Events ongoing should terrify everyone—things likely heading for greater war than already.
Most Americans, Brits, and others in NATO countries are unaware of the danger posed by hardline Western extremists in charge of policymaking—notably in Washington, London and Israel, the Jewish state an alliance Mediterranean Dialogue member.
Businessman Trump was co-opted to be a warrior president—neocon generals in charge of geopolitical policies, their agenda hardened by Mike Pompeo replacing Rex Tillerson at State, along with torturer-in-chief Gina Haspel appointed new CIA director.
An unholy alliance of US extremist policymakers allied with likeminded ones in partner countries risks war winds reaching gale force, a terrifying prospect if confrontation with Russia, Iran or North Korea occurs—the possibility increased by recent events.
Earlier this week, US Defense Secretary Mattis and UN envoy Haley threatened Russia and Damascus.
Russia vowed to retaliate against US attacks on Syrian forces in East Ghouta or elsewhere endangering its personnel in the country.
Anti-Russia hysteria in Britain over the Sergey Skripal poisoning affair, most certainly Moscow had nothing to do with, soured bilateral relations more than already.
In response to British PM Theresa May demanding swift Russian answers to questions posed about the incident, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman (speaking for her government) replied sharply saying, “One does not give 24 hours notice to a nuclear power,” adding the “Skripal poisoning was not an incident but a colossal international provocation,” addin, not a “single international legal mechanism [exists] to probe the Skripal case.”
Russia’s embassy in London said “Moscow will not respond to London’s ultimatum until it receives samples of the chemical substance to which the UK investigators are referring.”
“Britain must comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention which stipulates joint investigation into the incident, for which Moscow is ready.”
“Without that, there can be no sense in any statements from London. The incident appears to be yet another crooked attempt by the UK authorities to discredit Russia.”
“Any threat to take ‘punitive’ measures against Russia will meet with a response. The British side should be aware of that.”
“Not only is Russia groundlessly and provocatively accused of the Salisbury incident, but apparently, plans are being developed in the UK to strike Russia with cyber weapons.”
“Judging by the statements of the prime minister, such a decision can be taken at tomorrow’s meeting of the National Security Council.”
Given the gravity of the situation, the above comments by Russian diplomats were uncharacteristically strong.
Sergey Lavrov warned Washington that “[i]f a new [US] strike . . . takes place [against Syrian forces], the consequences will be very serious,” adding, “I simply don’t have any normal terms left to describe all this.”
What’s coming remains to be seen. Hostile rhetoric from US and UK officials, along with hawkish extremists Pompeo in charge at State and Haspel appointed new CIA chief likely signal more war, not less.
What’s ongoing assures no possibility of improving dismal bilateral relations with Russia, China, Iran and other sovereign independent countries.
Talks with North Korea could either be scuttled or confrontational if they take place.
Given very disturbing ongoing events, the perilous state of world conditions reached a new low.
For almost 2 decades, the US pursued a list of ‘enemy countries’ to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow.
This imperial quest to overthrow ‘enemy countries’ operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations: the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a ‘regime change’ operation.
The criteria for determining an ‘enemy country’ and its place on the list of priority targets in the US quest for greater global dominance, as well as its vulnerability to a ‘successfully’ regime change will be the focus of this essay.
We will conclude by discussing the realistic perspectives of future imperial options.
Prioritizing US Adversaries
Imperial strategists consider military, economic and political criteria in identifying high priority adversaries.
The following are high on the US ‘enemy list’:
1) Russia, because of its military power, is a nuclear counterweight to US global domination. It has a huge, well-equipped armed force with a European, Asian and Middle East presence. Its global oil and gas resources shield it from US economic blackmail and its growing geo-political alliances limit US expansion.
2) China, because of its global economic power and the growing scope of its trade, investment and technological networks. China’s growing defensive military capability, particularly with regard to protecting its interests in the South China Sea serve to counter US domination in Asia.
3) North Korea, because of its nuclear and ballistic missile capability, its fierce independent foreign policies and its strategic geo-political location, is seen as a threat to the US military bases in Asia and Washington’s regional allies and proxies.
4) Venezuela, because of its oil resources and socio-political policies, challenge the US centered neo-liberal model in Latin America.
5) Iran, because of its oil resources, political independence and geo-political alliances in the Middle East, challenge US, Israeli and Saudi Arabia domination of the region and present an independent alternative.
6) Syria, because of its strategic position in the Middle East, its secular nationalist ruling party and its alliances with Iran, Palestine, Iraq and Russia, is a counterweight to US-Israeli plans to balkanize the Middle East into warring ethno-tribal states.
US Middle-level Adversaries :
1) Cuba, because of its independent foreign policies and its alternative socio-economic system stands in contrast to the US-centered neo-liberal regimes in the Caribbean, Central and South America.
2) Lebanon, because of its strategic location on the Mediterranean and the coalition government’s power sharing arrangement with the political party, Hezbollah, which is increasingly influential in Lebanese civil society in part because of its militia’s proven capacity to protect Lebanese national sovereignty by expelling the invading Israeli army and helping to defeat the ISIS/al Queda mercenaries in neighboring Syria.
3) Yemen, because of its independent, nationalist Houthi-led movement opposed to the Saudi-imposed puppet government as well as its relations with Iran.
Low Level Adversaries
1) Bolivia, because of its independent foreign policy, support for the Chavista government in Venezuela and advocacy of a mixed economy; mining wealth and defense of indigenous people’s territorial claims.
2)Nicaragua, because of its independent foreign policy and criticism of US aggression toward Cuba and Venezuela.
US hostility to high priority adversaries is expressed through economic sanctions military encirclement, provocations and intense propaganda wars toward North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Syria.
Because of China’s powerful global market linkages, the US has applied few sanctions. Instead, the US relies on military encirclement, separatist provocations and intense hostile propaganda when dealing with China.
Priority Adversaries, Low Vulnerability and Unreal Expectations
With the exception of Venezuela, Washington’s ‘high priority targets’ have limited strategic vulnerabilities. Venezuela is the most vulnerable because of its high dependence on oil revenues with its major refineries located in the US, and its high levels of indebtedness, verging on default. In addition, there are the domestic opposition groups, all acting as US clients and Caracas’ growing isolation within Latin America due to orchestrated hostility by important US clients, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
Iran is far less vulnerable: It is a strong strategic regional military power linked to neighboring countries and similar religious-nationalist movements. Despite its dependence on oil exports, Iran has developed alternative markets, like China, free from US blackmail and is relatively safe from US or EU initiated creditor attacks.
North Korea, despite the crippling economic sanctions imposed on its regime and civilian population, has ‘the bomb’ as a deterrent to a US military attack and has shown no reluctance to defend itself. Unlike Venezuela, neither Iran nor North Korea face significant internal attacks from US-funded or armed domestic opposition.
Russia has full military capacity – nuclear weapons, ICBM and a huge, well-trained armed force – to deter any direct US military threat. Moscow is politically vulnerable to US-backed propaganda, opposition political parties and Western-funded NGO’s. Russian oligarch-billionaires, linked to London and Wall Street, exercise some pressure against independent economic initiatives.
To a limited degree, US sanctions exploited Russia’s earlier dependence on Western markets, butsince the imposition of draconian sanctions by the Obama regime, Moscow has effectively counteredWashington’s offensive by diversifying its markets to Asia and strengthening domestic self-reliance in its agriculture, industry and high technology.
China has a world-class economy and is on course to become the world’s economic leader. Feeble threats to ‘sanction’ China have merely exposed Washington’s weakness rather intimidating Beijing. China has countered US military provocations and threats by expanding its economic market power, increasing its strategic military capacity and shedding dependence on the dollar.
Washington’s high priority targets are not vulnerable to frontal attack: They retain or are increasing their domestic cohesion and economic networks, while upgrading their military capacity to impose completely unacceptable costs on the US for any direct assault.
As a result, the US leaders are forced to rely on incremental, peripheral and proxy attacks with limited results against its high priority adversaries.
Washington will tighten sanctions on North Korea and Venezuela, with dubious prospects of success in the former and a possible pyrrhic victory in the case of Caracas. Iran and Russia can easily overcome proxy interventions. US allies, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, can badger, propagandize and rail the Persians, but their fears that an out-and-out war against Iran, could quickly destroy Riyadh and Tel Aviv forces them to work in tandem to induce the corrupt US political establishment to push for war over the objections of a war-weary US military and population. Saudi and Israelis can bomb and starve the populations of Yemen and Gaza, which lack any capacity to reply in kind, but Teheran is another matter.
The politicians and propagandists in Washington can blather about Russia’s interference in the US’s corrupt electoral theater and scuttle moves to improve diplomatic ties, but they cannot counter Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East and its expanding trade with Asia, especially China.
In summary, at the global level, the US ‘priority’ targets are unattainable and invulnerable. In the midst of the on-going inter-elite dogfight within the US, it may be too much to hope for the emergence of any rational policymakers in Washington who could rethink strategic priorities and calibrate policies of mutual accommodation to fit in with global realities.
Medium and Low Priorities, Vulnerabilities and Expectations
Washington can intervene and perhaps inflict severe damage on middle and low priority countries. However, there are several drawbacks to a full-scale attack.
Yemen, Cuba, Lebanon, Bolivia and Syria are not nations capable of shaping global political and economic alignments. The most the US can secure in these vulnerable countries are destructive regime changes with massive loss of life, infrastructure and millions of desperate refugees . . . but at great political cost, with prolonged instability and with severe economic losses.
Yemen
The US can push for a total Saudi Royal victory over the starving, cholera-stricken people of Yemen. But who benefits? Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a palace upheaval and has no ability to exercise hegemony, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of US/NATO arms, trainers and bases. Colonial occupations are costly and yield few, if any, economic benefits, especially from a poor, geographically isolated devastated nation like Yemen.
Cuba
Cuba has a powerful highly professional military backed by a million-member militia. They are capable of prolonged resistance and can count on international support. A US invasion of Cuba would require a prolonged occupation and heavy losses. Decades of economic sanctions haven’t worked and their re-imposition by Trump have not affected the key tourist growth sectors.
President Trump’s ‘symbolic hostility’ does not cut any ice with the major US agro-business groups, which saw Cuba as a market. Over half of the so-called ‘overseas Cubans’ now oppose direct US intervention.
US-funded NGOs can provide some marginal propaganda points but they cannot reverse popular support for Cuba’s mixed ‘socialized’ economy, its excellent public education and health care and its independent foreign policy.
Lebanon
A joint US-Saudi economic blockade and Israeli bombs can destabilize Lebanon. However, a full-scale prolonged Israeli invasion will cost Jewish lives and foment domestic unrest. Hezbollah has missiles to counter Israeli bombs. The Saudi economic blockade will radicalize Lebanese nationalists, especially among the Shia and the Christian populations. The Washington’s ‘invasion’ of Libya, which did not lose a single US soldier, demonstrates that destructive invasions result in long-term, continent-wide chaos.
A US-Israeli-Saudi war would totally destroy Lebanon but it will destabilize the region and exacerbate conflicts in neighboring countries – Syria, Iran and possibly Iraq. And Europe will be flooded with millions more desperate refugees.
Syria
The US-Saudi proxy war in Syria suffered serious defeats and the loss of political assets. Russia gained influence, bases and allies. Syria retained its sovereignty and forged a battle-hardened national armed force. Washington can sanction Syria, grab some bases in a few phony ‘Kurdish enclaves’ but it will not advance beyond a stalemate and will be widely viewed as an occupying invader.
Syria is vulnerable and continues to be a middle-range target on the US enemy list but it offers few prospects of advancing US imperial power, beyond some limited ties with an unstable Kurd enclave, susceptible to internecine warfare, and risking major Turkish retaliation.
Bolivia and Nicaragua
Bolivia and Nicaragua are minor irritants on the US enemy list. US regional policymakers recognize that neither country exercises global or even regional power. Moreover, both regimes rejected radical politics in practice and co-exist with powerful and influential local oligarchs and international MNC’s linked to the US.
Their foreign policy critiques, which are mostly for domestic consumption, are neutralized by the near total US influence in the OAS and the major neo-liberal regimes in Latin America. It appears that the US will accommodate these marginalized rhetorical adversaries rather than risk provoking any revival of radical nationalist or socialist mass movements erupting in La Paz or Managua.
Conclusion
A brief examination of Washington’s ‘list of enemies’ reveals that the limited chances of success even among vulnerable targets. Clearly, in this evolving world power configuration, US money and markets will not alter the power equation.
US allies, like Saudi Arabia, spend enormous amounts of money attacking a devastated nation, but they destroy markets while losing wars. Powerful adversaries, like China, Russia and Iran, are not vulnerable and offer the Pentagon few prospects of military conquest in the foreseeable future.
Sanctions, or economic wars have failed to subdue adversaries in North Korea, Russia, Cuba and Iran. The ‘enemy list’ has cost the US prestige, money and markets – a very peculiar imperialist balance sheet. Russia now exceeds the US in wheat production and exports. Gone are the days when US agro-exports dominated world trade including trade with Moscow.
Enemy lists are easy to compose, but effective policies are difficult to implement against rivals with dynamic economies and powerful military preparedness.
The US would regain some of its credibility if it operated within the contexts of global realities and pursued a win-win agenda instead of remaining a consistent loser in a zero-sum game.
Rational leaders could negotiate reciprocal trade agreements with China, which would develop high tech, finance and agro-commercial ties with manufacturers and services. Rational leaders could develop joint Middle East economic and peace agreements, recognizing the reality of a Russian-Iranian-Lebanese Hezbollah and Syrian alliance.
As it stands, Washington’s ‘enemy list’ continues to be composed and imposed by its own irrational leaders, pro-Israel maniacs and Russophobes in the Democratic Party – with no acknowledgement of current realities.
For Americans, the list of domestic enemies is long and well known, what we lack is a civilian political leadership to replace these serial mis-leaders.
… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …”
— Morris Berman
I cannot remember U.S. culture ever being quite so compromised by ruling class control. Hollywood turns out one jingoistic and militaristic and racist film and TV show after another. Corporate news is completely controlled by the same forces that run Hollywood. It is the complete capitulation of the liberal class to the interests of the increasingly fascistic U.S. elite. And this didn’t start with Donald Trump. Certainly in its current incarnation it goes back at least to Bill Clinton, and really it goes back to the end of World War Two. The ideological trajectory was formed under the Dulles brothers and military industrial complex — representing U.S. business interests and exhibiting a demand for global hegemony. But once the Soviet Union collapsed, the project was accelerated and intensified.
Another starting point might well be the 1960 Bay of Pigs fiasco, or the 1961 CIA (and MI6) assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Or Kennedy’s 1962 speech at American University calling for the end of Pax Americana. We know what happened to Kennedy soon after that. Pick any of these incidents. But it was the fall of the U.S.S.R. that signaled to the governing class, the proprietor class, that the last real obstacle to global domination had been removed. In the interim, one finds the Iran/Contra affair, and the invasion of Iraq. The real and the symbolic meaning of the Soviet Union is forgotten today, I think. Its meaning for the developing world, especially.
The next conscious trial balloon was Clinton’s attack on the former Yugoslavia. A test run for expanding NATO. And it worked. The propaganda machine has never been as successful as it was when it demonized the Serbs and Milosevic. Then came 9/11. And the well honed PR machine spewed an endless barrage of hyper-patriotic rhetoric and disinformation. American exceptionalism was given full credibility. And remember Colin Powell and his cartoon visual teaching aids at the UN? Nobody was going to argue. Certainly not the white liberal class. And Hollywood upped its game in churning out military fantasies. And in just churning out fantasies. A genre that lent itself to obvious neo-colonial messages. By 2007, when Barack Obama announces he will run for President, the master narrative for America was firmly entrenched. The biggest hit from Hollywood in this period is Avatar (2009), a neo-colonial fable that fit seamlessly with Obama’s reconquest of Africa.
Dan Glazebrook recently wrote:
The year 2009, two years before Gaddafi’s murder, was a pivotal one for US-African relations. First, because China surpassed the US as the continent’s largest trading partner; and second, because Gaddafi was elected President of the African Union. The significance of both for the decline of US influence on the continent could not be clearer. Whilst Gaddafi was spearheading attempts to unite Africa politically, committing serious amounts of Libyan oil wealth to make this dream a reality, China was quietly smashing the West’s monopoly over export markets and investment finance. Africa no longer had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for loans, agreeing to whatever self-defeating terms were on offer, but could turn to China – or indeed Libya – for investment. And if the US threatened to cut them off from their markets, China would happily buy up whatever was on offer. Western economic domination of Africa was under threat as never before.
The US response was to increase base building, upgrade AFRICOM, and then murder Gadaffi. Hollywood hits from this period include The Hurt Locker and The Dark Knight. Meanwhile domestically Obama was giving the OK for militarizing of police departments across the country. On another front….Danny Haiphong wrote…
What isn’t discussed often enough is how Obama has worked tirelessly to protect and fulfill the interests of the corporate healthcare system. In 2009, he collaborated with the monopoly health insurance industry and its pharmaceutical counterparts to repress the demand for single payer healthcare. The conditions at the time appeared ripe for a single payer system. Popular discontent with Republican Party rule was at its highest point. A relatively organized movement for single payer care was represented by organizations such as Healthcare Now. The Democratic Party possessed a majority in both the House and Senate.
Obama came to power as Wall Street went into meltdown, 2008. But instead of hope and change we got almost 5 trillion dollars moving to the top 1% of the financial elite. Poverty increased every year under Obama, as did inequality. Social Network came out in 2010 and Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. Both were big hits. The message from Hollywood never changed. And part of that message is that wealth is its own justification and a symbol of virtue. Hollywood, and U.S. liberals just naturally gravitate toward the rich.
Obama attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. And it is perhaps that last venture that will prove to be his most significant. Arming, training, and coordinating the Saudi aggression (and now that has escalated to boots on the ground) against the helpless Yemen has resulted in the largest humanitarian catastrophe in five decades.
The U.S. now has all but formally criminalized dissent, especially if that dissent is aimed at Israel.
None of this is to create exact corollaries between political action and studio product. But rather that the overriding message of Hollywood in both film and TV is to validate U.S. exceptionalism. And to hedge criticism with faint token protest. But its not just Hollywood, its theatre and fiction and all the rest of the arts. The erasure of the working class is the most pronounced truth in American culture today. There are no Clifford Odets (a high school drop out) anymore; they have been replaced by a steady stream of well groomed compliant MFA grads. Mostly from elite and expensive schools. Hemingway and James Baldwin were not college grads, nor was Tennessee Williams, the son of a traveling shoe salesman. Even more recent authors such as Thomas Pynchon were college drop outs (to join the Navy), but the point is that today mass culture is carefully controlled. Dreiser was a college drop out, and Twain was a typesetters apprentice. Others like Faulkner, went to University, but also worked. In Faulkner’s case as a postman. Same profession as Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Stephen Crane and Hemingway worked as journalists, when that was an honorable profession.
The decision makers in mass culture are mostly firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party ethos (witness stuff like House of Cards, Madame Secretary, or Veep). If one only gets one’s news from MSNBC or FOX or CNN then one will take away mostly pure propaganda. Rachel Maddow has a career based on craven parroting of DNC approved talking points and conclusions. Bill Maher, whose show is on HBO, is of late pimping for war. Sunday news talk shows do not invite radical voices, not ever. Michael Parenti isn’t on those shows, nor are Ajamu Baraka or Glen Ford Mike Whitney or Ed Curtin or Dan Glazebrook or Stephen Gowans. No, but there are plenty of retired generals and politicians. This is a media that exerts absolute control of message.
The loss of the working class, of class diversity, has been a far bigger blow to the health of the culture than anything else. One might argue that culture has always been, in the modern era, a province of the bourgeoisie, and that’s true. But there is still a rather pronounced change that has taken place. But Americans are discouraged from thinking in terms of class. They see individualism and identity. Get me more women directors they cry….which would give us more versions of Zero Dark Thirty, I guess. Gender equality matters, something every single socialist country in history has emphasized. Something Chavez saw fit to write into the Bolivarian constitution on day one. Chavez, who liberal avatar Bernie Sanders dismissed as a “dead communist dictator”. Chavez, who feminist avatar Hillary Clinton worked overtime to oust from power.
People are shocked…shocked I say…that US soldiers are killed in Niger. Darn that Donald Trump. When it is pointed out that it was Obama who sent troops there in his pivot to Africa, one is met with blank stares. The concern over U.S. soldiers dying is simply mind numbing in its hypocrisy and blinkered exceptionalism. I mean just count the numbers of dead civilians due to U.S. drone strikes from just one year. Pick any year you like.
Under Obama, the US African Command (AFRICOM) has penetrated every African country but Zimbabwe and Eritrea. AFRICOM has locked African nations into military subservience. In 2014, the US conducted 674 military operations in Africa . According to a recent Freedom of Information Act request by Intercept, the US currently has Special Forces deployed in more than twenty African nations.
Danny Haiphong
People are terrified today lest they be called conspiracy theorists. No single pejorative term has exercised such disproportionate power. There is a subterranean subject position associated with this, too. A masculine identity that connects with the presentation of those accepting of the official version of things. It is ‘no nonsense, mature, and sort of tough guy’ pose. Only weak and muddled (feminine you see!) would bother to question official narratives of…well, anything. It is staggering, really, why so few ask why is it OK to assassinate people without due process? Why is it whistleblowers, truth tellers, are being locked away and shunned? Why are there 900 plus US military bases around the world. Why, given the growing poverty in the U.S. do we need an updated nuclear arsenal that will cost trillions? In fact why is the defense budget over 4 billion a day? The liberal educated class seem not to ask such questions. Let alone ask is the U.S. arming takfiri jihadists in Syria? Most of what people call conspiracy is just perfectly reasonable skepticism. Given a history that includes COINTELPRO, Operation Northwoods, Gladio, MKUltra, and Operation AJAX. This is also relevant in terms of the coming war on *fake news*. An idea put forward by Obama and now in enthusiastic Orwellian operation by Facebook, YouTube, and Google. In the U.K. Theresa May proudly announces the government SHOULD control what one can see on the internet. Censorship is pitched as protection.
And then we come to NATO and Europe. Why does NATO even exist one might ask? I mean the USSR doesn’t exist anymore. Well, the answer has been under construction for a few years now, and that answer is the extraordinary anti Putin propaganda of the U.S. The “Russian Threat” is now an accepted trope in public discourse. Or the anti Iranian disinformation. In fact Iran is far more democratic and less a global threat (actually its NO global threat) than U.S. boon allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Which brings us back to Yemen. The utter destruction of Yemen, poorest Arab country in the world, and now one with the largest Cholera outbreak in history, posed no threat to ANYONE. Certainly not to the United States. Are we to believe the House of Saud is worth supporting? They behead homosexuals and witches in Saudi Arabia. The leader of KSA is a 32 year old psychopath named Mohammed Bin Salman. Someone please explain the U.S. support for this country?
Or Venezuela. The U.S. has waged various campaigns against this sovereign nation for over a decade now. A democracy. But a disobedient one. Where is the outcry? When people are going on about Harvey Weinstein, a troglodyte movie producer that literally everyone knew was a serial abuser, I wonder that the women of Venezuela seem not to count. Or of Libya, or Haiti, or Puerto Rico, or hell, the women of Houston right now. Poor women. Ah, but that is class again. Now perhaps the Weinstein affair will yield good results and some form of collective protection and maybe even unionizing will take place to limit the power of rich white men. I doubt it, but maybe. Still, given that the liberal class today applaud the idea of making it OK for women to bomb defenseless villages in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen, just like men, and given that most of these horrified by Weinstein were and are solidly behind Hillary Clinton and the DNC, and laud adulation on figures like Maddie Albright, it seems hard to imagine.
David Rosen:
Sexual abuse and violence in the U.S. is as old as the country. America’s patriarchal culture long legitimized sexual abuse and violence toward women — and children — whether conducted at the workplace, at home, a nightclub or on a deserted street. During the nation’s earliest days, the custom of sexual abuse and violence was legitimized through the notion of “chastisement.” This was a feature of Anglo-American common law that recognized the husband as master of “his” household and, thus, permitted him to subject “his” wife to corporal punishment, including rape, so long as he did not inflict permanent injury upon her. Sexual abuse was institutionalized in the rape of African and later African-American female slaves. As the legal scholar Adrienne Davis notes, “U.S. slavery compelled enslaved black women to labor in three markets – productive, reproductive, and slavery – crucial to the political economy.”
One need only note the sexual violence that takes place in the U.S. military (See Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War). But that is not the military you see in this season’s TV shows such as SEAL Team or Valor or The Brave. The current Tom Cruise film American Made is a sort of comedy about Barry Seal who worked as a pilot for the CIA, and with various cartels in South America. Yeah, nothing funnier than squashing a socialist government like in Nicaragua. There is not a single Spanish speaking character who is not either a drunk, a sadist, or just incompetent. This stunningly racist revisionism was called “jaunty and bouncy” by the Hollywood Reporter.
The liberal class will always side with the status quo. Always. They do not care if the status quo is fascist. And its suits them much more to lay out bromides about male abuse of women, as long as this doesn’t mean having to untangle the complexity of women in unfamiliar non tourist visited nations like Yemen or Libya or Honduras. Just like the fact that U.S. domestic police departments murdered over a thousand black men in 2015. And continue to do so, along with increasing numbers of black women. That’s just not a jaunty bouncy story, I guess. Obama has never been comfortable talking about or to black people. He did manage to scold Colin Kaepernick recently though, about the pain he, Kaepernick, might be causing. The pain of white billionaire sports team owners I guess. The Uncle Tomism of what Glen Ford called black misleadership has never been greater. And that’s another crime we can lay, largely, at the feet of Barack Obama.
The U.S. House voted unanimously to sanction Iran and North Korea, an absurdity and a crime, and yet one that barely registered on the media Richter scale. What has Iran or North Korea ever done to hurt anyone in the United States? It is Saudi Arabia and Israel that fear a democratic nation like Iran and the influence they wield in the region. Iran is accused of fomenting instability but evidence is never given. Russia is said to control U.S. public opinion, but evidence is never given. The U.S. doesn’t even bother to really try and make claims about Venzeuela, because its just part of inherited wisdom that they are *bad*. Like Castro was bad, like Gadaffi, like Aristide, like anyone exhibiting independence. The world according to media entertainment is made up of bad guys and good guys. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA, recently stated that his agency would become a “much more vicious agency” in fighting its enemies. Its actually hard to imagine what that might look like given CIA history. More vicious than rendition, drone killing and black site torture? Remember it was the U.S. and its School of the Americas that trained those death squads in Central America. Hollywood makes comedies about this.
In any event nobody in Hollywood complains. Just as none of the actresses assaulted by Weinstein (and countless others) said anything lest they lose career opportunities. Just as nobody complains about the racism and demonizing of Muslims or Serbs or North Koreans or Russians lest they not get the job. Coercion is silent and a given. It is also absolute. Most actors and directors simply don’t think about it, and most know little beyond what they hear on corporate news or read in the NYTimes. But I understand. People have to eat, have to feed their families. The real problem is that power is ever more consolidated. Distribution of films is monopolized. And for most Americans, foreign policy remains a giant black hole about which they know very little. Tell someone Milosovic was actually a good guy and they will laugh at you (this still happens on the left, too, rather depressingly). Tell them Russia is not threatening the U.S. or Europe, and they will laugh at you. Try to explain what Imperialism is and means, and you get that bored look of irritation. A good rule of thumb is if the U.S. targets a country or leader, then its worth questioning the western generated propagated propaganda in mainstream media about said country or leader (think Syria, Gadaffi, Aristide, Milosovic, Iran, North Korea). The U.S. does not go after countries who welcome western capital.
One of the things I’ve noticed about Hollywood film is the extraordinary amount of self pity from most characters. Self pity, entitlement, and sarcasm. The people who produce and make film and TV today, by and large, tacitly censor themselves. Some don’t have to, of course. But there is a general group think at work. And it extends to the way characters are written. The problems of affluent white people is the template here. Few examine the wider world, and mostly when they do it is seen as a world of threat and menace. An uncivilized place in need of guidance from the civilized white West (The Lost City of Z comes to mind, which made all the approved anti colonial notes while still creating a colonial narrative anyway.). But it is even more narrow than that. Everything resembles a studio; political discussions, even if they take place in outer space, resemble studio executives discussing opening weekend profits, or Neilson ratings. And since Hollywood itself ever more resembles Wall Street, or some corporate headquarters, that is increasingly what the world looks like. It is a profound loss of imagination. Westerns look and sound the same as melodramas set in Santa Monica or New York. Fantasy worlds resemble corporate headquarters or corporate motivational weekends. It is a world created by writers under thirty, largely, and certainly under forty. These are worlds created by people who themselves know very little of the world. They know even less about having to work for a living. The entire universe of film is absent any class awareness. History is simplified the better to appeal to a wider audience. Everything feels and sounds the same. And it is stultifying. There are films and TV from Europe, even from the U.K. that have merit, have heterogeneous sensibilities, but not from Hollywood. Like White House press conferences, the idea is to stay on message. Black characters sound white (or are given caricature *black* dialect and dialogue), brown characters sound white (or are given caricature barrio dialects), and Muslims sound dangerous and devious. Asians seem lifted from Fu Manchu serials or Charlie Chan. Strange when I hear people make fun of ethnic cliches from the 1940s, because it is really no different today (and check the recent TV incarnation of the venerable Star Trek franchise where the Klingon villains are very dark, live in dark spaceships and utter a guttural invented language all of which suggests something oddly racist and like nothing so much as colonial portraits of savages from darkest Africa).
Fixation on Trump’s crimes distracts from a system in which crime is a built-in factor. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. They are only the figureheads that carry water for the system. And the system is the property of the ruling class. People vote as if it crucially matters, and they vote for who they like. Not for policy because mostly they have no idea of policy. Trump is an obvious target, but that’s the problem in a sense. America didn’t become racist and violent overnight. The forces of social unrest have been building for decades. Trump was inevitable. His lack of basic literacy mirrors the nation he nominally heads, and his vulgarity mirrors the vulgarity of America, as does his misogyny and racism. The same advisors are in place and if Hillary had won, those openly fascist thugs applauding Trump would still be committing hate crimes. Has Trump empowered them? To a degree, yes. But an HRC win would likely have provided motivation of a different sort and the same violence would be taking place. You cannot sustain, as a country, this level of inequality. And as more super hurricanes descend on us, as the bio-sphere collapses, none of this may end up mattering. There is something disturbing, actually, about the relentless attacks on Trump. Its like beating up a special needs kid. Where was this hatred and outrage before? I mean Trump’s America, a term I hear a lot, is just America. We have over 2 million people in prison in the U.S. Far and away leaders in the world. Infant mortality however puts the U.S. between 26th and 51st, depending on who is counting. There is no Universal Heath Care, no union protection for workers, no maternity leave, no free education. What is there to feel so special about, exactly? Trump was very popular on his moronic reality TV show. I’m guessing more than few now outraged by this buffoonish reactionary watched that show. I mean it did last fifteen years I believe. Who did they think he was? There is nothing wrong with identifying the crimes of Trump’s administration. But there is something deeply wrong in not recognizing it as a continuation of prevailing policy. Yes, it is worse in many areas. The environment for one. But then again, 47% of the world’s pollution is caused by the military. And the U.S. has a military bigger than the next ten largest militaries in the world. And every president since the first Bush has increased the military budget. The nightmare did not begin with the swearing in of Donald Trump. But nobody likes him. They liked Obama. And that is why he was able to do so much harm. Trump is dangerous not because of what he thinks (he mostly doesn’t) but because of his ignorance and weakness (and fear). And that weakness generated his welcoming hand to the Pentagon. Foreign policy is really in the hands of a man nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’. One cannot blame this catastrophic situation on one man. This is the creation of American history.
Last week, the US said it was working to create “alternative government authorities” on Syrian territory. This latest move, aside from demonstrating once again that the US has no respect for Syria’s territorial integrity, indicates we may be seeing more from that group of mercenaries known as Islamic State.
Thus, it seems to be an appropriate time to reflect upon a set of very strange circumstances that led to the rise of this loathsome terrorist group. Here are the top 10 reasons, in no particular order, as to why we should be very suspicious about this group.
10. Convenient Timing
In late August 2013, the United States was on the verge of initiating a massive attack on the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad over a deadly chemical attack that had occurred in the town of Ghouta just days earlier. Although it would have made no sense for Assad to have resorted to such dirty tactics, Washington had found its casus belli. It should be noted that at this time the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was largely unknown. That would change soon enough.
Meanwhile, a terrible thing happened on the way to this jolly little war. UK Prime Minister David Cameron suffered a stunning defeat in the House of Commons, voting down his effort to join the Americans in Syria. Apparently the British were America’s obedient poodle no longer.
The setback had an apparent sobering effect on Barack Obama, who suddenly – in a feigned nod to democratic procedure and all that – called for Congress to decide whether or not to use military force against Syrian. Tellingly, that vote never materialized.
What did materialize, however, and with alarming speed and viciousness, was a terrorist group that rose up like a phoenix from the ashes of Iraq known as Islamic State (ISIS)*, with evil designs to create an Islamic caliphate across a wide swath of Iraq and Syria.
In other words, the perfect casus belli for the US in Syria that would require no need for a vote from Congress.
9. Journalist Killings
As if to draw gratuitous attention to itself more than anything else, the Sunni terrorist group ISIS, under the leadership of one Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, began to grab world headlines not by its battlefield exploits, but by carrying out videotaped executions of Western journalists, as well as destroying cultural heritage sites. I still can’t help wondering: Why didn’t the group just let its fighting skills speak for itself? Why the apparent need for such outrageous publicity stunts? Was this compensation for something the group was desperately lacking?
In any case, starting in August 2014, almost one year to the day that Obama was forced to put the brakes on his Syrian attack, the beheadings began in earnest.
On August 19, US journalist James Foley, seen kneeling on the ground in some undetermined location next to his apparent executioner, ‘Jihadi John,’ reads out a short statement before being beheaded by his captor. However, Islamic State spared its audience the gore by not showing the moment of the actual beheading; the video only shows a head lying on a body following the purported act.
Even Western mainstream publications admitted that something didn’t seem quite right.
Under the headline, ‘Foley murder video may have been staged’ the Telegraph, a reputable British newspaper, interviewed forensic experts who called into question the moment in the video when Foley is allegedly being beheaded by his captor.
“After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black,” the expert said.
Another expert who examined the video for the newspaper said: “I think it has been staged. My feeling is that the execution may have happened after the camera was stopped.”
Incredibly, every subsequent beheading video put out by Islamic State attracted the same amount of scepticism – not just from alternative websites, who were also noticing the many irregularities contained in the videos, but from mainstream media news sources.
Following the release of the video purported to show the beheading of Steve Sotloff, a journalist who worked with the Jerusalem Post, The Australian newspaper reported that “the apparent beheading on camera of a second US hostage by a man with a British accent was again staged, according to forensic analysis.”
Then there was the video of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, dressed in impeccably clean orange jumpsuits, being led along a Libyan beach by black-clad members of ISIS, all of whom appear to be members of some NBA basketball team.
Veryan Khan, editorial director of the Florida-based Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, told Fox News that “the speaker, “Jihad Joseph” is much larger than the sea in both the close up and wide shots, and his head is bizarrely out of proportion, meaning he was filmed indoors and the sea added behind him… In addition, the jihadists featured in the film look to be more than 7 feet tall, towering as much as two feet above their victims…”
In July 2015, yet another strange report emerged, CyberBerkut, a Ukrainian group of hackers, said it hacked John McCain’s laptop while he was on an official visit to Kiev around the first week of June 2015. In a report by TechWorm, what they purported to find was a fully staged production of an ISIS execution video, with an actor portraying an executioner who is holding a knife in preparation to behead the prisoner.
The authenticity of this video has not been independently verified.
None of this proves that the individuals in all of the ISIS beheading videos did not go on to meet some grisly fate. However, it seems worth noting that so many forensic experts have spoken out on the “staged” nature of these videos, and that the actual moment of execution during these film productions is never actually shown. Why would such a barbarous group of villains like ISIS need to script and censor their videos?
8. ISIS freedom of movement
Despite employing state-of-the-art fighter jets, like the F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Warthog, the US campaign to destroy Islamic State was largely an exercise in utter futility. There is no other way to explain it. In June 2014, a convoy of hundreds of ISIS fighters drove through 200 km of the Syro-Arabian Desert in fresh-off-the-lot Toyota pickup trucks on the way to Syria. For any modern military, eliminating such a target would have been the equivalent of a lazy afternoon at the shooting range, or shooting fish in a barrel. The fact that these terrorists made it to Syria unmolested tells us everything we need to know about America’s real agenda.
“With state of the art jet fighter aircraft … it would have been – from a military standpoint – ‘a piece of cake’, a rapid and expedient surgical operation, which would have decimated the Islamic State convoys in a matter of hours,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in Global Research.
“Instead what we have witnessed is an ongoing drawn out six months of relentless air raids and bombings, and the terrorist enemy is apparently still intact.”
“And we are led to believe that the Islamic State cannot be defeated by a powerful US led military coalition of 19 countries,” he added.
The only reasonable conclusion to make from all of this is that the air campaign was not designed to eliminate Islamic State.
In 2002, Rita Katz and Josh Devon founded Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), which, according to its website, is “the world’s leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization specializing in tracking and analyzing online activity of the global extremist community.”
In 2006, in a New Yorker article entitled, “Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business,” it was mentioned how SITE spoke directly with jihadists via various message boards:
“Katz has a testy relationship with the government, sometimes acting as a consultant and sometimes as an antagonist. About a year ago, a SITE staffer, under an alias, managed to join an exclusive jihadist message board that, among other things, served as a debarkation point for many would-be suicide bombers.
For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as “wills,” the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going.
When Katz called officials in Washington, she was reportedly met with resistance: ‘Oh, Rita, I’m not sure you should even be communicating with them—you might be providing material support!,” they told her.
In an interview with CNN, Katz admitted that her group was able to “beat [ISIS] with a release” of a video before it had even been disseminated.
In 2007, SITE came under fire for obtaining an alleged Bin Laden video a month prior to its formal release.
Some have raised questions as to how this small group is able to do what the government has not been able to: track ISIS and other terrorist groups with uncanny efficiency.
6. Toyota Trucks
Watching mainstream media reports detail the adventures of Islamic State as they speed carefree across wide-open desert, beards blowing in the wind, one would be forgiven for thinking they were watching a Toyota commercial.
The Times of Israel went so far as to ridicule the leaders of the West for expressing such fear over these militants in their Toyotas like hell raising teenagers speeding around the parking lot of McDonald’s on a Friday night to impress their friends.
“It’s almost unbelievable,” Avi Issacharoff wrote. “They used to say in the IDF that ‘the man in the tank will win,’ justifying the preference for armor over infantry. Now we hear that, from a US source no less, ‘the man in the Toyota’ will defeat the West.”
Somehow we are expected to believe that these shiny new trucks, along with over 2,000 Humvee vehicles, fell into the terrorists’ control by winning some battles in Iraq, like in Mosul and Palmyra. That absurd explanation falls very wide of the mark and needs far more inquiry.
5. Drone attack on Russia
On New Year’s Eve and on January 6, 2018, Russia’s Khmeimim Airbase in Syria was attacked. The first incident involved militants armed with mortars that resulted in the death of two Russian soldiers and damage to several aircraft. The second attack involved a swarm of 13 drones armed with bomblets, which Russian forces countered by means of electronic warfare and air-defense systems. Around half of the drones were electronically hijacked by Russian forces, while the others were shot down without incident. Nevertheless, the attack required a high level of expertise from a “technologically advanced country,” according to Russia.
The United States countered the claim, suggesting that such technology can be easily purchased. Pentagon spokesman Maj. Adrian Rankin-Galloway said the “devices and technologies can easily be obtained in the open market.”
Meanwhile, however, President Putin never mentioned Islamic State when he discussed the incident with the media.
“Those aircraft were only camouflaged – I want to emphasize this – to look like handicraft production. In fact, it is quite obvious that there were elements of high-tech nature there,” the Russian leader said.
So are we expected to believe that Islamic State terrorists were able to buy these UAV drones, or is it more realistic to believe, along with the Russians, that some outside major power was needed to provide the know-how?
4. Never attacked mainland Israel
In March 2016, the warriors of Islamic State picked up their pens in an effort to explain away a question that has been perplexing many observers: why don’t they ever attack Israel?
In the article, translated by a group called MEMRI, the group said it holds to the position that the Palestinian cause does not take precedence over any other jihadi struggle.
“If we look at the reality of the world today, we will find that it is completely ruled by polytheism and its laws, except for the regions where Allah made it possible for the Islamic State to establish the religion…. Therefore, jihad in Palestine is equal to jihad elsewhere,” the article said.
“The apostate [tyrants] who rule the lands of Islam are graver infidels than [the Jews], and war against them takes precedence over war against the original infidels,” the article said, as reported in the Times of Israel.
Whatever the case may be, this seems to be the first time in modern history that a radical jihadist group has had no reason to quarrel with Israel.
3. Oil Export Business
After Islamic State managed to make it across the vast desert between Iraq and Syria without attracting so much as a damaged fender, it managed to do the unthinkable: it set up a very lucrative oil-export business practically overnight in the north of the country. And this was not some small-time operation.
According to one estimate, the motley crew of mercenaries was generating profits of more than £320million a year from oil exports, or about 40,000 barrels of crude every single day.
Are we really expected to believe that a 19-member military organization led by the United States was powerless to put this rag-tag operation out of business?
The reason why the story is so utterly preposterous is that Russia, in a matter of several days, was able to do what this multinational outfit could not do in over a year. In mid-November 2015, Russia had announced that it had destroyed in a matter of days some 500 fuel trucks – and there is plenty of videotape of the Russian attacks for the naysayers who doubt the Kremlin’s claim.
According to Russian General Staff spokesman Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov: “In just the first few days, our aviation has destroyed 500 fuel tanker trucks, which greatly reduced illegal oil export capabilities of the militants and, accordingly, their income from oil smuggling.”
2. Islamic State’s Israeli medical plan
In March 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported a rather stunning revelation that Israel was treating “Al-Qaeda* fighters wounded in the Syria civil war.”
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Israel has provided medical assistance to nearly 2,000 Syrians.
The Wall Street Journal quoted “an Israeli military official” who said no questions were asked of the patients.
“We don’t ask who they are, we don’t do any screening,” the official said. “Once the treatment is done, we take them back to the border and they go on their way.”
Amos Yadlin, the former military intelligence chief, told the Journal that Hezbollah and Iran “are the major threat to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists, who are also an enemy.”
“Those Sunni elements who control some two-thirds to 90% of the border on the Golan aren’t attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy – maybe it isn’t Israel.”
The Jerusalem Post repeated a joke allegedly told by Syrian President Bashar Assad to Foreign Affairs, ‘How can you say that al-Qaida doesn’t have an air force? They have the Israeli air force…They are supporting the rebels in Syria. It is very clear.”
1.The Pentagon report that speak volumes
In May 2015, a declassified Pentagon document provided shocking evidence that the US-led campaign in Syria not only contributed directly to the rise of the Islamic State (IS), but that Washington was perfectly satisfied with such an outcome.
The US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, obtained by Judicial Watch, dated August 2012, states that the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” comprise “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq].”
Furthermore, it states, these forces are being supported by a Western-led coalition – “The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition.”
It went on to predict that the takeover of Hasaka and Deir Ezzor would possibly create a militant Islamist political entity in eastern Syria:
“If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasak and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”
According to Nafeed Ahmez from Middle East Eye, “This extraordinary passage confirms that at least three years ago, the Pentagon anticipated the rise of a ‘Salafist Principality’ as a direct consequence of its Syria strategy – and that the ‘supporting powers’ behind the rebels ‘wanted’ this outcome ‘to isolate the Syrian regime,’ and weaken Shiite influence via Iraq and Iran.”
Let that sink in for a moment. The US-backed coalition, which seemed so inexplicably lacklustre in its fight against Islamic State, to the point where this group was actually able to open an oil export business, not to mention drive its Toyota trucks across wide-open desert unmolested, was more content to let a band of terrorists occupy Syria than the legitimate government in Damascus.
It seems safe to say, based on the findings of this incredible document, that such a rationale is exactly what guided Washington’s hand not only in Syria, but in other regime-change war zones, like Iraq and Libya. Democracy building was not the desired result in these fated places, but absolute chaos.
* Terrorist organization, banned in Russia by court order.
Preface by Washington’s Blog: A leading cybersecurity expert has publicly said that Mr. Eliason’s research as presented in this article does not violate the law. Washington’s Blog does not express an opinion about whether or not the claims set forth in this article are accurate or not. Make up your own mind.
A little over a year ago, the deep-state graced the world with Propornot. Thanks to them, 2017 became the year of fake news. Every news website and opinion column now had the potential to be linked to the Steele dossier and Trump collusion with Russia. Every journalist was either with us or against us. Every one that was against us became Russia’s trolls.
Fortunately for the free world, the anonymous group known as Propornot that tried to “out” every website as a potential Russian colluder, in the end only implicated themselves.
Turnabout is fair play and that’s always the fun part, isn’t it? With that in mind, I know the dogs are going to howl this evening over this one.
The damage Propornot did to scores of news and opinions websites in late 2016-2017 provides the basis of a massive civil suit. I mean huge, as in the potential is there for a tobacco company sized class-action sized lawsuit. I can say that because I know a lot about a number of entities that are involved and the enormous amount of money behind them.
How serious is this? In 2016, a $10,000 reward was put out for the identities of Propornot players. No one has claimed it yet, and now, I guess no one will. There are times in your life that taking a stand has a cost. To make sure the story gets out and is taken seriously, this is one of those times.
If that’s what it takes for you to understand the danger Propornot and the groups around them pose to everyone you love, if you understand it, everything will have been well worth it.
In this article, you’ll meet some of the people staffing Propornot. You’ll meet the people and publications that provide their expenses and cover the logistics. You’ll meet a few of the deep state players. We’ll deal with them very soon. They need to see this as the warning shot over the bow and start playing nice with regular people. After that, you’ll meet the NGO’s that are funding and orchestrating all of it. How am I doing so far?
The image that you see is the clincher or game winner that supplies the necessary proof up front and the direct path to Propornot. This was a passive scan of propornot.com showing the administrative dashboard belongs to the InterpreterMag.com as shown on the left of the image. On the right, it shows that uploads to Propornot.com come from InterpreterMag.com and is a product of that publication.
Now we have the first layer of Propornot, fake news, and our 1st four contestants. We havea slew of new media organizations that are influenced by, or feeding Propornot. Remember, fake news got off the ground and got its wings because of the attention this website received from the Washington Post in Dec. 2016.
At the Interpreter Mag level, here are the people:
Michael Weiss is the Editor-in-Chief at the InterpreterMag.com. According to his Linkd profile, he is also a National Security Analyst for CNN since Jul 2017 as well as an Investigative Reporter for International Affairs for CNN since Apr 2017. He has been a contributor there since 2015. He has been a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast since Jun 2015.
With the lengthy CNN cred’s, how much involvement does CNN have in fake news? Yes, I know, but we’re talking about Propornot.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick is a Russian translator and analyst for the Interpreter. She has worked as an editor for EurasiaNet.org and RFE/RL.
Pierre Vaux is an analyst and translator for the Interpreter. He’s also an intern. He is a contributor to the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, RFE/RL and Left Foot Forward and works at Dataminr Inc.
James Miller’s bio at the InterpreterMag.com includes Managing Editor of The Interpreter where he reports on Russia, Ukraine, and Syria. James runs the “Under The Black Flag” column at RFE/RL which provides news, opinion, and analysis about the impact of the Islamic State extremist group in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. He is a contributor at Reuters, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, and other publications. He is an expert on verifying citizen journalism and has been covering developments in the Middle East, specifically Syria and Iran, since 2009. Follow him on Twitter: @MillerMENA- Miller even works for the US Embassy in Kiev “diplo-page” the Kiev Post.
The Interpreter is a product of the Atlantic Council. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has been carrying the weight in Ukrainian-Russian affairs for the Atlantic Council. Fellows working with the Atlantic Council in this area include:
StopFake- Irena Chalupa- Chalupa is the sister to the same Alexandra Chalupa that brought the term Russian hacking to worldwide attention. Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine’s propaganda channel Stopfake.org She is a Ukrainian Diaspora leader. The Chalupa’s are the 1st family of Ukrainian propaganda. She works with and for Ukrainian Intelligence through the Atlantic Council, Stopfake, and her sisters Andrea (Euromaidanpr) and Alexandra.
The strand that ties this crew together is they all work for Ukrainian Intelligence. If you hit the links, the ties are documented very clearly. We’ll get to that point again shortly, but let’s go further:
Propornot-> Atlantic Council -> Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
Who are the BBG? According to Wikipedia- “The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an independent agency of the United States government. According to its website, its mission is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. The BBG supervised Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Television Marti, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.
The board of the BBG was eliminated and replaced with a single appointed chief executive officer as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which was passed in December 2016.”
On January 1, 2016, the Interpreter became a special project of RFE/RL and under the oversight of the BBG. The Secretary of State had a seat on the board of the BBG until December 2016. Why the change?
During the 2016 election, the BBG developed a major conflict of interest. At least two BBG board members worked actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. These government officials were working against the president-elect after the election. It looks like it didn’t go unnoticed. In the following linked article, it shows that they should be investigated for their part in an attempted coup.
From a Nov 7, 2016, article– “Karen Kornbluh is helping refine and to get Hillary Clinton’s message out. ” All of them are names to watch if Clinton wins — and key jobs at the FCC and other federal agencies are up for grabs.”
According to her bio: Karen founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program and is a senior fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Karen has written extensively about technology policy, women, and family policy for The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post. New York Times columnist David Brooks cited her Democracy article “Families Valued,” focused on “juggler families” as one of the best magazine articles of 2006.
Michael Kempner is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of MWW Group, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, and may get a greater role if she is elected. Kempner is a member of the Public Relations Hall of Fame. Michael Kempner hired Anthony Weiner after the sexting scandal broke in 2011.
Jeff Shell, chairman of the BBG and Universal Filmed Entertainment is supporting a secondary role by being an honor roll donor to the Atlantic Council. While the BBG is supposed to be neutral it has continuously helped increase tensions in Eastern Europe. While giving to the Atlantic Council may not be illegal while in his position, currently, the Atlantic Council’s main effort is to ignite a war with Russia. This may set up a major conflict of interest.
According to journalist Robert Parry “The people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East.”
Parry goes on to say that at the forefront of this is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO. Their main goal is a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.”
So, to make sense of all this, most of the people listed would have held cabinet positions in a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the Interpreter is a project of RFE/RL then the decision to go ahead with Propornot would have to go across their desk. That includes then Sec of State, John Kerry.
The unasked question of why would a US Government Agency do this (?) needs to be addressed. All the people listed above were actively working for Clinton to get her elected and throw Donald Trump’s campaign off the rails.
After the election, they were going to take care of Clinton’s “deplorables” by dissecting alternative media. I wrote about this before the election and I warned several major new sites what they could expect. I was right on the money. After she lost, it was already in motion. The deplorable media didn’t fall into a particular political pattern other than they did not promote Hillary Clinton.
These people want reality shaped on what the perceived majority (louder) group believes to be true, regardless of what the facts are. Perception based reality is only a Facebook like away from killing one person or elevating another to hero status regardless of what they have done.
That little statement about the free speech rally says it all. It’s something that would hardly be noticed unless you were looking for it because it is part of the meta-data.
Now you can say it’s only a sentence and who cares? Nobody communicates through metadata do they? Wasn’t that what Propornot was all about? Yes, they do communicate through metadata. That’s why I look at it.
Do you see it? No? Look again. There in the metadata, at the bottom of the image is an ad for a job. Go for it and remember to mention the header. It could just as easily be hacking instructions, or a do not disturb sign. That’s why it pays to really research carefully.
The Boston ‘Free Speech’ Rally was billed by the social networks and MSM as a fascist rally. It was really a Free Speech Rally. What they learned is that with just a little nudge, they can make you demand nationalist repression. Nice going Boston!
Hey, is this starting to sound a little conspiratorial? If it is, we need ruskie hackers with Guy Fawkes masks to make this work. They have to admit to changing international politics through hacking in 2016, belong to a foreign country, code in Russian, and use spear phishing techniques to lure people in. Let’s not forget that they also have to work for some form of Intelligence.
Most importantly, they have to work with and influence all of the people above. They will definitely impact US foreign policy toward Russia. Let’s raise the stakes even more. The hackers have to answer to whoever is funding a lot of the illegal and immoral activities.
They are not even savvy enough to stay clear of outing each other. This is the Pravy Sektor hacker RUH8. The common thread for these hackers is clear if you read the linked material on the profiles that make up these organizations. They work for Bellingcat, Informnapalm, the Atlantic Council, Ukrainian Intel, and the Diaspora.
In a follow-up article, I have reason to ask if they were given access to United States Government Top Secret Secure Servers. I’m not kidding.
In a Euromaidan Press article dated November 2nd, 2016, the hackers state enthusiastically “Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA… I don’t know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don’t think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics.”
And we have a winner. In 2016 the sharp movement in international politics was caused by…survey says….hacking!!!!
According to Donna Brazille, the Democratic Party servers were hacked multiple times and the hacking didn’t stop until December 2016. At this juncture, we should be able to agree that Seth Rich leaked the information to Wikileaks. But, now we are talking about other hacks. In the above linked article, these hacker specifically say their favorite route is spear phishing email accounts.
In the article, you’ll also see they work directly for Ukrainian Intel. Bellingcat works directly for Ukrainian Intel and works with them and the Atlantic Council. Stopfake is a product of Irena Chalupa who works for RFE/RL, the Atlantic Council and the Ukrainian government. Stopfake works directly with them and is a product of the Ukrainian government. Crowdstrike has an ongoing relationship with Ukrainian Intel and these particular hackers. Crowdstrike conjured up Fancy Bear. Well say, hello to the real fancy bear of 2016 (*fancybear is technically a set of tools and not people).
This means that former Secretary of State John Kerry approved of Ukrainian Intelligence hackers having access to servers inside a US Government Agency because of Propornot and the Atlantic Councils reliance on the hackers.
How are the Ukrainian hackers tied into Propornot at any level? James Miller isn’t shy about using their work. Propornot relies on the work of the Atlantic Council, Aric Toler, Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and Joel Harding. The Ukrainian hackers work directly with InformNapalm and are the go-to resource for most of the people involved and all of the people just named.
Who does the Atlantic Council work for? It’s the same people that staff RFE/RL.
“On 29 January 2016 in Washington, U.S.A., Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) President Eugene Czolij and Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe officially signed a Memorandum of Agreement to renew the cooperation between the UWC and the Atlantic Council, that began in September 2014.
In accordance with this Memorandum, the UWC will continue its cooperation with the Atlantic Council on implementing the “Ukraine in Europe Initiative”, which aims to galvanize international support for an independent, sovereign and territorially integral Ukraine, including Crimea. This initiative is also intended to support reforms in Ukraine and its EuroAtlantic integration, and to counter Russian disinformation.”
This one little paragraph spells out clearly what I have shown in detail throughout this article.
The Ukrainian World Congress is represented in the US Congress by the Ukrainian Caucus headed up by ISIS supporter and Nazi cheerleader Marcy Kaptur. Her Ukrainian Caucus represents people with political positions that scared Adolf Hitler in WWII.
The obvious takeaway is that a lawsuit is a bare minimum that needs to happen. People need to be investigated for crimes against the state. When we take a closer look at who had potential access to top-secret servers, that will become painfully obvious.
These people have tried and are trying to rip the fabric of society in pieces. At the very least, they have earned a good tarring…and feathering. When you look at the financial end of this a lawsuit in the billions would barely touch it.
Just one company the Ukrainian Diaspora started for this is valued over 100 million dollars. This will need to be a class action suit with a cease and desist to the BBG.
In early 2015, almost 2 years before most people took the idea of censorship seriously, I documented its inception. In the same way, it happens with many of the biggest stories of our times, I stumbled onto it by accident.
In early March 2015, Ukrainian Information Policy designer Joel Harding laid out what to expect going forward in the following statements: “In military IIO operations center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US, and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.
The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audiences emotions, motives, and reasoning.
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.”- Harding
While the above sounds gloriously overoptimistic, Harding, along with his little band of Kremlin Troll hunters personally started developing the idea of organizations capable of blackballing journalists and publications in a way that could not be construed as censorship.
From another March 2015 article– A “Disinformation Charter” for Media and Bloggers: Top-down censorship should be avoided. But rival media, from Al-Jazeera to the BBC, Fox and beyond, need to get together to create a charter of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Vigorous debate and disagreement qre ,of course, to be encouraged—but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community. A similar code can be accepted by bloggers and other online influencers.
This “Disinformation Charter” for responsible behavior (Ministry of Truth?) he describes is to fight “conscious deception” can only be weighed against how he describes Propaganda.“The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging one’s opponent.”– Harding
Journalists that need to be excluded are those “our side” label as propagandists or active measure agents.”
Harding’s connections in media are very large. Through his friend Mathew Armstrong, Harding had access to and the ear of the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG board is staffed by the who’s who of network and radio broadcast, print media and shortwave CEO’s and heavy hitters. They are behind RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty).
Where this wasn’t feasible, they set up hack and harass attacks at various publication to get them to stop publishing hard-hitting journalists. This still hasn’t been effective because it caused publishers to dig in and harden their internet properties instead.
The softer more indirect approach Harding pushed in March 2015 quickly developed into the unified media strategy he wanted for the US and Europe. Control the information and don’t allow contradicting information or news into the media stream. When it does get in, call it propaganda.
While NATO was busy setting up a vast network with which to accuse Russia of perpetuating propaganda from the Soviet era, Washington was suddenly swamped by a wave of hysteria. In an attempt to discredit the new US President, the dominant media accuse him of talking rubbish – in response, the President accuses them of propagating fake news. This cacophony is amplified by the swift development of the social media, which had once been intended for use as weapons of the State Department against nationalist regimes, but which today are popular forums used to combat abuse by all kinds of elites – with Washington at the top of the list.
As soon as the announcement of his surprise election was made public, and even before he had access to the White House, the immense majority of US and NATO media began screaming about the negligence and insanity of President Trump. Battle was joined between the media class and the new President, with each side accusing the other of propagating fake news.
Almost everywhere in the NATO countries – and only in these countries – political representatives began denouncing fake news. This was intended to reveal the supposed influence of Russian propaganda within the « Western democracies ». The State which has been the most seriously impacted by this campaign is France, whose President Emmanuel Macron recently announced the drafting of a law specifically aimed at fighting these « attacks on democracy », but only during « an electoral period ».
The fact that the English expression fake news is maintained in all the languages of the NATO countries attests to the Anglo-Saxon origin of the problem, when in fact the phrase designates a phenomenon as old as the world – false information.
At the origin of the campaign against « fake news » – NATO
In 2009, at the NATO summit in Strasbourg-Kehl, President Obama announçed his intention of creating an Alliance « Strategic Communication » service [1]. It took six years to implement, using elements of the 77th Brigade of the British Land Army and the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade of the United States Land Army (based in Germany and Italy).
At first, their mission was to counter communications accusing the US deep state of having itself organised the attacks of 9/11, then those accusing the Anglo-Saxons of having planned the « Arab Springs » and the war against Syria — such communications were termed « conspiracy theories ». However, the situation evolved rapidly in such a way as to convince the populations of the Alliance that Russia was continuing to apply propaganda from the Soviet era – and thus that NATO was still useful.
Finally, in April 2015, the European Union created a « Work Group for Strategic Communications – East » (East StratCom Task Force). Every week, this group addresses a report on Russian propaganda to thousands of journalists. For example, its last edition (dated 11 January 2018) accuses Sputnik of pretending that the Copenhagen zoo feeds its predators with abandoned household pets. Lord help us, the « democracies » are under attack ! Clearly, it is difficult for these specialists to find meaningful examples of Russian interference. In August of the same year, NATO inaugurated its « Centre for Strategic Communication » in Riga (Latvia). The following year, the US State Department created a Global Engagement Center which works on the same principles.
How Facebook, Hillary Clinton’s pet obsession, turned against her
In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the instigation of Jared Cohen (leading member of the Policy Planning Staff ), persuaded herself that it was possible to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by manipulating the social media. This theory did not have the desired affect. However, two years later, in 2011, the same Jared Cohen — since become the the CEO of Google Ideas — managed to mobilise the youth of Cairo. Although the « revolution » of Tahrir Square had not swayed the opinion of the Egyptian people, the myth of the extension of the American way of life via Facebook was born. As a result, the State Department sponsored a number of associations and assemblies to promote Facebook.
However, the US Presidential election of 2016 was a shock. An outsider, real estate promoter Donald Trump, eliminated all his rivals one by one, including Hillary Clinton, and was swept into the White House, having benefited from the advice of Facebook. For the first time, the dream of the Muse of professional politicians became reality, but worked against her. Overnight, Facebook was demonised by the dominant Press.
It became evident on this occasion that it is possible to artificially create crowd movements with the social media, but that after a few days, media users regain their senses. This is the constant fact for all systems of information manipulation — they are fleeting. The only form of lie which makes it possible to create long-term behaviour patterns supposes that one has forced the citizens into a form of minor engagement, in other words, that one has brainwashed them [2].
Indeed, Facebook understood this very well, creating its « Politics & Government Outreach Program » and handing it over to the care of Katie Harbath. It was intended to create collective emotions in favour of one client or another, but does not seek to organise lasting campaigns [3]. This is why President Macron proposes to legislate the social media only during electoral periods. He was himself elected thanks to a brief disorder created jointly by a weekly newspaper and Facebook against his rival François Fillon — an operation orchestrated by Jean-Pierre Jouyet [4]. Furthermore, Emmanuel Macron’s fear that next time the social media may be used against him fits with NATO’s desire to demonstrate the continuity of USSR-Russia propaganda. As an example of manipulation, Macron therefore cites an interview with Sputnik concerning his private life and the publishing of an allegation concerning a foreign bank account.
The Christopher Steele Report
During the US Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s team ordered an inquiry on Donald Trump from an ex-agent of the British Secret Services, Christopher Steele. Ex-chief of MI6’s « Russia House », he was known for his scandalous and always unverifiable allegations. After having accused Vladimir Putin, without proof, of having commanded the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium 210, he accused him of having caught Donald Trump in a sex trap and blackmailing him. The Steele Report was then discretely handed to various journalists, politicians and master spies, and finally published [5].
This is the source of the hypothesis according to which, seeking to get his puppet elected and hamper the election of Hillary Clinton, the lord of the Kremlin had ordered « his » media to buy publicity on Facebook and spread lies about the ex-Secretary of State – a hypothesis which may be supported by a conversation between the Australian ambassador in London with one of Donald trump’s advisors [6]. It doesn’t matter that Russia Today and Sputnik only spent a total of a few thousand dollars for publicity which rarely concerned Mrs. Clinton, the US ruling class is persuaded that they turned back the popular tide in favour of the Democrat candidate and her 1.2 billion dollar campaign. In Washington, people persist in believing that technological inventions can be used to manipulate the human race.
It is no longer a question of noting that Donald Trump and his partisans ran their campaign on Facebook because the totality of the written and audiovisual Press was hostile to them, but pretending that Facebook was manipulated by Russia in order to prevent the election of the Muse of Washington.
The legal privilege of Google, Facebook and Twitter
By seeking to prove the interference of Moscow, the US Press underlined the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter — these three companies are not considered responsible for their content. From the point of view of US law, they are no more than transporters of information (common carrier).
The experiments carried out by Facebook, which demonstrated the possibility of creating collective emotions on one hand, and the legal non-responsibility of this company on the other, attest to an anomaly in the system.
Particularly since the privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter is clearly undue. Indeed, these three companies act in at least two different ways to modify the content they transport. First of all, they unilaterally censor certain messages, either via the direct intervention of their personnel, or mechanically, via hidden algorithms. Then they promote their vision of the truth to the detriment of other points of view (fact-checking).
For example, in 2012, Qatar ordered from Google Ideas, already directed by Jared Cohen, the creation of software which would make it possible to follow the progression of defections in the Syrian Arab Army. The point was to show that Syria was indeed a dictatorship, and that the people were beginning to revolt. But it very quickly became clear that this vision of affairs was false. The number of soldiers who defected never rose above 25,000 in an army of 450,000 men. This is why, after having promoted the software, Google discretely retired it.
Conversely, for seven years, Google promoted articles which relayed communiqués from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHD). Day after day, they gave the exact count of the number of victims in both camps. Of course, these figures are imaginary – it is impossible for anyone to count them. Never, in a time of war, has a state been able to determine, on a daily basis, the number of soldiers killed in combat and the civilians killed behind the lines. And yet, in the United Kingdom, the SOHD claims to know what the people who live there, in Syria, cannot know.
Far from being just the common carriers, Google, Facebook and Twitter are the forgers of the information they transport, and as such, they ought to be counted legally responsible for their content.
The rules of the freedom of expression
Let’s imagine that the efforts of NATO and those of President Macron against Russia in terms of audiovisual Internet traffic meet with failure. It is nonetheless necessary to enter these new medias into general law.
The principles which regulate the freedom of expression are only legitimate if they are identical for all citizens and for all media. This is not the case today. While the general law applies, there is no specific rule concerning denial or the right to reply for the messages on Internet and the social media.
As always in the history of information, the old medias attempt to sabotage the new. Thus I remember the violent editorial that the French daily Le Monde dedicated in 2002 to my work on the Internet concerning the responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. What shocked the newspaper just as much as my conclusions was that the Voltaire Network was free from the financial obligations of which it felt prisoner [7]. This is the same corporatist attitude that it demonstrates again, fifteen years later, with its service, Le Decodex. Rather than developing a critique of the articles or videos of the new medias, Le Monde proposes to note the reliability of its rival Internet sites. Of course, only the sites issued by their paper colleagues find grace in their eyes, all the others are judged less trustworthy.
To shore up the campaign against the social media, the Fondation Jean-Jaures (that is to say the foundation of the Socialist Party linked to the National Endowment for Democracy) has published an imaginary poll [8]. With a display of numbers, it aims to demonstrate that unsophisticated people – the working classes and the partisans of the National Front – are gullible. It claims that 79 % of French people believe in one conspiracy theory or another. As proof of their naïveté, it points out that 9 % of them are convinced that the Earth is flat.
However, neither myself nor any of my French friends consulted by Internet have ever met any of our compatriots who believe that the Earth is flat. The figure is obviously invented and discredits the entire study. As it happens, although it is linked to the Socialist Party, the Fondation Jean-Jaures still has Gerard Collomb as its general secretary – Collomb has since become President Macron’s Minister for the Interior. This same foundation had already published, two years ago, a study aimed at discrediting the political opponents of the system that it already qualified as « conspiracy theorists » [9].
Under the regimes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, millions of civilians in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have been slaughtered, wounded, displaced and made desperately ill with the effects of toxins such as depleted uranium: the “gift” that never ends, literally—it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Now, “because Trump,” the image of George W. Bush has been rehabilitated and (if one can believe polls) now enjoys a 59% approval rating. He left office with ratings in the mid-20’s, which I thought were far too generous, at the time.
Since the imperial agenda of W. Bush murdered my son in Iraq on April 04, 2004, my personal grief has expanded to become global in nature and I can’t stomach any of this Bush-lite just because he has been critical of someone with whom his family has personal issues. Remember when Trump humiliated Jeb? Jeb, whom I believe was the next crown prince of the Bush Crime Family?
This is not a defense of Trump. I am sure given one or two full-terms, his regime will equal that of his predecessors in gore and pain, but he has a way to go if he wants to catch up with them. I also know, that when his term ends, whenever that is, whichever presidents are still alive will laugh it up with him, no matter what political points they seem to be scoring today.
Recently, when The Five Former Presidents™ were on their “hurricane relief” tour (god help those poor people who have already been through so much), Bill Clinton was speaking with George and Barack standing behind him. George Bush apparently said something that “cracked” up Barack Obama. Of course, whenever one killer is making another laugh, the joke is usually on us. However, what disheartens me, is how many are raving about those two mass-murderers giggling just like 7th graders at a school assembly when so many are suffering because of their allegiance to empire.
Of course, the presidencies of Carter, Bush Sr. (perv and self-pro-claimed, “David Cop-a-Feel”) and Clinton (W. Bush destroyed Iraq, but Clinton “softened” it up with regular bombing raids and a decade of crippling sanctions that killed around 2 million) were blood-soaked, but Obama and W. Bush seem to radiate a certain kind of sleazy vibrancy.
To see these killers who have caused so much lingering pain have so much delightful fun (at taxpayer’s expense, by the way), is heartrending.
Even when I am at my happiest with my grandchildren and I feel my heart is filled with joy, it isn’t, quite. There is always a black hole of anguish that can never be filled. At any moment, without warning, I can be plunged back into despair, but, hey, at least The Five Former Presidents™ are still able to yuck it up and garner millions for speeches and public appearances. Who am I to deny all these war criminals a renewed lease on life?
They are not good humans and they ALL (yes even Carter) deserve to be incarcerated for life at The Hague, never to bother anyone again. Just because they all left office unfettered by shackles doesn’t mean they should be able to live long lives of peace and profit.
The people of the United States need to be deprogrammed from their cultish devotion to these mass-murderers: Absent incarceration in The Hague, they should be shunned and ridiculed at every opportunity.
I intend to make it my life’s work to hold them accountable.
After 19 al-Qaeda militants armed only with box-cutters and knives hijacked four American commercial airliners, the U.S. military moved with remarkable efficiency to rectify the problem. In the years since, in its global war on terror, the Pentagon has ensured that America’s enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere have regularly been able to arm themselves with… well, not to beat around the bush, a remarkable range of U.S. weaponry. The latest such story: a report that in recent fighting around the city of Tal Afar, the Iraqi military recovered a U.S.-produced FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile and launcher from an Islamic State weapons cache. That’s a weapon capable of taking out an M1 Abrams tank. And this is hardly the first time U.S. anti-tank missiles meant either for the Iraqi military or Syrian rebels backed by the CIA have turned up in the hands of ISIS militants. In 2015, that group released photos of its fighters using U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missiles.
Of course, when the American-trained, funded, and armed Iraqi army collapsed in the summer of 2014 in the face of relatively small numbers of ISIS fighters, that group took vast stores of U.S. weaponry and vehicles that they’ve used ever since. But that was hardly the end of it. The U.S. soon began retraining and rearming its Iraqi allies to the tune of $1.6 billion for “tens of thousands of assault rifles, hundreds of armored vehicles, hundreds of mortar rounds, nearly 200 sniper rifles, and other gear,” much of which, a government audit found, the Pentagon simply lost track of. The weaponry, you might say, went missing in action. No one knew whose hands much of it ended up in and this wasn’t a new story, either. For example, in 2007 the Government Accountability Office found that “the United States could not account for nearly 30% of the weapons it had distributed in Iraq since 2004 — about 200,000 guns.”
Similar stories could be told about Afghanistan, another country where U.S. weaponry has disappeared in remarkable quantities. (The Taliban, for instance, recently released a video of their fighters sporting weaponry normally used only by U.S. Special Operations personnel.) In short, the Pentagon has been arming itself, its allies, and its enemies in a profligate fashion for years now in its never-ending conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. As TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests today, since 9/11 the U.S. military has in some sense been fighting itself — and losing. Someday, when historians look back on this bizarre tale, they will have to explain one thing above all: Why, year after year, in the face of obvious and repetitive failure in such conflicts, was no one in Washington capable of imagining another course of action? Tom
The American Military Uncontained
Out Everywhere and Winning Nowhere
By William Astore
When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets. Ground troops who find themselves fighting “rebels” in Syria previously armed and trained by the CIA. Already overstretched Special Operations forces facing growing demands as their rates of mental distress and suicide rise. Proxy armies in Iraq and Afghanistan that are unreliable, often delivering American-provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various enemies. All of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year.
What gives? Why are highly maneuverable and sophisticated naval ships colliding with lumbering cargo vessels? Why is an Air Force that exists to fly and fight short 1,200 pilots? Why are U.S. Special Operations forces deployed everywhere and winning nowhere? Why, in short, is the U.S. military fighting itself — and losing?
It’s the Ops Tempo, Stupid
After 16 years of a never-ending, ever-spreading global war on terror, alarms are going off in Asia from the Koreas and Afghanistan to the Philippines, while across the Greater Middle East and Africa the globe’s “last superpower” is in a never-ending set of conflicts with a range of minor enemies few can even keep straight. As a result, America’s can-do military, committed piecemeal to a bewildering array of missions, has increasingly become a can’t-do one.
Too few ships are being deployed for too long. Too few pilots are being worn out by incessant patrols and mushrooming drone and bombing missions. Special Operations forces (the “commandos of everywhere,” as Nick Turse calls them) are being deployed to far too many countries — more than two-thirds of the nations on the planet already this year — and are involved in conflicts that hold little promise of ending on terms favorable to Washington. Meanwhile, insiders like retired General David Petraeus speak calmly about “generational struggles” that will essentially never end. To paraphrase an old slogan from ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” as the U.S. military spans the globe, it’s regularly experiencing the agony of defeat rather than the thrill of victory.
To President Donald Trump (and so many other politicians in Washington), this unsavory reality suggests an obvious solution: boost military funding; build more navy ships; train more pilots and give them more incentive pay to stay in the military; rely more on drones and other technological “force multipliers” to compensate for tired troops; cajole allies like the Germans and Japanese to spend more on their militaries; and pressure proxy armies like the Iraqi and Afghan security forces to cut corruption and improve combat performance.
One option — the most logical — is never seriously considered in Washington: to make deep cuts in the military’s operational tempo by decreasing defense spending and downsizing the global mission, by bringing troops home and keeping them there. This is not an isolationist plea. The United States certainly faces challenges, notably from Russia (still a major nuclear power) and China (a global economic power bolstering its regional militarily strength). North Korea is, as ever, posturing with missile and nuclear tests in provocative ways. Terrorist organizations strive to destabilize American allies and cause trouble even in “the homeland.”
Such challenges require vigilance. What they don’t require is more ships in the sea-lanes, pilots in the air, and boots on the ground. Indeed, 16 years after the 9/11 attacks it should be obvious that more of the same is likely to produce yet more of what we’ve grown all too accustomed to: increasing instability across significant swaths of the planet, as well as the rise of new terror groups or new iterations of older ones, which means yet more opportunities for failed U.S. military interventions.
Once upon a time, when there were still two superpowers on Planet Earth, Washington’s worldwide military posture had a clear rationale: the containment of communism. Soon after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 to much triumphalist self-congratulation in Washington, the scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson had an epiphany. What he would come to call “the American Raj,” a global imperial structure ostensibly built to corral the menace of communism, wasn’t going away just because that menace had evaporated, leaving not a superpower nor even a major power as an opponent anywhere on the horizon. Quite the opposite, Washington — and its globe-spanning “empire” of military bases — was only digging in deeper and for the long haul. At that moment, with a certain shock, Johnson realized that the U.S. was itself an empire and, with its mirror-image-enemy gone, risked turning on itself and becoming its own nemesis.
The U.S., it turned out, hadn’t just contained the Soviets; they had contained us, too. Once their empire collapsed, our leaders imbibed the old dream of Woodrow Wilson, even if in a newly militarized fashion: to remake the world in one’s own image (if need be at the point of a sword).
Since the early 1990s, largely unconstrained by peer rivals, America’s leaders have acted as if there were nothing to stop them from doing as they pleased on the planet, which, as it turned out, meant there was nothing to stop them from their own folly. We witness the results today. Prolonged and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interventions throughout the Greater Middle East (Libya, Syria, Yemen, and beyond) that spread chaos and destruction. Attacks against terrorism that have given new impetus to jihadists everywhere. And recently calls to arm Ukraine against Russia. All of this is consistent with a hubristic strategic vision that, in these years, has spoken in an all-encompassing fashion and without irony of global reach, global power, and full-spectrum dominance.
In this context, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the full scope of America’s military power. All the world is a stage — or a staging area — for U.S. troops. There are still approximately 800 U.S. military bases in foreign lands. America’s commandos deploy to more than 130 countries yearly. And even the world is not enough for the Pentagon as it seeks to dominate not just land, sea, and air but outer space, cyberspace, and even inner space, if you count efforts to achieve “total information awareness” through 17 intelligence agencies dedicated — at a cost of $80 billion a year — to sweeping up all data on Planet Earth.
In short, America’s troops are out everywhere and winning nowhere, a problem America’s “winningest” president, Donald Trump, is only exacerbating. Surrounded by “his” generals, Trump has — against his own instincts, he claimed recently — recommitted American troops and prestige to the Afghan War. He’s also significantly expanded U.S. drone strikes and bombing throughout the Greater Middle East, and threatened to bring fire and fury to North Korea, while pushing a program to boost military spending.
At a Pentagon awash in money, with promises of more to come, missions are rarely downsized. Meanwhile, what passes for original thinking in the Trump White House is the suggestion of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, to privatize America’s war in Afghanistan (and possibly elsewhere). Mercenaries are the answer to Washington’s military problems, suggests Prince. And mercs, of course, have the added benefit of not being constrained by the rules of engagement that apply to America’s uniformed service members.
Indeed, Prince’s idea, though opposed by Trump’s generals, is compelling in one sense: If you accept the notion that America’s wars in these years have been fought largely for the corporate agendas of the military-industrial complex, why not turn warfighting itself over to the warrior corporations that now regularly accompany the military into battle, cutting out the middleman, that very military?
Hammering a Cloud of Gnats
Erik Prince’s mercenaries will, however, have to bide their time as the military high command continues to launch kinetic strikes against elusive foes around the globe. By its own admission, the force recent U.S. presidents have touted as the “finest” in history faces remarkably “asymmetrical” and protean enemies, including the roughly 20 terrorist organizations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations. In striking at such relatively puny foes, the U.S. reminds me of the mighty Thor of superhero fame swinging his hammer violently against a cloud of gnats. In the process, some of those gnats will naturally die, but the result will still be an exhausted superhero and ever more gnats attracted by the heat and commotion of battle.
I first came across the phrase “using a sledgehammer to kill gnats” while looking at the history of U.S. airpower during the Vietnam War. B-52 “Arc Light” raids dropped record tons of bombs on parts of South Vietnam and Laos in largely failed efforts to kill dispersed guerrillas and interdict supply routes from North Vietnam. Half a century later, with its laser- and GPS-guided bombs, the Air Force regularly touts the far greater precision of American airpower. Yet in one country after another, using just that weaponry, the U.S. has engaged in serial acts of overkill. In Afghanistan, it was the recent use of MOAB, the “mother of all bombs,” the largest non-nuclear weapon the U.S. has ever used in combat, against a small concentration of ISIS fighters. In similar fashion, the U.S. air war in Syria has outpaced the Russians and even the Assad regime in its murderous effects on civilians, especially around Raqqa, the “capital” of the Islamic State. Such overkill is evident on the ground as well where special ops raids have, this year, left civilians dead from Yemen to Somalia. In other words, across the Greater Middle East, Washington’s profligate killing machine is also creating a desire for vengeance among civilian populations, staggering numbers of whom, when not killed, have been displaced or sent fleeing across borders as refugees in these wars. It has played a significant role in unsettling whole regions, creating failed states, and providing yet more recruits for terror groups.
Leaving aside technological advances, little has changed since Vietnam. The U.S. military is still relying on enormous firepower to kill elusive enemies as a way of limiting (American) casualties. As an instrument of victory, it didn’t work in Vietnam, nor has it worked in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But never mind the history lessons. President Trump asserts that his “new” Afghan strategy — the details of which, according to a military spokesman, are “not there yet” — will lead to more terrorists (that is, gnats) being killed.
Since 9/11, America’s leaders, Trump included, have rarely sought ways to avoid those gnats, while efforts to “drain the swamp” in which the gnats thrive have served mainly to enlarge their breeding grounds. At the same time, efforts to enlist indigenous “gnats” — local proxy armies — to take over the fight have gone poorly indeed. As in Vietnam, the main U.S. focus has invariably been on developing better, more technologically advanced (which means more expensive) sledgehammers, while continuing to whale away at that cloud of gnats — a process as hopeless as it is counterproductive.
The Greatest Self-Defeating Force in History?
Incessant warfare represents the end of democracy. I didn’t say that, James Madison did.
I firmly believe, though, in words borrowed from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that “only Americans can hurt America.” So how can we lessen the hurt? By beginning to rein in the military. A standing military exists — or rather should exist — to support and defend the Constitution and our country against immediate threats to our survival. Endless attacks against inchoate foes in the backlands of the planet hardly promote that mission. Indeed, the more such attacks wear on the military, the more they imperil national security.
A friend of mine, a captain in the Air Force, once quipped to me: you study long, you study wrong. It’s a sentiment that’s especially cutting when applied to war: you wage war long, you wage it wrong. Yet as debilitating as they may be to militaries, long wars are even more devastating to democracies. The longer our military wages war, the more our country is militarized, shedding its democratic values and ideals.
Back in the Cold War era, the regions in which the U.S. military is now slogging it out were once largely considered “the shadows” where John le Carré-style secret agents from the two superpowers matched wits in a set of shadowy conflicts. Post-9/11, “taking the gloves off” and seeking knockout blows, the U.S. military entered those same shadows in a big way and there, not surprisingly, it often couldn’t sort friend from foe.
A new strategy for America should involve getting out of those shadowy regions of no-win war. Instead, an expanding U.S. military establishment continues to compound the strategic mistakes of the last 16 years. Seeking to dominate everywhere but winning decisively nowhere, it may yet go down as the greatest self-defeating force in history.
After the Crash 