libya, Syria) into swamps of ruin and violence where terrorism can breed. None of these contradictory rationales make sense on the surface. But viewed as part of an ongoing, bipartisan agenda of securing American dominance of economically strategic lands — and of “discouraging advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” (as an earlier Cheney-Wolfowitz document put it) — it becomes easier to see a pattern in today’s howling chaos.

This is not “conspiracy theory.” These motives and agendas are out in the open, and always have been. Our bipartisan leaders eagerly trumpet them, and declare that it is our right and our duty to dominate the world in this way. What’s more, any actions we take to accomplish this — wars, regime change, intrusive surveillance, drone campaigns, death squads, torture, killing thousands of innocent people (mere “collateral damage”), fomenting more hatred and extremism, breaking our own laws, turning our own people into fearful cowards ready to throw away their liberties to “stay safe,” etc. — are automatically just and righteous, because we are “exceptional.”

So yes, the “transformations” wrought in American policy — and the American psyche — since that “new Pearl Harbor” have indeed been “revolutionary.” Post-9/11, we are all living in a PNAC world.

Note: The above post was adapted (and updated) from a much more detailed piece originally written in 2002, which can be found here.

 

Bush-Clinton Mafia Dynasties Merry-Go-Round

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The_Godfather_LogoBy Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

If a space or a time traveler would set his time ship’s dial to 2015, with the United States as its destination, one could think that a mandatory preparation for the journey to understand the US’ political system would be an attentive study of the Constitution. After all, the document, drafted in 1787 by the so called “founding fathers” and finally ratified three later in 1790 in its original form, is supposed to be the foundation of the US’ political edifice. Two hundred and twenty-five years later, the document has been so much thoroughly gutted of its substantial original merits, at least in its spirit if not its letter, that the foundation of the building has become a superfluous architectural ornament. While the US Constitution was far from being revolutionary and granted equal rights only to white male landowners, it marked, in conjunction with the French revolution of 1789, a resolute break from the European kingdoms. No kings or queens could ever claim this land again, under any circumstance. A republic, ruled by a meritocracy of well-educated Anglo-Saxon patrician men, was born. Since 190 years after the US Constitution’s ratification, however, which is exactly since 1980, the country has been ruled by two dynasties or their surrogates: the Bushes and the Clintons.

American royal mafia and co: organized crime as political model

To understand the undemocratic and extremely seedy side of US modern-day politics, it would be imperative for our time traveler, de Tocqueville in training, to watch two classics of American cinema: “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II”. Director Francis Ford Coppola, in his fictional, yet extremely well-researched and documented films, invited us inside the US’ underbelly. During the 19th century and up to the early 20th century, a massive numbers of poor immigrants, mainly Italians, Irish and Jews from eastern Europe, were lured to the Americas largely to escape economic hardship. Those who landed in the US quickly understood that they were excluded from or at best marginalized in this promised land run by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The more ambitious ones, unencumbered by moral boundaries, developed their own form of government and social code of conduct in the form of a tightly knit family-like structure that usually strictly followed ethnic lines. The birth of organized crime in the US, either Italian, Jewish or Irish, was a direct consequence of the fight for survival of communities that were deliberately excluded from power or even any political discourse.

Mafia families had a strictly enforced code of conduct and precise hierarchy, with a Don (boss) at the top; a Consiglierie (adviser to the head of the family) directly picked by the Don; an Under-Boss who was usually groomed to be the Don’s successor; Capos (the lieutenants), and “soldiers”. In the 1930s, under the supervision of Lucky Luciano, the Don of all Dons, not only the five Italian mafia families worked together, but they also collaborated on many occasions with the Jewish and Irish mafia. In this parallel brand of power and economy, mafia families extracted contributions (a primitive form of taxation of usually 10 percent of income) from businesses, ironically to protect them from random criminal activity. By the mid-1930s mafia families controlled large sections of the US economy. The prohibition of alcoholic beverages, which spanned from 1920 to 1933, marked the apogee of the mafia families, either Italian, Jewish or Irish. The mob controlled the flow of liquor, and Americans were thirsty.

During the prohibition era, Joe Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy), the patriarch of a family that passed for being true US aristocracy although he had been the grandson of a dirt-poor potato-famine Irish immigrant, substantially increased his vast fortune by importing, from the UK and Canada, and selling illicit liquor in association with Italian-American don Frank Costello and Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Joe Kennedy had an edge on the competition: he went into the prohibition era in 1920 with large stocks of booze from his father’s own stores. In what cannot be a coincidence, on the day prohibition ended 13 years later, Joe Kennedy had three exclusive deals to import British whiskey and gin, as well as a extensive network of retailers already in place. Kennedy understood that his political ambitions for his sons would require vast amounts of money. Like any mafia bosses, don Joe Kennedy wanted to start a dynasty at any cost and regardless of moral or even legal considerations. In the US, money meant power, and this is a notion that was the motto for both supposed blue-blood patriarch Kennedy and don Lucky Luciano.

Bush mafia vs Clinton mafia: Defining US politics from 1980 to 2016

Arguably, the first term of George H. Bush, founder of the Bush dynasty, started in 1980 when he officially became Vice President or, to use the mafia term, super under-boss to Ronald Reagan, an aging actor, perhaps already senile, hired to perform the role of global don: “Leader of the free world” and most powerful man on earth, according to US mainstream media propaganda. Bush Sr. had previously run the Central Intelligence Agency. During the two terms of the Reagan administration (1980 to 1988), it was common knowledge that he was the boss who led US policy. He officially became the don in 1988, and ran his own operation with pretty much the same crew until 1992. James Baker was the key consigliere to don Bush Sr, but he also listened closely to the Talleyrand of US politics, consigliere extraordinaire Henri Kissinger. Bush Sr’s under-boss was Donald Rumsfeld who picked his capo in the person of Dick Cheney. George W. Bush or Bush Jr, when his turn came, kept most of the old don’s crew with some minor changes and additions. Cheney became the under-boss, while Rumsfeld took the vital Pentagon portfolio.

Before George W. Bush’s turn, the Clinton dynasty came along in 1992, courtesy of WallMart, and with the firm intention, as an obligation to their sponsors, to facilitate a global corporate imperialist agenda. With the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), don Bill Clinton went the extra mile for the benefit of his friends in transnational corporations. Bill Clinton became a favorite of Wall Street’s investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, by being instrumental in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which was voted in 1933 during the Great Depression in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The Glass-Steagall Act limited commercial banks securities activities, and it clearly separated commercial banking from investment banking, to curtail speculation. The repeal of this Act allowed Wall Street investment banks to gamble money that was held in commercial banks, and this was arguably one of the lead systemic factors in the 2008 global financial-market crash.

Don Clinton’s consigliere was mainly first-lady Hillary, but he also took the advice of the other super-consigliere, beside Kissinger: Polish born Zbigniew Brzezinski. Consigliere Brzezinski started his career in 1966 when he advised Lyndon B. Johnson. He returned in the late 1970s to advise Jimmy Carter. When he was Carter’s consigliere, Brzezinski came up with the idea to finance and arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Don Clinton’s under-boss was Leon Panetta, and the lead capo was Rahm Emanuel. When dona Hillary Clinton lost what she viewed as being her turn in the driver’s seat, both the Clinton and Bush mafias made sure that young capo Barack Obama, who had not patiently waited for his turn in the limelight, was surrounded by trusted hands. One can imagine the deal imposed on Obama by Bill and Dick. The Bush mafia would keep the Pentagon for the time being; Hillary would run US foreign policy from the State Department; don Bill’s under-boss Leon Panetta would become Obama’s CIA director (2009 to 2011) and boss of the Pentagon (2011 to 2013). Clinton’s trusted lead capo Rahm Emanuel became Obama’s under-boss. Don Bill did not stay idle after the 2008 election, he became Obama’s lead consigliere, with the occasional help on geopolitical dossiers such as Ukraine of… Brzezinski of course. The 88-year-old anti-Russian Democrat uber-consigliere’s latest contribution has been to bring back the Cold War into international affairs. Bill Clinton’s main task was to replenish the family coffers through the Clinton Global Initiative, a fund raising operation disguised as being humanitarian. After the 2010 earthquake, Haiti became don Bill’s pet project and personal fiefdom.

Is there anyway off this sinister merry go round?

By now, our time-traveler hero realizes that the premise of the upcoming 2016 US presidential  election “fight” is already set. It will be a rematch of an old time classic: Bush against Clinton, dona Hillary versus don Jeb. For good measure, and to give American consumers of elections a sense that their democracy is not an illusion, there will be unelectable challengers in the fake primaries. This will be strictly for entertainment purposes and to indulge the so-called American left. On a short list of likely seat warmers for Hillary are Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, perhaps even Joe Biden. On the Bush side of the ring, the supposed primary challengers will be harder to find: perhaps Mitt Romney again or phony Libertarian Rand Paul. But let us listen to what Consigliere extraordinaire Henry Kissinger recently said on the issue, after all he has advised more US presidents than anyone else alive. In a September 6, 2014 interview with NPR‘s Scott Simon, when asked if Hillary Clinton would make a good president, Kissinger said:“I know Hillary as a person, and as a personal friend. I would say, yes she would be a good president. But that would put me under a great conflict of interest if she were a candidate, because I intend to support the Republicans….Yes I would be comfortable with her as a president.” Our time traveler, de Tocqueville in training, is dazed, confused and disgusted by what the US has grown into: in this display of vile and raw power for power’s sake, the sort of charade that notions like democracy, the common good and morality have become.