In the run-up to the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago this month, Ashley Smith interviewed the State Department official-turned-antiwar activist.

Ashley Smith: You had been a career military officer and State Department official. What compelled you to resign and join the antiwar movement?

Ann Wright: I was in the military for 29 years –13 years on active duty and 16 years in the reserves, and then another 16 years while I was in the State Department as a U.S. diplomat. So I was a part of the system under seven different presidents, from Lyndon Johnson all the way to George Bush Jr.

I didn’t believe in, or agree with, all the policies of all these administrations. I disagreed with many of them, but I never resigned. I always found other things I could work on that I felt were not harming people. It was only at the end of my government career that I finally resigned over something, because there were plenty of things I could have resigned over earlier, but I didn’t. I held my nose about them, like most government employees do.

The tipping point for me was the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. They used the excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t believe them. We all knew that there had been two no-fly zones over the country over a period of 10 years. There had been quarantine, a blockade around the country, and there had been endless inspections for weapons of mass destruction.

On top of that, the UN inspectors, most of whom were U.S. intelligence agents, didn’t find anything, or the few weapons they found they destroyed. But, in general, the consensus of the international community was that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

So I just didn’t believe what the Bush administration was saying. When Colin Powell gave that lengthy address to the General Assembly in February 2003, I remember sitting in our embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I watched it on live TV with all of our staff around, because we all realized that this was a momentous event, and we knew that our lives would again be changing if the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

With the buildup of rhetoric that was coming out of Washington in the fall of 2002, I was very, very uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping. I ended up having to be medically evacuated to Singapore because they thought I was suffering symptoms that are often the precursor of a stroke. I was having all sorts of light-headedness, shortness of breath, and I had arrived at the age where you need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

After an intense week of every type of medical exam possible, the doctor said, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m under stress. My nation is about to blast the hell out of another country.”

I continued waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, and then staying up and just reading and writing out my concerns about what was going on. Every night I was reading materials, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins like, “This is the stupidest thing they could ever think up!” I was piling up pages and pages of writing detailing all my disagreements with Bush’s policy.

When I finally resigned, I ended up writing what I’ve been told was the longest resignation letter in the history of the State Department. It’s about three pages long and it not only talks about the war in Iraq, but other concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Bush administration’s lack of effort to engage North Korea, and its unnecessary curtailing of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.

When I resigned, I got over 400 e-mails from friends and colleagues in the State Department and other agencies saying, “You’re doing the right thing. We wish we could resign, but we’ve got kids in college, mortgages, you know, the whole financial thing.” But there are plenty of people in the government I think that have retired early and with severe cases of ulcers from having had to go through all of the horrors of the Bush administration.

AS: After you resigned, you became an antiwar leader while Bush was in office, but you did not stop when Obama was elected. What’s your assessment of Obama and his policies?

AW:  Everyone was hoping for a real change from what George Bush had dished out during his eight-year reign. But let’s remember that even during the campaign, candidate Obama did tell us that he felt the Afghanistan war was a good war, and he intended to escalate it. On that bad promise he’s delivered, but on many other good ones he has not.

He’s not closed Guantánamo. We still have the military commissions trying a few prisoners in Guantánamo. Virtually nobody has been released during the Obama administration, or even put on trial — these people are in imprisoned with no hope of resolution of their cases.

On the issue of curtailing of civil liberties, it’s worse under the Obama administration. Whistleblowers are getting the worst of the raw deals — six people have now been charged with espionage for revealing classified information that shows government malfeasance and criminal acts.

I’ve been very disappointed and displeased with Obama’s tenure. Like many other people, I have been challenging those policies, and writing and speaking and having endless vigils out in front of the White House. I, like many others, have gone to protest the president at various events, disrupting them over a variety of issues and getting arrested, just as we did under the Bush administration.

How to deal with the Obama administration has been a big debate in the movement. At our recent Veterans for Peace convention, we had a long and good discussion about whether we should call for the impeachment of President Obama as we had called for the impeachment of President Bush. While we were hesitant to come out against the first Black president, after we laid out all the evidence we decided that we had no choice but to call for Obama’s impeachment.

AS: What do you think of Obama’s policies in his Afghanistan?

AW: I think his escalation of the war in Afghanistan is perhaps his worst decision. He’s caused a huge number of civilian casualties, wasted a tremendous amount of money on sweetheart deals for private contractors, and enabled enormous amounts of corruption among Afghan businessmen as well as in the Afghan government itself.

Many of these Afghan corporate and governmental elites are part of the warlord class. We’re training and equipping their militias in the police and army. They will be there to fight not for the country of Afghanistan, but for the warlords to whom they belong.

Obama has decided to extend his patronage of the corrupt Afghan elite with this new 10-year strategic pact. He’s supposedly closing the door in Afghanistan as he supposedly had closed the door in Iraq. This is all, in fact, a public relations ploy. Behind the supposedly closed door, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars in Iraq and there will be billions for the next 10 years in Afghanistan.

AS: What’s your analysis of Obama’s new focus on Asia to contain Chinese power?

AW: Obama sees China as a rising rival, a huge economic powerhouse as well as a regional military power with the largest land army in the world and with an increasingly advanced air force and the navy. As you said, he wants to contain it.

He and the Congress are whipping up anti-Chinese rhetoric here in the U.S. Just recently the administration denounced the Chinese for building their first aircraft carrier. This is pure hypocrisy. The U.S. already has 14 of them. And for the first time, the Chinese have one, and they talk about it as that’s the greatest threat to all of the world.

That’s not to absolve the Chinese government of its problems and its own bad policies. But the U.S. should not be adding them to the “axis of evil.” This pivot to Asia will only push China into a corner and may lead them to do something that will give the excuse for the U.S. to make even more hostile policies.

And the U.S. pivot seems almost designed to provoke China. Obama has increased the military to military relationships with the Philippines. We still have a huge number of soldiers stationed in Okinawa in Japan.

He’s opened a new base for 2,500 Marines in Australia and an airfield that will be dedicated toward big Global Hawk drones that can stay indefinitely in the air for surveillance in Asia. And in South Korea, we still have over 30,000 troops and he’s pushing for a new naval base in a pristine place called Jeju Island. Obama wants that to be the homeport for Asia’s part of America’s worldwide missile defense system.

This last decision is very significant since it will increase tensions with not only the Chinese but also Russians. The missile shield in Europe as well as the new one proposed for Asia is one of the reasons that Putin did not attend the G8 meeting. He wanted to send a signal that he is going to be putting more and more pressure on the U.S. to stop this missile defense system. Otherwise, he’s going to put one in, too, which will not be good for world security.

AS: Why is the U.S. putting an increasing emphasis on drones as a central part of its new strategy?

AW: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are an easy, clean way for the U.S. to wage war. You don’t have to have your own military on the ground. These drones are capable of flying long distances, they can be refueled in the air, and they can do the dirty work of the U.S. without any American’s life being risked.

They are automating warfare. Some of these drones are as large as the 727 and can carry payloads that are enormous. They can put big bunker buster bombs under these things and fly them over and just drop wherever they want.

But this new automated military will not, in fact, protect American lives. Just like traditional military actions or missile strikes, drone warfare will inevitably precipitate blowback. We’ve already seen attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates specifically in response to drone attacks. So, the administration’s claim that these are the safest things that we could be using isn’t true.

We’ve already had examples of blowback from Obama’s drone war. Remember the young Pakistani-American guy who had planned to detonate a carload of explosive in Times Square. Luckily a hot-dog vendor thwarted his plot, but afterward when he was asked why he planned the attack, he explained, “Well, it’s the drones. The U.S. is using them to kill families in Pakistan.”

We also have the incident of the Jordanian doctor who was recruited to be an asset of the CIA. The CIA wanted him to infiltrate al-Qaeda and bring back information. But, this agent became horrified by the U.S. drone war. So he went to a CIA base in Afghanistan and blew himself up and killed all eight CIA agents.

Afterward it came out that he left a letter for his wife saying, “I am so horrified about what the U.S. is doing with these drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I refuse to work with them anymore.”

The drone war is even complicating U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the main supply route for over three months in protest against CIA drone strikes. The U.S. has been forced to bring in equipment into Afghanistan through the northern road network from Latvia, which is extraordinarily expensive. Despite Obama’s hopes, war, including drone war, will never be bloodless and clean.

AS:  A lot of people think that Obama is bringing an end to the wars Bush’s started. What is the real picture of U.S. militarism today?

AW: First of all, we have to be very watchful of what the Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is he has not really ended the U.S. domination over either of those countries. The U.S. has hoards of American private contractors in each of those countries, and many of them are private security firms who have every bit as much firepower as the U.S. military.

Beyond that, the U.S. has increased its bases throughout the Middle East. We don’t even know the total number of bases, outposts, runways and landing strips in Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We do know that there are CIA and U.S. military bases in Yemen. There’s a huge base in Qatar. There are, I think, seven bases now in Oman.

In Africa, the U.S. has established a military base in Somalia. They are using various alibis to justify increased military presence throughout the continent. The U.S. is sending the military into Ethiopia all the time. We have U.S. military forces in Kenya. And then we have U.S. Special Forces in Uganda to supposedly to go after Kony. Well, you can be sure that once they’re in, they’ll never leave.

Over in Mali and West Africa, the U.S. always has what they call mobile training teams, groups of Special Forces that will come in and do specialized training for militaries. That’s their way to establish relationships between senior leaders of the military, to try to get some sort of compatibility with the military in case the U.S. decides it needs to go in there. So the U.S. has a large number of small groups of military all over Africa.

In Asia, the U.S. pivot against China is ratcheting up tensions throughout the region. We have Special Forces in the Philippines, down in the island of Mindanao that are using drones and have assassinated 11 people already. And there are members of the Philippine government and legislature, their parliament, who are outraged about what’s going on.

Walden Bello, one of the wonderful international activists and member of the Philippine parliament, has already written to his government saying, “What’s going on? These are things you’re doing without any consultation — allowing U.S. military and armies, military operations that are killing Filipino people.”

And then, of course, we have many U.S. military forces in Korea, Japan and Okinawa. We’ve had a large naval base down in Singapore for a long time. We do have military to military relationships now with Vietnam, with Laos, Cambodia. So, the U.S. has its tentacles everywhere and, depending on who gets out of line, the U.S. may put great military as well as economic pressure on that country. And the U.S. will use the global “war on terror” to declare its right to go anywhere, anytime, do anything.

AS: So what do you think the key tasks for the antiwar movement today?

AW: Well, to be vigilant, to be vocal, to be on the streets, to keep after the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let them fade out of view. And one can use a variety of levers on it, because we’ve got to have some hook to make the public aware. In Iraq, we have to call attention to the issue of private contractors and the numbers that are there — who they are and what they’re doing — and also where U.S. oil companies are and what sort of contracts they’ve got there.

And in Afghanistan, we will be seeing war sponsored by the U.S. well after 2014. We have to debunk the idea that U.S. forces will be leaving behind an independent country. I think that the next 10-year period we will see U.S. forces there in large numbers fighting Taliban, conducting night raids and drone strikes, and violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. We should also watch out for U.S. using its power to control pipeline routes in the region as well as exploit the natural resources of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will likely be the most volatile of all of the areas. What the U.S. is doing there just has the potential to be a greater catastrophe than even Afghanistan. The U.S. is killing untold numbers of people with drones and essentially thumbing its nose at the Pakistani government, which has pleaded with us to stop because of the reaction that they are getting from their own people.

I mean it could explode in just so many horrific ways. People are furious with the U.S. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has already been burned twice over the past decades.

We really have to follow what the U.S. is up to in Asia and the Pacific. We have to be watchful of the rhetoric of the administration and do everything we can to tamp it down, to call the hand of the government.

We also need to keep agitating against the occupation of Palestine. We need all sorts of international citizen activism to highlight the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, and the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the blockade of Gaza. I think that campus activists have played a key role doing all sorts of things like building walls to bring home what the apartheid structure of Israel is like.

We have to keep up the international effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Very soon, we’ll be announcing a new project called Gaza’s Ark. Rather than trying to get boats to break the blockade from outside, we are going to work with Palestinians to break the blockade from the inside. We’re going to help sponsor a Gaza boat building and sailing school. This will provide some much needed jobs for the people of Gaza.

This is an important shift. We all have felt badly about spending so much money on flotillas from the outside that gets a lot of publicity for the issue but they don’t really help the people inside Gaza that much. With this new approach, we can get work for people and help stimulate the economy to a small degree.

Once the boats get built, we’ll solicit people all over the world to order products from Gaza. We’ll put these products on the boat and have them set sail from Gaza to deliver them to the world. Everyone will know that the probability of ever getting this stuff is pretty low, but they can be a part of helping break the blockade and also help the people of Gaza earn money for the beautiful work that they do. It’s an important new step for the continuing struggle to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Finally, we need to keep the pressure on the American government and the Israeli government to stop any drive to war against Iran. We really need to pester the hell out of the Obama administration on this rhetoric that they’ve been saying about Iran developing weapons of mass destruction.

I mean we’ve heard all of this before. These same allegations against Iraq lead me to resign my post. Instead we should be encouraging them to talk with Iran. We should be in dialogue, not in military confrontation.

*  This article first appeared at Socialist Worker.

1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

NATO has always been a war-making institution lacking in accountability to the peoples of the nations it claims to represent. But NATO at least once claimed a defensive purpose that it neither claims nor represents any longer.

NATO has militarized the nations of Europe against the will of their people, now maintains hundreds of nuclear weapons in non-nuclear European nations in blatant violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and is threatening Russia with missile base construction on its borders.

Having fought aggressive wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, NATO remains in Afghanistan, illegally, immorally, and to no coherent purpose. The people of the United States, other NATO nations, and Afghanistan itself, overwhelmingly favor an end to NATO’s presence, while Presidents Obama and Karzai, against the will of their people, work to commit U.S. forces to at least 12.5 more years in Afghanistan.

NATO provides the United States with a pretense of global coalition and legality. Approximately half of the world’s military spending is U.S., while adding the other NATO nations brings the total to three-quarters. The head of the Pentagon, Leon Panetta, recently testified in Congress that a war could be made legal by working through either the United Nations or NATO. While no written law supports that claim, it is a claim that has served its intended purpose. NATO also serves as a false legal shield, protecting the U.S. military from Congressional oversight.

The U.S. dominated NATO holds up the past year’s war on Libya as a model for the future, with an eye on various potential victims, including Syria and Iran. In so doing, NATO serves as the armed enforcer of the exploitative agenda of the G-8, which has fled Chicago for the guarded compound at Camp David.

NATO’s interests are neither democratically determined nor humanitarian in purpose. NATO does not bomb all nations guilty of humanitarian abuses. Nor does NATO’s bombing alleviate human suffering, it adds to it. Saudi Arabia is not a target. Bahrain is not a target. Ben Ali and Mubarak were not targets. An analysis of NATO’s real motivations reveals a desire to control the global flow of oil, to support dictators who have supported U.S./NATO wars, prisons and torture operations, to back Israel’s expansionist agenda, and to surround and threaten the nation of Iran.

The killing and destruction engaged in by NATO in Libya was illegal, immoral, and counter-productive as is its aggression in Afghanistan. NATO’s wars have not brought democracy, peace, or human rights anywhere.

Libya is not a model for future NATO action. There is no model for future NATO action. NATO has lost its reason to exist if it ever had one. Veterans For Peace joins with our brothers and sisters in Europe, who are also rallying nonviolently against NATO, in calling for its elimination.

These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US.  Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US?

Some Facts about Drone Assassinations

The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.   But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or the identities of most of those killed.

In Pakistan alone, the New America Foundation reports US forces have launched 297 drone strikes killing at least 1800 people, three to four hundred of whom were not even combatants.   Other investigative journalists report four to eight hundred civilians killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Very few of these drone strikes kill high level leaders of terror groups.  A recent article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS estimated “only one out of every seven drone attacks in Pakistan kills a militant leader.  The majority of those killed in such strikes are not important insurgent commanders but rather low level fighters, together with a small number of civilians.”

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal in November 2011 revealed that most of the time the US did not even know the identities of the people being killed by drones in Pakistan.  The WSJ reported there are two types of drone strikes.  Personality strikes target known terrorist leaders.  Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants but are people whose identities are not known.  Most of the drone strikes are signature strikes.

In Yemen, there have been at least 34 drone assassination attacks so far in 2012 alone, according to the London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.  Using drones against people in Yemen, who are thought to be militants but whose names are not even known, was authorized by the Obama administration in April 2012, according to the Washington Post.   Somalia has been the site of ten drone attacks with a growing number in recent months.

Civilian deaths in drone strikes are regularly reported but more chilling is the practice of firing a second set of drone strikes at the scene once people have come to find out what happened or to give aid.  Glen Greenwald of Salon, a leading critic of the increasing use of drones, recently pointed out that drones routinely kill civilians who are in the vicinity of people thought to be “militants” and are thus “incidental” killings.  But the US also frequently fires drones again at people who show up at the scene of an attack, thus deliberately targeting rescuers and mourners.

Here are five reasons why these drone assassinations are illegal.

One.  Assassination by the US government has been illegal since 1976

Drone killings are acts of premeditated murder.  Premeditated murder is a crime in all fifty states and under federal criminal law.  These murders are also the textbook definition of assassination, which is murder by sudden or secret attack for political reasons.

In 1976 U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, Section 5(g), which states: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” President Reagan followed up to make the ban clearer in Executive Order 12333. Section 2.11 of that Order states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Section 2.12 further says: “Indirect participation.  No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”  This ban on assassination still stands.

The reason for the ban on assassinations was that the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate national leaders opposed by the US. Among others, US forces sought to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

Two.  United Nations report directly questions the legality of US drone killings

The UN directly questioned the legality of US drone killings in a May 2010 report by NYU law professor Philip Alston.  Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said drone killings may be lawful in the context of authorized armed conflict (eg Afghanistan where the US sought and received international approval to invade and wage war on another country).  However, the use of drones “far from the battle zone” is highly questionable legally.  “Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal.” Can drone killings be justified as anticipatory self-defense?  “Applying such a scenario to targeted killings threatens to eviscerate the human rights law prohibition against arbitrary deprivation of life.” Likewise, countries which engage in such killings must provide transparency and accountability, which no country has done.  “The refusal by States who conduct targeted killings to provide transparency about their policies violates the international law framework that limits the unlawful use of lethal force against individuals.”

Three.  International law experts condemn US drone killings

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international affairs and politics at Princeton University, thinks the widespread killing of civilians in drone strikes may well constitute war crimes.  “There are two fundamental concerns. One is embarking on this sort of automated warfare in ways that further dehumanize the process of armed conflict in ways that I think have disturbing implications for the future,” Falk said. “Related to that are the concerns I’ve had recently with my preoccupation with the occupation of Gaza of a one-sided warfare where the high-tech side decides how to inflict pain and suffering on the other side that is, essentially, helpless.”

Human rights groups in Pakistan challenge the legality of US drone strikes there and assert that Pakistan can prosecute military and civilians involved for murder.

While stopping short of direct condemnation, international law expert Notre Dame Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell seriously questions the legality of drone attacks in Pakistan.  In powerful testimony before Congress and in an article in America magazine she points out that under the charter of the United Nations, international law authorizes nations to kill people in other countries only in self-defense to an armed attack, if authorized by the UN, or is assisting another country in their lawful use of force.  Outside of war, she writes, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.  Because the US is not at war with Pakistan, using the justification of war to authorize the killings is “to violate fundamental human rights principles.”

Four.  Military law of war does not authorize widespread drone killing of civilians

According to the current US Military Law of War Deskbook, the law of war allows killing only when consistent with four key principles: military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity.   These principles preclude both direct targeting of civilians and medical personnel but also set out how much “incidental” loss of civilian life is allowed.  Some argue precision-guided weapons like drones can be used only when there is no probable cause of civilian deaths.  But the US military disputes that burden and instead directs “all practicable precautions” be taken to weigh the anticipated loss of civilian life against the advantages expected to be gained by the strike.

Even using the more lenient standard, there is little legal justification of deliberately allowing the killing of civilians who are “incidental” to the killings of people whose identities are unknown.

Five.  Retired high-ranking military and CIA veterans challenge the legality and efficacy of drone killings

Retired US Army Colonel Ann Wright squarely denies the legality of drone warfare, telling Democracy Now:  “These drones, you might as well just call them assassination machines.  That is what these drones are used for: targeted assassination, extrajudicial ultimate death for people who have not been convicted of anything.”

Drone strikes are also counterproductive.  Robert Grenier, recently retired Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, wrote, “One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in the future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them.”

Recent polls of the Pakistan people show high levels of anger in Pakistan at US military attacks there.  This anger in turn leads to high support for suicide attacks against US military targets.

US Defense of Drone Assassinations

US officials claim these drone killings are not assassinations because the US has the legal right to kill anyone considered a terrorist, anywhere, if they can argue it is in self-defense.  Attorney General Holder and White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan recently defended the legality of drone strikes and argued they are not assassinations because the killings are in response to the 9/11 attacks and are carried out in self-defense even when not in Afghanistan or Iraq.  This argument is based on the highly criticized claim of anticipatory self-defense which justifies killings in a global war on terror when traditional self-defense would clearly not.  The government refuses to provide copies of the legal opinions relied upon by the government.

Growing Resistance to Drone Assassinations

In signs of hope, people in the US are resisting the increasing use of drones.

CODEPINK, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the London-based human rights group Reprieve co-sponsored an International Drone Summit in Washington DC to challenge drone assassinations. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill noted that Congress only managed to scrape up six votes to oppose the assassination of US citizens abroad.  “What is happening to this country? We have become a nation of assassins.   We have become a nation that is somehow silent in the face of the idea that assassination should be one of the centerpieces of US policy.”

The American Society of International Law issued a report “Targeting Operations with Drone Technology: Humanitarian Law Implications” in March 2011.   Concerned that drones may be the future of warfare, scholars examined three questions in the US use of drone technology: the scope of armed conflict (what is the battlefield upon which deadly force of drone killing is authorized); who may be targeted; and the legal implications of who conducts the targeting (since it is often not military but clandestine CIA agents who decide who dies).   Concluding that the US may soon find itself “on the other end of the drone” as this technology expands, they criticize official US silence on these key legal questions.

Others are taking direct action.  Select examples include: fourteen people arrested in April 2009 outside Creech Air Force base in Nevada in connection with a protest against drones by the Nevada Desert Experience; in January 2010 people protested drones outside the CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia; in April 2011, thirty-seven were arrested at Hancock Air Force base in upstate New York as part of a four hundred person protest against the use of drones;  in October 2011, as part of the International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space, there were protests outside of Raytheon Missile Systems plant in Tucson;  in April 2012, twenty-eight people were pre-emptively arrested on their way to protest drones at Hancock Air Force Base.

There is a brilliant new book, DRONE WARFARE authored by global activist Medea Benjamin which documents the nuts and bolts of the drone industry and the money involved in their production and operation.  She collects many global media reports of innocent civilian deaths, investigations into these deaths, and gives voice to international opposition groups like her own CODEPINK, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters International, Human Rights Watch, the Catholic Worker movement, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and others working against the drones.

As National Public Radio and The New Republic jointly editorialized, there is good reason to doubt the veracity of US claims that drone killings are even effective.  Drone use has escalated and expanded the US global war on terror and thus should be subject to higher levels of scrutiny than it is now.  As the use of drones escalates so too does the risk of killing innocents which produces “legitimate anti-American anger that terrorist recruiters can exploit….Such a steady escalation of the drone war, and the inevitable increase in civilian casualties that will accompany it, could easily tip the delicate balance that assures we kill more terrorists than we produce.”

There is incredible danger in allowing US military and civilians to murder people anywhere in the world with no public or Congressional or judicial oversight.  This authorizes the President and the executive branch, according to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, to be prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner.

The use of drones to assassinate people violates US and international law in multiple ways.  US military and civilian employees, who plan, target and execute people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia are violating the law and, ultimately, risk prosecution.  As the technology for drone attacks spreads, protests by the US that drone attacks by others are illegal will sound quite hollow.  Continuation of flagrantly illegal drone attacks by the US also risks justifying the exact same actions, taken by others, against us.

Reforms in Myanmar have made the past experience just described less dangerous. However, from time to time these days I find myself feeling like a hypocrite when speaking about American ideals and Democracy. Democracy in the United States, seen from abroad, looks more like Communism in China. American foreign policy looks more like mafia thuggery. I’ve begun feeling like I’m misleading my students who deeply believe in American political policy and projected principles solely for the reason that the United States government is – rightly so for a change of pace – Aung San Suu Kyi’s greatest ally.

My students aren’t absent any ideas about what Democracy means. All of them were ex-political prisoners or family members of political prisoners. The youngest among them was detained just six months ago after supporting her father’s single-person protest against an obscure land-seizure case that left his family farm in the hands of a corrupt government crony. The father was arrested and the daughter went to the police station to demand his release. She was arrested when she did so. Three or four years ago they would both have been sentenced to several years in prison.

These days, as Myanmar eases into sort of becoming a fledgling democracy in its earliest stages, reforms have opened doors and minds and after nearly a week, both father and daughter were set free without any pending charges — absent their land. Human rights abuses and injustices still occur wholesale in Myanmar, yet with less frequency except in the frontier regions where westerners are banned from entering. In the United States, human rights abuses and injustices still occur, yet more frequently every day.

When I see video’s of American police brutality against Occupy protesters, people being evicted from their homes, TSA security hacks accosting four-year old children at airports and calling the child “a suspect”, TSA searches of innocent American citizens travelling on buses, trains and sidewalks, police busting down the door of an African American Vietnam Veterans home in white Plains, New York and electrocuting him, then shooting him to death, and when I read the news of the madness of war zone atrocities of murderous drones flying over half of Arabia, bombing and killing at random, American soldiers pissing on corpses, raping and rampaging death and destruction on to impoverished uneducated people with no electricity in their villages, I wonder, what the hell is Democracy?

What is the United States anymore? I hardly can recognize it from the days long ago when I had Civics class in seventh grade; the American military had just finished slaughtering 3 million people in Vietnam, untold numbers more in Laos and was unquestionably responsible for the genocide of 3 million more in Cambodia. Didn’t Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia behave this way long before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II? No country dared, then or now, to stand up to American militarism abroad and now that it’s come home to roost in the styles of fascism on American streets and in American homes. Few Americans actually can resist the police state without their lives and livelihoods being  destroyed more than they’ve become.

When the world finally stood up to the spread of fascism in the 1940’s it was too late to save the so-called civilized world from total destruction. That the United States was the only power left not destroyed was because of geography, not superiority. Can the rest of the world stand up to the United States military and security complex?  The BRICS nations are succeeding at bringing imperial American economic might down by devaluing the dollar to 65% of the world’s currency reserve from 85% a few years ago. But as our  politicians have caved like lemmings jumping over a cliff to the security industrial complex, more and more money is being wasted to reap death, destruction, and surveillance over the world and in the United States. American militarism is out of control. Americans collectively have  become like the solitary young man standing in front of the huge tank during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1979.

What has become of the United States? The nation’s police departments behave as if they are occupying army’s hell bent on subduing the populace that pays them, even to the point of a citizen being subjected to being stripped searched not once, but twice, for failing to pay for a traffic violation. That means if your spouse, grandparents or children forget or fail to pay a parking ticket, for whatever reason, they can be arrested, strip searched and stored away in a jail and possibly even left there out of professional  neglect such as the kid in California who was doomed to spend four days in prison cell by the DEA, forced to drink his urine to survive, he was never charged with a crime.

America imprisons close to 2.5 million people at a time, year in and year out. African Americans are  disproportionately jailed per capita more than are white people. Where is the democracy? What on earth could 2.5 million Americans be doing so badly that all of them deserve to be in prison? Millions more each year are subjected to the legal system of parole and probation.  Corporations run the prisons in the United States. They lobby for tougher laws in all areas of law in order to arrest and detain more and more American citizens, because they make profits from having people in their prisons. Police and judges have been exposed as being corrupted with kickbacks and payoffs in some places in America as they’ve been caught arresting and sentencing with abandon while getting paid commissions in the form of cash. It’s probable many more have not been caught.

I tell my students to go on YouTube and search “police taser” and watch the many, many videos of American police electrocuting its citizens. They report back to me in shock and horror. They proclaim, “This never even happen in Burma!” It’s hard to teach Democracy when you come from a country where Democracy doesn’t really exist anymore.  Where the police state is the enemy of its citizens, where every form of communication is captured and stored, analyzed and used for advertising or – who knows – future blackmail? American citizens are all “suspects” to the police state. They are now subjected to drones hovering in their air space. No more laying out topless in the back yard on a sunny day or going for a romantic walk in a cornfield or forest and finding a nice cozy place to snuggle. If seen by a police drone, the police will arrive to arrest, strip search, and imprison the couple and they will inevitably be labeled sex-offenders and have their lives forever ruined. All for being in love under the clear blue sky on a pleasant summer day. Clear except for the police watching.

What does Democracy mean regarding the upcoming presidential election? There’s a choice between two people for president who swear they will give more money to the security state, cut social safety nets, privatize public education, cut taxes on the wealthy, spend more money on drug prohibition, continue to kill, torture and destroy more in Afghanistan, and in many other countries in the middle east – for what? Oil? The minority of Israel’s leaders and their insane but wealthy American supporters who are extreme warmongers and zealots hell bent of attacking Iran and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral lands? Most Israelis and Jewish Americans oppose these warmongers among them. The American corporate media is complicit in fueling the airwaves with propaganda against Iran and Islam, immigrants, and any idea left of what was once considered fascism. In today’s bizarre political world Richard Nixon would be called a  progressive.

What are Americans doing about the injustices and high-crimes and misdemeanors of American government and its Wall Street puppeteers? Mitt Romney has a car lift in his home. He’s the Republican nominee – thankfully since all of his opponents were nearly intellectually catatonic  evangelical non-Christ-like Christians. He’s a hedge fund financier – or whatever they call such crooks these days. Call them anything except guilty as charged. Barack Obama is a traitorous liar who sold himself to the American people as a new deal liberal peace-loving reformer who would ends wars, curtail the security state, and fight Wall Street – hahaha. Last time I looked, Guantanamo was still operating full steam ahead.  Americans will be at war in Afghanistan until 2024. (Hasn’t the bloodthirsty response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy been satisfied enough?) Wall Street crooks are still robbing the nation with ease. Terrorism of all kinds rules the world around us.

I want to be clear. I fear terrorism. Make no question about it. I fear police drones watching me from above, being tracked electronically and fondled by the TSA, being  harassed by police at roadblocks – but I fear it coming from Americans in America. I fear it from a psychotic night watchman like Mr. Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie. I fear it from a policeman wanting to arrest me in case my auto insurance payment is late and my insurance lapses. Or maybe I might forget to put the little sticker on my license plate that says I paid for the auto registration. I don’t deserve to be arrested, strip-searched and put in prison where I or anyone one, male or female, could be raped by other prisoners or abused by under-educated, unskilled, under-paid power tripping prison guards working for a corporation.

Maybe we should lobby local towns and cities to blood test and strip search people who want to run for office. I can’t imagine why a person who is not criminally inclined would want to do so. Call it a pre-emptive test of character. If one is willing to be blood tested and strip searched in order to be an elected politician, then they are either going to be guilty of something or they are insane. In either case, they will not be fit for office. Maybe that way we can keep the criminals and crazies out of politics. And then we can keep politics out of American society and return America to the rule of law and not the rule of the wealthy corporatists and the police. Call it the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. What a dream it was to think it could last. What a nightmare American Democracy has become.

You fasten the triggers for others to fire,
Then you sit back and watch,
When the death count gets higher.
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in mud.

— “Masters of War”, Bob Dylan, 1941- present

Humanitarian Awards are surely taking on a whole new meaning. The end of April brought the obscenity of the announcement that Madeleine Albright, a woman prepared to sacrifice children by proxy was to be awarded America’s highest honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her role as a long time champion of democracy and human rights all over the world.

In the same 24 hours, an announcement was made that Britain’s Prince Harry is to receive a special award for his “humanitarian work”.

The ”Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership” award “recognizes outstanding achievement” and is presented annually by the Atlantic Council. Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William, have been jointly nominated, with Prince Harry traveling to Washington to accept on behalf of both, on May 7.

Madeleine Albright’s latest honour for her services to humanity has been awarded to others who compete admirably with her dedication. They include such peerless warmongers as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, General Colin Powell, whose pack of lies to the United Nations (February 2003) initiated Iraq’s destruction – and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair whose offices and officers provided those lies.

That human dove of peace, Dick Cheney, has been a recipient, as has his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, and General Norman “No one left to kill” Schartzkopf, to name a few.

Fellow recipient of the Award with Albright is Bob Dylan. Funny world.

Prince William and Harry are both in the armed forces (between social engagements). In a career move that has been dubbed by many “a cynical PR stunt”, William flies Naval Rescue helicopters. Seemingly it no longer looks good for a future king to kill people. Harry clearly faces no such trying constraints.

Deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2007, he reportedly lurked safely, deep in a bunker, out of harm’s way, surrounded by a phalanx of armed Royal Protection Officers whilst playing at being a Forward Air Controller, who remotely (in all senses of the word) guide in aircraft to attack the locals.

There is not alone an irony, but a terrible deviance, about a supremely privileged young man, whose entire upbringing has been in palaces, castles and most elite of schools, calling in aircraft to destroy peasant farmers in remote, poverty stricken villages – along with their subsistence livelihood and simple adobe homes.

There is a further irony in that his “child within” knows loss. At thirteen he walked behind his mother, Princess Diana’s, coffin, as it was transported for her funeral, after her death in Paris in an appalling car crash, with her Muslim lover – some say fiancée – Dodi al Fayad.

Freud might have had something to say of his display of crusading  contempt for the people of Afghanistan – 99% Muslim population – just before he was hurriedly whisked out of the country for his safety in January 2008, once the media had exposed that he was there. His attitude, “day job”, and his fleeing, beneath contempt. If Albright sacrificed children by proxy, the Prince, arguably, killed them by proxy.

Back home he and his brother have their own households, with flunkies to provide, and an aristocratic titled adviser to oversee, the all and their lives.

Now his delayed return to Afghanistan to hone his killing skills is seeming more imminent. He will be more hands on, having been awarded his Apache Flying Badge, so he can return and dissect living beings from an air borne, mass human shredder of obscene and terrifying destructive power.

That the two Princes have established a charity to aid needy children in Africa, whilst Prince Harry has been involved in orphaning, maiming and ending fledgling lives in Afghanistan, and now returning, is surely a near schitzophrenic perversity.

The Atlantic Council presentation for the pair’s humanitarian endeavors, however, is “for efforts in championing” other soldiers involved in invading and killing in two decimated lands which posed no threat to anyone, yet alone far away Britain and America.

Prince Harry “is being recognized (with The Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership trinket) for support to Forces’ charities like Walking With The Wounded, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity, and Help For Heroes.” All of which are funded with the sort of monies which would help the maimed, destitute and traumatized in the countries the Charity’s beneficiaries have helped destroy back to normality for many years.

A St James’s Palace spokesperson commented:

Prince Harry will use the award to pay tribute to British and American veterans’ charities for their achievements in helping to rehabilitate wounded servicemen and women, and to reintegrate those who have served in the armed forces into civilian life.

No such helping and rehabilitation for their Afghan or Iraqi victims.

The Prince, however, is in good company. Previous presentations of the Awards have included Madeleine Albright’s philandering, Iraq strangulating boss, William Jefferson Clinton; President George W. “Crusader” Bush, wanted by many for Crimes Against the Peace; Tony Blair; Henry Kissinger, of course – and General Colin Powell (2005, just two years after his serial misleading of the UN.)

Blair’s acceptance speech air-brushed out “Shock and Awed”, destitute Iraqis and Afghans and blathered on about “commitment to freedom … economically, politically, culturally …”

Brent Scowcroft, Former National Security Advisor and Atlantic Council Director, lauded Colin Powell’s “wisdom, sagacity, integrity …” Powell, of course, responded by talking of “Peace and freedom … respect for human rights …”

Sponsors of this peaceful and freedom loving establishment run into several pages but include the US Departments of the Air Force, Navy, Defence and Energy, and Los Alamos National Laboratory which brought the world the atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In October of that year the Laboratory received the “Army-Navy ‘E” Award” for “excellence in production.”

Another sponsor is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory whose development aimed originally to “spur innovation and provide competition to nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos.” It also brought the world the Polaris nuclear armed submarine.

NATO and Lockheed Martin are on the roll of honour, as Raytheon and SAIC ($2.6 Billion in trade with the Department of Defence in 2003, year of the invasion of Iraq.) SAIC’s Management team includes Bill Clinton, a clutch of former US Defence Secretaries, and former UN Iraq Weapons Inspector David Kay, who continued his fruitless hunt for Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq invasion, when the US-UK coalition was using them.

General Dynamics is at the table, so to speak, as is Boeing and Dow Chemical, which swallowed up Union Carbide, which brought the world the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Exact casualty numbers have never been established relating to Bhopal, but upper figures are fifteen thousand dead and over half a million medically affected, still ongoing.

The Atlantic Council lists its “important contributions” as including:  “The process of NATO transformation and enlargement” and “drafting roadmaps for U.S. policy towards the Balkans, Africa, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and Libya.”

No “E” for Excellence Award for the Balkans and Iraq — watch out Africa and Cuba. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, under whose watch and UNSCR 1973  Libya was largely destroyed by NATO’s “Humanitarian Intervention”, is a fellow recipient of this year’s  Distinguished  Humanitarian Leadership Awards.

It can only be hoped that this joyous occasion is not sullied by the Prince’s lack of respect for cultural diversities and that he is sparing with the liquid refreshment. Hopefully he will also dress suitably .

One episode, when he dressed in a Nazi uniform complete with Swastika arm band, caused Royal Photographer, Arthur Edwards to write:

Where were his father and the highly-paid courtiers who advise this young man? Who let him drive out of (Highgrove House, his father, Prince Charles’ residence) dressed this way? Smoking cannabis, late-night drinking and brawling with paparazzi could be explained away as the errors of youth. But Harry, what must you have been thinking when you put on that armband?

This was shortly before his Uncle, Prince Edward, was to attend the commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, representing the Queen.

Incidentally, Prince Harry’s Award is to be presented by Colin Powell and Ban Ki-Moon’s by Henry Kissinger.

In all, mind stretching stuff. Oh, to be a fly on the wall!

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a “Bilateral Security Agreement” still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement “with the goal of concluding within one year”.

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 “Status of Forces” agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai’s repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people’s homes. Karzai’s insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai’s demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency.

CENTCOM officials refused to go along with ending the night raids or giving the Afghan government control over them, as IPS reported last February.

The two sides tried for weeks to craft an agreement that Karzai could cite as meeting his demand but that would actually change very little.

In the end, however, it was Karzai who had to give in. What was done to disguise that fact represents a new level of ingenuity in misrepresenting the actual significance of an international agreement involving U.S. military operations.

The MOU was covered by cable news as a sea change in the conduct of military operations. CNN, for example, called it a “landmark deal” that “affords Afghan authorities an effective veto over controversial special operations raids.”

But a closer reading of the text of the MOU as well as comments on it by U.S. military officials indicate that it represents little, if any, substantive change from the status quo.

The agreement was negotiated between the U.S. military command in Kabul and Afghan Ministry of Defence, and lawyers for the U.S. military introduced a key provision that fundamentally changed the significance of the rest of the text.

In the first paragraph under the definition of terms, the MOU says:

For the purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), special operations are operations approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws.

That carefully crafted sentence means that the only night raids covered by the MOU are those that the SOF commander responsible for U.S. night raids decides to bring to the Afghan government. Those raids carried out by U.S. units without consultation with the Afghan government fall outside the MOU.

Coverage of the MOU by major news media suggesting that the participation of U.S. SOF units would depend on the Afghan government simply ignored that provision in the text.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters flatly on April 9 that Karzai would not have a veto over night raids. “It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibility to the Afghans,” he said.

Kirby would not comment on whether those SOF units which operated independently of Afghan units would be affected by the MOU, thus confirming by implication that they would not.

Kirby explained that the agreement had merely “codified” what had already been done since December 2011, which was that Afghan Special Forces were in the lead on most night raids. That meant that they would undertake searches within the compound.

The U.S. forces have continued, however, to capture or kill Afghans in those raids.

The disparity between the reality of the agreement and the optics created by administration press briefings recalls Obama’s declarations in 2009 and 2010 on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and an end to the U.S. war there, and the reality that combat units remained in Iraq and continued to fight long after the September 1, 2010 deadline Obama he had set for withdrawal had passed.

Fifty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq after that deadline in 2010 and 2011.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two exercises in shaping media coverage and public perceptions: the Iraq withdrawal agreement of 2008 made it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Iraqi government to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the agreements just signed impose no such constraints on the U.S. military. And although Obama is touting a policy of ending U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Pentagon have publicly said they expect to maintain thousands of SOF troops in Afghanistan for many years after 2014.

Obama had hoped to lure the Taliban leadership into peace talks that would make it easier to sell the idea that he is getting out of Afghanistan while continuing the war. But the Taliban didn’t cooperate.

Obama’s Kabul speech could not threaten that U.S. SOF units will continue to hunt them down in their homes until they agree to make peace with Karzai. That would have given away the secret still hidden in the U.S.-Afghan “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement.

But Obama must assume that the Taliban understand what the U.S. public does not: U.S. night raids will continue well beyond 2014, despite the fact that they ensure enduring hatred of U.S. and NATO troops.

Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone …

— Maya Angelou, 1928 – Present

If destabilization, duplicity, insurgency and mass murder could surprise yet again, with the blame of the victim adding to the “shock and awe”, after Libya, Syria would certainly be a case in point.

America’s decades long plan  for another puppet government and quasi client state status for the country is well underway. Any observer of the shenanigans within the US Embassy in Damascus would be forgiven for mistaking it for a covert operations centre rather that a seat of diplomacy.

Michel Chossudovsky gives graphic life to Ambassador Ford’s – surely coincidentally – eminently pertinent and relevant qualifications.

Of course, no plan for a country’s ruination is complete without the help of the UN. Think Libya and Resolution 1973, the green light for a “humanitarian” blizkrieg, regime change, razed towns, murder from air and ground on an industrial scale, including most of the country’s leading family, its small grandchildren, and the butchering of Colonel Gaddafi, the country’s sovereign leader, whose body is still unaccounted for.

Lynch-law ruled under UN mandate.

Who then, better to be appointed “Peace Envoy” to Syria than Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General (1997-2006) who silently acquiesced to the deaths on average of 6,000 children a month in Iraq from “embargo-related causes”, throughout the 119 months of his tenure, bowing to the US-UK driven UN embargo?

Inevitably, for his silence, the man who one diplomat described as “like Pontius Pilate, he washes his hands”, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, jointly with the UN for, amongst other delusional rubbish, his “emphasizing its obligations as with regard to human rights.”

Presumably this “emphasis” also applied to his deafening muteness as America and Britain illegally bombed Iraq for his entire tenure, often daily, routinely re-destroying vital infrastructure and erasing lives in uncounted numbers.

The UN’s Baghdad cabal, with its fine restaurant and barbecue parties, ensconced at the Canal Hotel at Iraq’s expense were in a perfect position to visit these sites, record and account. They never bothered.

That was yesterday. Apart from Annan, the UN has another weapon for Syria — UN diplomats’ wives.

The wives of the German and British Ambassadors to the UN, Frau Huberta Voss-Wittig and Lady Sheila Lyall Grant, have released a video appeal and an online petition to President Assad’s wife, Syria’s First Lady, Asma al Assad. A performance of skin crawling, patronizing, head patting, treacled trash, which reflects nothing but the UN’s duplicity and its representatives privileged, reality- removed lives in its ivory tower.

The “initiative”, the pampered pair stress, is entirely independent, theirs alone, and nothing to do with their husbands.

Of course, ladies.

Frau Voss-Wittig’s involvement, it might be surmised, lies in “The German ‘no’ to the US about Iraq”, in 2002.  “Historically this was the deepest ever division between the White House and any post-cold-war German Chancellor.”

Additionally, in August 2002, Germany and France agreed on the “Declaration of Schwerin”, named for the German town where their representatives had a working dinner, resolving that they “had to oppose the war … and that they had to do it in public and as forcefully as possible.” An overt collision course with the US and UK.

Only when Angela Merkel took office were links tentatively repaired formally, but “shock-waves” remained. Two wives have clearly taken delivery of bricks and tools and set about erecting bridges, never mind demolishing those of others.

Sheila Lyall Grant is the wife of Sir Mark Lyall Grant, former political Director General of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a post with wide responsibilities including for Iraq, 2007-2009, and also line manager of post-invasion UK Ambassadors to Iraq.

He was senior policy adviser to the Foreign Secretary on various strategic Foreign Office priorities regarding Iraq, in which capacity he attended major European, G8, UN, OSCE and NATO meetings.

Sir Mark clearly went through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s rigorous and scrupulous selection process as to suitability for key posts:  “I was not an Arabist. I haven’t been posted in the Middle East”, he told the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq on January 20, 2010.

However, he added,  “It naturally fell to the Foreign Office to look at where Britain’s long-term strategic interests were in Iraq and in the wider region …”

The Iraq priority for Sir Mark had been “a strong economy”.

Whilst an  “abidance of human rights and better social conditions, better social delivery to the people (were) highly desirable, I don’t say it is absolutely essential in the near future”, he told the Inquiry. (Emphasis mine.) “Let them rot” comes to mind.

Given that Nuri al Maliki’s Iraq is now firmly allied with Iran, and a disaster on every level, with economy, health, malnutrition and social conditions worse than the embargo years, it might be thought that the Foreign Office and Sir Mark would think twice before stepping aside, as his “independent” wife became another regional unguided missile.

The wives petition, which is pretty much the same as their toe-curling video reads, in part:

Dear Asma,

Some women care for style and some women care for their people. Some women struggle for their image and some women struggle for their survival. Some women have forgotten what they preached about peace and some women can only pray for their dead.

Hundreds of Syrian children have already been killed or injured. One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed. What will your answer be, Asma? That you, Asma had no choice?

Every single child had a name and a family. Their lives will never be the same again. Asma, when you kiss your own children goodnight, another mother will find the place next to her empty.

These children could all be your children. They are your children. Stand up for peace, Asma. Speak out now. Stop being a bystander. No one cares about your image. We care about your action. Right now.

Lady Lyall Grant, has been a diplomat since 1980. Her most recent post was Head of VIP Visits at the Protocol Directorate in the heart of government, Whitehall.

Clearly her induction course in protocol did not include instructions on how to address the wife of a Head of  State.

Incidentally, Sir Mark apparently cares as little about the UN as he did Iraq. Asked at the Inquiry about the current role of UN in Iraq, he replied that they were no longer there after the bombing of their building in, he hesitated, then said,“2005, was it?”

The bombing of the Canal Hotel, which killed seventeen, including the Head of Mission, Sergio de Mello, and injured scores, was on August 19, 2003.

Corrected by the Chairman, Sir Mark responded,  “2003, was it? I apologise”, apparently as sanguine about his colleagues being blown to bits as in assessing that basic provisions to sustain Iraqi lives were not “absolutely essential.”

Now, for Syria, in a  crisis so clearly manipulated from without, as Kofi Annan ratchets up the number of “UN Observers” from ten to three hundred – surely as with Iraq, many will be meddlers, spies and worse — Sheila Lyall Grant writes,  “One day, our children will ask us what we have done to stop this bloodshed.”  Every child “had a family and a name.”

The child victims of Afghanistan, decimated by the invasion, also had names – but the Taliban was blamed. As did their small counterparts in Iraq since that illegal takeover, the 4.5 million orphans, 600.000 of whom live on the streets, are still somehow the fault of Saddam Hussein, and their traumatized little global siblings in Libya are still somehow the fault of Colonel Gaddafi, who brought the country the best welfare and highest living standard in Africa.

Perhaps the diplomatic duo have not noticed that Syria, generous host country to two million Iraqis fleeing their “liberation” now have their own nationals fleeing in fear over the border to Jordan; Syrians now joining the near similar number of Iraqis there, refugees themselves. Iraqis in Syria have nowhere to run.

The ladies have seemingly also missed the media coverage of senior, experienced Al Jazeera journalists, who have walked away from their livelihood in protest and disgust at the media distortion and manipulation of Syria’s plight, the portrayal, of course, that all blame lies with President al Assad.

Further, “Peace Envoy” Kofi Annan has already let slip that both he and the “truce monitors should help pave the way for much needed political process”.  Presumably he means with those insurgents with foreign passports. Read “regime change”.

And no planned destruction, overthrow, and general catastrophe would be complete without hidden weaponry and hardware with which the leader “oppresses his own people.” Syria, say – as ever – unnamed “activists” is hiding tanks and weapons in government compounds.

The media faithfully repeats the mantra. None seem to have mentioned that one of the “Peace Envoy’s” stipulations, to which Bashar al Assad agreed, was to take tanks and weapons off the streets. Where rebel violence is such that government troops are not forced to respond, they have been withdrawn — back to government compounds. Mr. Annan seemingly has not thought to point this out.

China’s Ambassador, Li Baodong, appears to be watching more closely than most. He expressed the hope that “the Supervision Mission will fully respect Syria’s sovereignty and dignity, act in strict accordance with the authorization of the Security Council, adhere to the principles of neutrality and impartiality …”   Quite!

If Lady Lyall Grant cares about children, which could equally be “her” children, she should ponder on, and tell her humanity-deficient husband of just one, which represents the trauma of every child, in every street, in every country targeted by an unholy Western alliance – and the UN.

It is an Iraqi boy of about five in an orphanage asleep. He has drawn a huge picture, depicting his mother on the floor, her arms outstretched. He is curled up on it. Every night he goes to sleep the same way — on the floor between her arms.

Well past time for the powerful to grow the hell up. Those children could be your children.

Targets across the country included Vice-President Mohammad Karim Khalili, airfields and police stations in three eastern provinces. About 20 insurgents were killed in the attacks, which injured at least 15 police officers and nine civilians.

US ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker dismissed the Taliban’s claim of responsibility: “Frankly, I don’t think the Taliban is good enough,” leaving unsaid who is. Crocker commended the NATO-trained Afghan forces, whose capability was “proven today by their professional and highly effective response in restoring order”.

A warning came from New Delhi’s Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Director Dipankar Banerjee: “We’re only going to see an increase in these attacks. It helps [the militants] ensure political dominance in the new order as they slowly take over.” Talha said that Sunday’s strikes were just a preview of the fighting season to come. “We want to engage smaller numbers of well-trained fighters to make attacks on significant government, American and NATO targets.” He said the mastermind of the operation was Hajji Lala, the insurgency’s shadow governor of Kabul and its eastern-front military chief.

One big difference, according to Talha and other Taliban sources, was that this time the Haqqani network did not play a significant role in the operation. Rivalry has developed between the Taliban and its eastern partner in insurgency, although Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin have in the past declared their loyalty to Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. Talha says he’s hopeful that the Taliban and the Haqqanis will work together in the future. “With this coordination we can double of number and size of attacks across Afghanistan.”

Sunday’s attacks confirmed the ease with which the Taliban are able to infiltrate fighters, suicide bombers, explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons into the capital and the main towns of the three surrounding provinces. The Kabul government’s 300,000-strong security forces actually make this easier, Talha explained. “The bigger the Afghan police, army, and intelligence services grow, the less effective they become. Kabul’s intelligence and police are weaker than ever, allowing us to carry out these stunning episodes.”

A senior Kabul-government official in eastern Paktia province confirms this: “I fear our intelligence and security forces are becoming less coordinated while the Taliban’s coordination is getting better.” The problem is that the intelligence service, the police, and the army, controlled by Tajiks, are riven by ethnic rivalries and mistrust between them, Pashtuns and Uzbeks. “They do not coordinate with each other. This provides a golden opportunity for the Taliban to infiltrate and penetrate wherever and when they wish.”

American, Afghan and NATO officials undoubtedly will call the Taliban assault a failed offensive. But that is small comfort to most Afghans.

British parliamentarian Lord Nazir Ahmed added a note of whimsy to AfPak’s ongoing tragedy, when he announced a reward for the capture of US President Barack Obama and his predecessor George W Bush at a reception in Lord Nazir’s honour held by the business community of Haripur, Pakistan on Friday. Nazir said that placing a bounty on Lashkar-e-Taiba Chief Hafiz Saeed was an insult to all Muslims, and by doing so President Obama has challenged the dignity of the Muslim Ummah. Lashkar-e-Taiba is held responsible for the 2008 Mumbai bombings and is on the US terrorist list.

“If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the captor of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of 10 million pounds on President Obama and his predecessor George Bush,” Lord Nazir said. A terrorist tit-for-tat.

One of the more prevalent images in the current epoch is that of militarization. The armed forces now take part in Hollywood production (the recent film Act of Valor, for example), one of the top selling video game series, Call of Duty, promises the most authentic war experience, and the line between news and military action is blurred by the embedding of journalists in active units – a move that has the potential to disrupt objective reporting on the events that occur. Popular musicians appear in videos aimed at increasing the levels of military recruits, and the ever-changing military slogans enter common lexicon at a rapid pace. This conflation of military advertising is by no accident. Ever since the creation of so-called “military Keynesian”¹ during the Cold War, the armed forces industry has risen to be one of the key sectors of both the US and global economy. The financial aspects of the military, be it the armament, logistics, or marketing sectors, are indeed a business, and they have a product to sell – war.

The military image is conducted upon the utilization of symbols that are branded as the Other, the enemy that threatens the sanctity or livelihood of the nation’s population. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the Other, portrayed in a manner that contrasted sharply with the domestic propaganda of the American Way of Life. The image of the USSR was used to sell to the American public unprecedented weapons build-up, violent interventions overseas, and the importance of US global supremacy. The largest post-Cold War conflict, the current War on Terror, saw Islamic fundamentalism – and centrally Osama Bin Laden – become the dominant symbol of evil, and it was used to justify expensive and needless wars, not to mention the rolling back of vital civil liberties on the home front.

Yet Bin Laden is now dead, and the wars rage on, unmoored from their symbolic context. Contrived justifications are wearing thin on a population growing wearing from the deaths, the costs, and the gruesome stories pouring forth from the television. With the branded image, war cannot exist, and without the war a dominant aspect of the economy is threatened to its very roots.

Enter Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army – a roving band of guerrilla fighters that consists primarily of kidnapped children-turned soldiers. Fueled by a curious combination of nationalism, Christianity, and occultism, Kony’s crimes – which include the aforementioned kidnappings and militarization of the youth, child sex slavery, and the massacring of civilian populations – have led to his indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and his placement on the US’s list of known terrorists in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While the horrors Kony have visited upon Uganda have been some of the egregious human rights abuses in the modern era, his forces have subsequently thinned out and have left Uganda, becoming scattered across the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.²  Regardless, this pivotal fact has not fazed an effective international campaign calling for the US to intervene into Uganda to finally fulfill the ICC’s mandate.

Kony 2012

On March 5, 2012, a thirty minute video titled simply “Kony 2012” was released on the social media platform Vimeo, a higher quality alternative to Youtube. In the short half hour running time, the viewer is given a crash course in the developed world’s opposition to Kony, including action kits to buy, campaigns to conduct, and requests to make of government leaders. Set to the tune of pop music and dubstep, the film’s primary mechanism for informing the viewer of the situation in Africa is the director, Jason Russell, explaining to his five year old son that Kony “is a bad guy.”

The video went viral immediately, with over 16 million views by the close of March. The aim of the film – “to make Kony famous” – was accomplished with unprecedented success, catapulting the warlord’s name one truly heard around the world. It’s an exciting prospect – thanks to the internet, the global citizenry can partake in a legitimate dialogue over problems facing the world and not be obstructed by geographical boundaries or racial and gender differences. It’s the latest event in a long line of actions derived from the modern era’s new technological prowess, following closely on the heels of the Obama election campaign, the Arab Spring revolutions, and Occupy Wall Street. But while these instances veer from the top-down (Obama’s treatment of new media forms) to the bottom-up (Arab Spring and OWS’s decentralized ethos), the true position of Kony 2012 and the Stop Kony movement that it spearheads has yet to be truly seen. There is gradually emerging evidence, however, that the campaign to raise awareness about Kony, while playing an essential role for the emergent global society, may be more in line with top-down procedures connected directly to the military establishment.

Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, a program officer at Clark University’s Strassler Center” for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, has noted that the Kony 2012 film is conducted not as a thoughtful analysis; instead, she argues, it’s rooted in simplistic advertising-style systematics.³ Facts are cast aside for emotional appeals, and viewers are, in a way, talked down to as broad comparisons permeate social consciousness that equate Kony with Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. Such relations are inherently linked to a militarized mindset – while, yes, Kony, Hitler, and Bin Laden were and are violent figures, juxtaposing their images together simultaneously creates an aura of evil that, historically, has only been toppled by the utilization of military force. The enemy, keep in tune with wartime propaganda, is reconfigured in the national perception as the embodiment of evil, one that we, as a benevolent and enlightened populace, have a responsibility to unseat.

Such imagery-based maneuvering, especially the utilization of figures that have been the center of two of the US’s larger conflicts, could lead the Kony 2012 to be seen as an exercise in aspects of “pre-propaganda,” a little known yet effective procedure that helps condition a population into a certain mental framework. Jacque Ellul describe pre-propaganda’s function as helping to:

prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective… It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes.⁴

The Stop Kony movement does carry with it a certain lack of concrete ideology. While the campaign does seek to raise awareness and to create a grassroots lobby to bringing Kony to justice before the close of 2012, the details are hidden behind vague terms such as “arrest,” and we are none the wiser as to what this truly details. Will it be, indeed, military intervention, or will it be some other action conducted in transnational comity? Perhaps the unwillingness to address such questions directly comes from the fact that much of the LRA consists of child soldiers and thus themselves the victims of human rights abuses. A conflict between well-trained Special Forces and children would certainly raise a few eyebrows.

It’s this very specter of international intervention that has caused some outcry against the film in Uganda – “Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” says one blogger from the country.⁵  Other Ugandans have criticized the film’s presumptuous tone, noting that as time has gone on Kony’s forces have lost much of their might and have become scattered. A spokesman from the Uganda government went as far to state “It is totally misleading that the war is still in Uganda… I suspect that if that’s the impression that they are making, they are doing it only to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda.” ⁶  Regardless, the anti-Kony movement is preparing to conduct a national “Cover the Night” campaign for late April, involving the plastering of high-visibility parts of US cities with awareness-raising posters.

So who are the organizations behind Kony 2012? As one would suspect, none of them are Ugandan institutions; instead, the coalition consists of powerful American bodies with deep pockets and political clout. Primarily, the organizations are Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and Resolve (Uganda).⁷  Invisible Children is the only one of the three which could be certifiably grassroots, being run by several young filmmakers who produced a 2006 documentary of the same name. However, Enough and Resolve “are closely related to one another and to the upper echelons of the US government’s foreign policy establishment.” ⁸

Michael Barker has observed the interrelated nature of the two organizations, writing in a piece for Swans Commentary that “the former acting executive director of Enough (Cory Smith) is the vice president of Resolve; while Peter Quaranto, one of the four individuals who founded Resolve with the aid of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, presently works in the office of the US State Department’s Special Envoy to Sudan.” Meanwhile, Resolve’s founding Executive Director Michael Poffenberger has worked at the USAID-funded Grassroots Reconciliation Group.

Enough, launched in 2007, is itself a joint project of two, well-entrenched political machines, the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the Center for American Progress (CAP),⁹ and is partnered with equally prolific international bodies such as Human Rights Watch, the Genocide Intervention Network, the aforementioned Grassroots Reconciliation Group, and the Save Darfur Coalition. Reflecting these partnerships, Enough’s governing body interlocks closely with quite a few of them – for example, the organization’s co-chair, John Prendegast, is an adviser to both the ICG and the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, a director for the Save Darfur Coalition, and an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network. His co-chair, Gayle Smith, became a senior fellow at CAP after a time at USAID, the World Bank, and an advisory position at Save Darfur’s sister organization, Olympic Dreams for Darfur. These ties are certainly not indicative of sinister conspiracy; they do represent common interests in troubled reasons – yet one certainly has to ask what drives these interests. While a great deal of members surely are involved for altruistic reasons, a closer look at Enough’s parents, the ICG and CAP, reveal a connecting thread of militarized rhetoric and certainly deserve deeper scrutiny.

The origins of the ICG date back to the mid-1990s, when Mark Molloch Brown, a PR man turned World Bank vice president, was joined by Morton I. Abramowitz, a State Department official and board member of the International Rescue Committee to create a “conflict prevention” organization in (rather ironically) the build-up to the NATO airstrikes in Serbia. ¹⁰  The seed money was provided by the liberal billionaire philanthropist, who now has been a long-time fixture on the ICG’s executive committee. By the same token, his primary philanthropic vehicle, the transnational Open Society Institute (OSI) has been a longtime funder of the organization.

Sitting alongside Soros in the ICG’s administrative wings are a practical who’s who of the military and corporate establishments. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, former Boeing executive Thomas Pickering, NAFTA negotiator Carla Hills, former International Monetary Fund deputy director Stanley Fischer, and former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark have all served the ICG in some capacity. Thus, it’s not surprising that by the organization’s own admission, the impetus behind their creation was to “persuade governments to do what it believes has to be done – if necessary by taking military measures.” ¹¹

The ICG goes to great lengths to cloak their militarized viewpoint in a liberal and humanitarian veneer, aligning itself with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). Under R2P, a concept that has received the endorsement of Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the World Federalists, and other transnational moderate bodies, [developed] nations have a responsibility to intervene in the affairs of [underdeveloped] countries or regions in order to ‘protect’ the population from human rights abuses – ignoring that frequently these very abuses stem from US military’s fist or from the imposition of Western economic models. The R2P doctrine was injected into transnational diplomacy following its drafting at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was chaired by the Australian politician Gareth Evans. Incidentally, Gareth Evans went on to act as president of the ICG.¹²

Despite its recognition from the foreign policy elite, the doctrine has been met with criticism by those who see the potentials for conflict of interest in its implementation. Noam Chomsky, in a talk given at the UN General Assembly, attacked the tendency for R2P adherents to act rather selectively in their invocations of the doctrine:

The natural interpretation of the timing gains support from the selectivity of application of R2P. There was of course no thought of applying the principle to the Iraq sanctions administered by the Security Council, condemned as “genocidal” by the two directors of the oil-for-food program, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom resigned in protest. Von Sponeck’s detailed study of the horrendous impact of the sanctions has been under a virtual ban in the US and UK, the primary agents of the programs. Similarly, there is no thought today of protection of the people of Gaza, also a UN responsibility, along with the rest of the “protected population” (under the Geneva Conventions), denied fundamental human rights.¹³

Chomsky goes on to point out that the R2P doctrine was never invoked during the crisis in East Timor, where Indonesian occupying forces (with US backing) were conducting ethnic cleansing against the region’s indigenous populations. Perhaps the silence was due to the fact that none other than Gareth Evans, at the time acting as Australia’s foreign minister, had signed lucrative contracts with the Indonesia government to drill in East Timor.¹⁴  Evans subsequently declared the Indonesian occupation as “irreversible” and flippantly commented that there were “zillions” of dollars to be made by the country’s joint oil programs.¹⁵

The Center for American Progress (CAP),¹⁶ on the other hand, is a relatively new US-based political advocacy organization, having been started in 2003 with financial backing from Hebert M. and Marion O. Sandler (the liberal philanthropists behind the investigative journalism non-profit, ProPublica). While Sandlers may have put up the money for CAP, it was John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, who crafted the organization into a well-oiled political machine. Modeled on powerful right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, Podesta envisioned the CAP as a “think-tank on steroids”– its program follows closely with the consumer-propaganda mentality, hosting a “edgy website,” maintaining a daily-operating “war room” to crank out talking points, and the recruitment of “hundreds of fellows and scholars” to draw up policy recommendations.¹⁷

The CAP’s agenda is costly, yet the majority of its financial backers remain undisclosed by the organization. It is known, however, that they have received money from Wal-Mart,¹⁸ a corporation that been represented on Capital Hill by Podesta’s lobbying company, the Podesta Group.¹⁹  Major funding also comes, much like the ICG, from George Soros, with the OSI providing CAP with $30,000 in 2006 for “general support” and much more money ever since.²⁰ Thus it’s not surprising that the OSI maintains high profile ties with the CAP: Morton H. Halperin, the director of the U.S. Advocacy at the Institute is a senior fellow at CAP;²¹ his son, David Halperin, is the senior VP of CAP’s subsidiary organization, Campus Progress. Furthermore, CAP is also funded in part by the Democracy Alliance,²² a consortium of high-profile liberal philanthropists that includes Drummond Pike (founder of the Tides Foundation), Robert H. Dugger (chief economist for the American Bankers Association), Gara LaMarche (former vice president of U.S. Programs at the OSI), and Soros himself on its membership rosters.

The CAP worked with another Soros-funded venture in 2007, MoveOn, as part of the pro-Democrat Party coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI). A faux-grassroots movement that was taking its marching orders from inside the Washington Beltway, the AAEI utilized the rage surrounding the American offensive in Iraq as a rhetorical talking point to channel activists into support for Democrat political candidates. As journalist Matt Taibbi observed:

[M]uch of the [AAEI’s] leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes Consulting — whose partners Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. … This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community. … The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it’s now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they’ve made to the contrary, in the end they’ve done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they’ve been asked to give, every step of the way.²³

In an extension of its support for Democrat Party politics, the CAP, much like MoveOn, was a primary supporter of the Obama campaign, working with yet another OSI-supported outfit, Media Matters, to launch a PR organization simply titled “Progressive Media.”²⁴  Not surprisingly, veterans from the AAEI, Tom Matzzie and Tara McGuinness, were tapped to help run the operation. Subsequently CAP has operated quite closely with the administration, endorsing and campaigning for President Obama’s health care plan. Earlier, John Podesta himself had been selected to serve as co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.²⁵

Just as Matt Taibbi predicted, the utilization of anti-war rhetoric served only to capture the activist voting bloc, while expedited troop de-escalation and withdrawal was never even near the table. In an about-face characteristic of the Democratic Party as a whole, the CAP went from opposing Republican-led maneuvers in the Middle East to arguing for an increase in military efforts under Obama. Their recommendations for a more hawkish approach to Middle East policy came in a report titled “Sustainable Security in Afghanistan,” and was the subject of a CAP-hosted forum called “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan.” ²⁶  In a complete evisceration of so-called progressive credentials, the report’s authors include Lawrence Korb, a director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Vice President of Operations at the defense contractor Raytheon; and Frederick Kagan, a senior scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the notoriously militaristic Project for the New American Century.²⁷

Contrasting sharply with the ICG and CAP, Invisible Children lacks direct ties to the transnational military establishment; its realm is far more grounded in the grassroots activist spectrum (although their board of directors includes Dave Karlman, who has been attached to the International Rescue Committee). ²⁸  Acting in this grassroots space, Invisible Children – in contrast from the ICG and CAP – does not receive funding from the large liberal foundational complex. Instead, as a quick peruse through the organization’s financial statements (which, in a meaningful display of transparency, are posted for all to view on the Invisible Children’s website), the bulk of the funders are either individual donors, smaller businesses, schools, and religious organizations. With this funding, the Invisible Children organization has been able to conduct an impressive strategy that engages the population by hosting school events, protests, and arranging conservations with important policy-makers.

Aside from Dave Karlman, the overwhelming majority of Invisible Children staffers come from religious organizations or joined up following screenings of the film that launched the movement, Invisible Children. Religion plays an important role in the initial motivators behind Invisible Children’s Action; Jason Russell himself is an evangelical Christian and has acknowledged that his worldview is related to his charitable work.²⁹  Thus, because of this, it has not been uncommon to see Christian missionaries, such as Living Waters International, at work with Invisible Children in Uganda on some of their more functional community-based programs, such as the repairing or construction of infrastructure that had been damaged during the war.

As Michael Barker and others have pointed out, one of the organizations that has been subsidizing Invisible Children is ProVision, an extension of the religious, right-wing National Christian Foundation.³⁰  He notes that this combine has been a financial clearinghouse for a myriad of organizations that make up the tapestry of the evangelical community – including “The Family,” (also known as “The Fellowship”), a Washington D.C.-based religious organization that hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Ironically, given the National Christian Foundation’s connection to Invisible Children, The Family itself has complicity in human rights abuses in Uganda: as reported by investigator Jeff Sharlet, a “core member” of the organization, the Uganda parliamentarian David Bahati, helped pushed forward the proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”³¹  This act, which is still being debated in the Ugandan parliament, would make homosexuality a capital offense and punishable by death.

Not all of National Christian Foundation’s funding recipients are religious-oriented, however. A large portion of their money is marked for free-market think-tanks that lobby for neoliberal economic reforms; these include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.³²  While at first this may seem like a curious anomaly, the fact that a religious organization is supporting a certain economic platform is not a new phenomenon. The two have been essentially conjoined at the hip for much of modern American history – religious integration has been utilized as a perfect vehicle for economic imperialism and vice-versa.

One worthwhile study of this complex has been Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.³³ In their sprawling work, the two authors have tracked an extensive history showing the often-indirect (but undeniable collusion) between the religious right (mainly Christian missionaries), progressive politicians and figureheads (such as the Rockefeller family) and US foreign policy agencies in bringing that unruly hotbed of Leftist, Central and South America, in line with American geopolitical and economic imperatives. Earlier still, the Rockefellers had already noted that religious work operated rather harmoniously with market prerogatives. Frederick Taylor Gates, the family’s administrator of philanthropic funding, took careful note that “Missionary enterprise, viewed solely from a commercial standpoint, is immensely profitable. From the point of view of means of subsistence for Americans, our import trade, traceable mainly to channels of intercourse opened by missionaries, is enormous.”³⁴

One last important example of the relationship between religion and elite strategy is the case of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive yet powerful consortium of right-wing politicians, businessmen, and evangelical leaders. In the early 1980s the CNP was joined by Colonel Oliver North, who saw in the organization a potential cash-cow for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.³⁵ The move proved to be wildly successful, and the evangelical community became an informal extension of US foreign policy in the south by providing both money and media coverage to help unseat the left-wing Sandinista government. Perhaps importantly, the CNP and the National Christian Foundation were established a mere six months apart and maintained an interlocking relationship between their founders.³⁶ Furthermore, the Foundation maintained funding ties to Christian charities run by the sister of Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the CNP’s original benefactors and one of North’s key Contra supporters.³⁷  To show just how closely aligned this world is, Hunt was also found to be one of the primary financiers of missionary work in South America, much to the benefit of the Rockefeller family and the US government.³⁸

Managing the Spectacle for Larger Ambitions

In bringing together the ICG, CAP, and Invisible Children together under a common rubric, a multi-tiered advocacy campaign is capable of being launched across normal class, ideological, and geographical divisions. At the top level, the ICG is capable of managing the flow of information coming from Uganda and can effectively craft policy recommendations on the actions that it sees fit. Likewise, CAP can work on the national level, and with its extensive relationship with the PR industry, drive a campaign while simultaneously conduct political lobbying. Invisible Children’s impact is primarily on a localized, community level, using clever campaigning to create a grassroots voice demanding action from the leaders in Washington. Working in tandem, a Spectacle is woven that promotes a singular mindset that, as discussed earlier, reflects the top-down pop consumer mentality of the society it was fomented in.

The Spectacle, in the hands of those who seek aggression, can be a powerful tool; it can overwhelm an opposition, as in the case of  the Iraq War, and one just has to turn on the television set to see the sabre-rattling being conducted towards Iran. Gerald Sussman, Professor of Urban Studies and Communications at Portland State University, has written that contrary to the ideas of many scholars, information – the cornerstone of the Spectacle³⁹ – does not, in the modern epoch, have a neutral character:

In the consumer economy, the prevailing uses of processed data are not simply informational in character or designed as a public good… Rather they are primarily promotional, which involves a control of language in ways that displaces the value of general wisdom and “common sense” that historically emerged in sites where public conversation, debate, and consensus on necessities and meanings took place (the public sphere). ⁴⁰

Kony 2012, by eschewing analysis and legitimate education in favor of easily digestible talking points and emotional appeals, creates a rather hollow framework that helps to undermine the complex conversations that must be had on the issue. The conditioning of society to consume hollow informational bits – a topic far beyond the scope of this article – allows a cohesive aura to be constructed, and the result in this case is the mass calls for what appears to indeed be an intervention in Uganda. A recent Reuters piece quotes John Campbell, an African specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that the “campaign… definitively energizes the political level and that in turn energizes the diplomatic machine.”⁴¹  The article also quotes an official from the ICG, who notes that while the “campaign aims to harden the U.S.’s engagement in the fight against the LRA,” fears of the negative fallout from troop deaths could spell disaster for Obama in the upcoming electoral season.

The irony is that while the Kony awareness campaign is utilizing people power to pressure politicians into action, a great many players in the campaign are themselves members of the transnational foreign policy elite who operate outside of the White House. The ICG itself has already successfully utilized its standing in shaping President Obama’s policy towards Uganda; in 2010 it issued a report that recommended that the US government dispatch a team of specialists to help run an “intelligence platform” to centralize efforts between the country’s military and other regional armies. ⁴²  The Obama administration, in a very under-reported move, did just that – and the Kony 2012 video proceeded to cite this as an example of people power interacting with their government.

This rise of interventionist mindset towards Africa follows closely on the heels of NATO’s excursion into Libya, situated at the northern edge of the continent. The Libyan venture, explained away to the US population as support for the country’s rebels seeking to unseat the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is a picture-perfect example of the R2P doctrine in action. Although, unlike the current Stop Kony campaign, it was not preceded by a seemingly politically engaged citizenry – it was a decision reached behind closed doors and far away from Congress. The primary catalyst for the excursion was one of Obama’s picks for his National Security Council, the self-proclaimed “humanitarian hawk” ⁴³  Samantha Power. ⁴⁴

Described by Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth as “[having] the president’s ear,” Power skyrocketed to prominence in 2003 after publishing A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which argued that the US government is the solution to much of the world’s problems. In crafting this argument, however, she curiously sidesteps instances where the US has been the catalyst for human rights abuses or simply obfuscates the nation’s complicity. Critic Edward Herman has observed that one such instance is the earlier-discussed mass extermination in East Timor: Power’s treatment of the crisis is limited to noting that “when… the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away” – ignoring that America “gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response… and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.” ⁴⁵  Regardless, Power’s work was heavily endorsed by the foreign policy establishment and during the year of its publication, was awarded the Council on Foreign Relation’s Arthur Ross Book Award.

Power’s position in the Obama administration has been dominated by an elite-centric and rather technocratic state of mind connected directly to managing the flow of information and leveraging propaganda in favor of government action. Her husband and longtime Obama confidant, Cass Sunstein, was also tapped for a governmental position after the election as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is tasked with “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,”⁴⁶ something that may be unsettling when one takes into consideration their new director has argued in a college thesis that the government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government. ” The justification, he continues, is that actions deemed to be conspiratorial are good, as long as it serves the “greater good.” ⁴⁷

In a similar vein, Power stated in a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose that controlling information would be required in the era of Obama, particularly when it came to the hope that US forces would be leaving Iraq – “Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally.”⁴⁸  Following this statement, she proceeded to deny that the Obama presidency would be viewed as a wartime leadership – and in the process revealed her elite-centric view towards US supremacy:

Part of having a credible American leader again who is unimplicated with the war in Iraq who is very attractive to people around the world, is to somehow use that early wind at his back to try to extract commitments to patrol the commons, to actually deal with these broken people and broken places.

In other words, the presence of a commander-in-chief who is outside of what is normally perceived as the military establish will be more conductive to militarized behavior. She attaches this rhetoric to references to “broken people and broken places” – linking the military directly to humanitarian relief, while her belief in the necessity of “patrolling the commons” reveals a distinctive police mentality.

Power has deep ties to foreign policy complexes, including ones that are directly tied to the current “Stop Kony” campaign. In 1996 she was a policy analyst for the ICG, and she has been a director at the International Rescue Committee. She was the founding executive director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; the organization, which interlocks with the ICG through Morton Abramowitz, would go on to be involved in developing counter-insurgency doctrines during the War on Terror. ⁴⁹  She is linked to the Investors against Genocide group – much like the Enough Project’s John Prendergast. Furthermore, Resolve lists her as a “LRA Strategy Power Player,” the group of politicians involved in the movement to intervene in Uganda.⁵⁰

Samantha Power is certainly not the centerpiece of the humanitarian intervention complex – but she is indicative of the prevailing attitude that military force can be used for good. By repositioning it in a liberal context, it’s distanced from the neoconservative “Peace through Strength” diplomacy that the Left has so long castigated. Yet America (and the UN and NATO by extension) has, historically, been selective in its military offensives and interventions; where there are no economic gains to be had or geostrategic interests to be defended, the financial and physical costs of war have never been put to use. Thus, the flowery rhetoric about humanitarian intervention and “responsibility to protect” has to be taken lightly.

When one pulls back the cover behind the “Stop Kony” people power, the usual collusion of business and military can be found. The military advisers dispatched to Uganda on the ICG’s recommendations operate under the auspices of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the umbrella group overseeing all of the US’s actions on the African continent.⁵¹  While the creation of AFRICOM, which occurred under the George W. Bush administration, was shrouded in humanitarian overtones, it came about following a lobbying campaign conducted by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG). ⁵²  The AOPIG, in turn, is a consortium of representatives from the CIA, African oil companies, and other private interests. It is also linked to the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies – an Israeli-based think-tank that seeks to “shift America’s dependency on oil from the Gulf nations — hostile towards Israel — to other parts of the world.”⁵³ The AOPIG also has ties to the Free Africa Foundation, an African-oriented free-market advocacy group with its own connections to a network of US-based conservative foundations and think-tanks.⁵⁴

The existence of AFRICOM and its connections hint at a wider geopolitical agenda. While we now veer into the area of conjecture, it is certainly interesting to observe that many have linked AFRICOM to the presence of Chinese petroleum interests on the African continent: “Officials say that Chinese efforts to exert its military influence in Africa have drawn the interest of U.S. military planners,” Fox News reported,⁵⁵ while the BBC drew attention to the fact that “the US gets more than 10% of its oil from Africa and is worried about increased economic and diplomatic competition from China.” ⁵⁶ Extrapolating from that, the Libyan intervention can be viewed in a new light: Gaddafi’s government had entered into an oil partnership with the China, providing the country with 3% of its oil needs in 2010.⁵⁷ The Libyan rebels made a point to attack these Chinese oil installations, disrupting worker camps and breaking down the lines of communication. ⁵⁸  Chinese African oil interests are not only limited to Libya; the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation also signed exploratory deals with the government of Somalia⁵⁹ (another spot of interest for the US military), and has also been engaging in talks with Uganda’s up and coming oil industry.⁶⁰

Regardless of the ultimate reason for AFRICOM and the surge in US interest on the African continent, many Africans have worried that the American command umbrella will lead to a militarization of the continent’s culture. “Africa is going to look at all its development efforts through the lens of the Pentagon. That’s a truly dangerous dimension. We don’t need militarisation of Africa, we don’t need securitisation of aid and development in Africa,” the BBC quoted Kenyan columnist Salim Lone as saying.⁶¹  This militarized mindset, driven by AFRICOM, is indivisibly linked to the Stop Kony movement through both logistics (the presence of military advisers) and rhetoric (the innocuous calls for the warlord’s arrest). It has the potential to serve further goals, beyond just the possible short-term gains of geopolitical interest, but also sets a precedent for future propaganda about the role of the military in alleviating humanitarian crises.

The election of President Obama was fueled, in large part, by the population’s disgust in war. Organizations capitalized on this sentiment, funneling discontent into a powerful voting bloc, and now the same organizations are pushing for military action with a citizenry – legitimately concerned with the plight of the world’s oppressed and exploited – acting as the primary vanguard of the movement. This is no small part thanks to a well-orchestrated management of the flows of information, rooted in a mental framework that is all pervasive throughout modern society. This is a byproduct of informational breakdown, the obfuscation of motivation, and the possibility for the elite to derive action from conditioned emotional responses. It is through oversimplification and ‘digestible’ sound bites and images that important and worthwhile education of human abuses and global affairs – things that must be known and discussed – can be transmuted into a space where the adage “War is Peace” rings true.

1. “Military Keynesianism” refers to the methodology of utilizing military spending to inject money into the national economy, leading to a cozy relationship between the armed forces, the corporations that produce goods used by the armed forces, and the wings of the government that hold control over military activities. President Eisenhower immortalized the concept as the “military-industrial complex.”
2. Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: What’s the Real Story”, The Guardian, March 8, 2012
3. Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, “Consumerism Trumps Education”, Huffington Post March 11, 2012
4. Jacque Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Vintage Books, 1965, pgs. 30-31
5. Mike Pflanza, “Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film”, The Telegraph, March 8, 2012
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Barker, “KONY 2012” Swans Commentary March 26, 2012
8. Ibid
9. “About” Enough Project
10. Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group”,  New Left Review, May-June 2010
11. See Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group“
12. Michael Barker, “Imperial Crusader for Global Governance”, Swans Commentary, April 20, 2009
13. Noam Chomsky,  “The Responsibility to Protect”,  Talk given at the UN General Assembly, New York City, July 23, 2009
14. Edward S. Herman, David Petersen,  “The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights”,  MRZine, August 24, 2009
15. Barker “Imperial Crusaders for Global Governance”
16. For more information the Center for American Progress, see my “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power” Dissident Voice December 21, 2012
17. Matt Bai,  “Notion Building”, The New York Times,  October 12, 2003
18. John McCormmack,  Corporatism and the Center for American Progress, The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2010
19. Justin Elliot, “Who’s Doing Mubarack’s Bidding in Washington?” Salon, January 28, 2011
20. Various Open Society Institute reports
21. Halperin is also on the steering committee of the Democracy Coalition Project, an initiative of the Open Society Institute that works closely with the UN Democracy Caucus.
22. Jim VandeHei, Chris Cillizza, “A New Alliance of Democrats Spreads Funding”, The Washington Post, July 17, 2006
23. Matt Taibbi, quoted in “Americans Against Escalation in Iraq”, Sourcewatch
24. John Strauber, “Progressive Media – A PR War Room for Obama”, March 28, 2009
25. Sam Stein, “Obama, McCain Transition Efforts are Worlds Apart”, Huffington Post, October 8, 2008
26. “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan”, Center for American Progress, April 3, 2009
27. The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, had been a coalition of neoconservatives that had come together during the Clinton administration to lobby for an increase in military action to maintain global American supremacy – an outgrowth of the “Peace Through Strength” mentality that had been the hallmark of Reagan-era foreign policy. Over twenty members of the PNAC went on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush, whose foreign policy followed their recommendations very closely.
28. Barker, “Kony 2012”
29. “Jason Russell and Alex Harris – Liberty University Convocation”
30. Michael Barker, “Kony 2012”
31. “The Secret Reach of ‘The Family’”, NPR interview between Terry Gross and Jeff Sharlet, November 24, 2009
32. M. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”, Political Cortex, October 29, 2006
33. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Harper Collins, 1995
34. E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, University of California Press, 1979 pg. 123
35. This will be discussed in my forth-coming book on the history of American democracy promotion.
36. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
37. See Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
38. See Colby and Dennett, Thy Will Be Done
39. The “Spectacle” referred to here is the superficiality of informational communication flows and mass media present in the age of advanced (or Late) capitalism. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red 2010 (reprint edition). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri summarize Debord’s notion of the Spectacle as “an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.” Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 321
40. Gerald Sussman, Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Peter Lang, 2010, pg. 11
41. Peter Apps, “Seen by as seen by millions, will Uganda Kony video matter?” Reuters
42. “LRA: A regional strategy beyond Killing Kony”,  International Crisis Group,  April 28, 2010
43. Sholto Byrnes,  “Interview: Samantha Power“,  New Statesmen,  March 6, 2008
44. Sheryl Gay Strolberg,  “Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside“,  The New York Times,  March 29, 2011
45. Edward Herman,  “Response to Zinn on Samantha Power”,  ZNet,  August 27,  2007
46. “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs”
47. Glenn Greenwald,  “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal“, Salon,  January 15, 2010
48. Paul Street,  “‘Calibrating’ HOPE in the effort to “Patrol the Commons:” Samantha Power and the Hidden Imperial Reality of Barack Obama”,  ZNet,  February 25,  2008
49. Tom Hayden,  “Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks”.  The Nation,  July 14, 2007
50. “Samantha Power”
51. Thomas P.M. Barnett,  “Africom to Work Lord’s Resistance Army Problem With Uganda”, Time,  October 17, 2011
52. “Ghana Oil – Seeking National or Some Personal Selfish Interests?” GhanaWeb,  February 1, 2010
53. Paul-Michael Wihbey,” Africa Energy Intelligence, November 5, 2002
54. One of the supporters of the Free Africa Foundation is Peter Ackerman, the managing director Rockport Capital Incorporated. Ackerman also holds deep ties to the US democracy promoting complex, acting as chairman of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which is funded in party by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Ackerman’s further credentials include acting as the former chairman of Freedom House, which also receives funding from the NED. Furthermore, Ackerman is a board member of the libertarian CATO Institute. In a similar vein, the Free Africa Foundation’s president, George Ayittey – who is also a member of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group – is a scholar at the CATO Institute, while another Free Africa Foundation board member, Theodore J. Forstmann, serves on the board of both CATO and Freedom House.
55. “Bush Approves New US Command in Africa”,  February 6, 2007
56. “US to get Africa command center”,  BBC News,  February 6, 2007
57. “Gaddafi’s fall threatens Chinese investments in Libya”,  Asia News,  August 24, 2011
58. Leslie Hook and Geoff Dyer,  “Chinese oil interests attacked in Libya”,  Financial Times,  February 24, 2011
59. Barney Jopson,  “Somalia Oil Deal for China”,  Financial Times,  July 13, 2007
60. “China’s State Oil Company in Talks for Uganda Refinery”,  Voice of America,  February 23, 2012
61. Daniel Gordon,  “The Controversy Over Africom”, October 3, 2007

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction.¹ Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”²

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.³

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnapings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May.⁴ Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity.⁵  But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.⁶

President Obama’s accomplishments

Last month, Alan S. Hoffman, an American professor from Washington University in St. Louis, was forbidden by the US Treasury Department to travel to Cuba to give classes in a course on biomaterials.⁷

At the same time, the State Department refused to grant two Cuban diplomats in Washington, DC permission to travel to New York City to speak at The Left Forum, the largest annual gathering of the left in the United States, which this year attracted over 5,000 people.⁸

The State Department has also been occupied recently with preventing Cuba from being invited to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April.⁹

And that’s just the past month.

I mention all this to keep in mind the next time President Obama or one of his supporters lists US relations with Cuba as one of his accomplishments.

And I still cannot go to Cuba legally.

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he’s abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”¹⁰

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the home of the brave. Kosovo and Diego Garcia — both of which house very large and secretive American military bases — if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued January 22, 2009 — “Executive Order 13491 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations” — leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only “in any armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of “armed conflict”, which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. And what about torture in a “counter-terrorism” environment?

One of Mr. Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions “that violate our human values.”¹¹

Just as no one in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against, no one has been punished for torture. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.¹²

I’d like at this point to remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back.

Joseph Biden

From a document found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.¹³

So … it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?

And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China’s presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?

America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China’s authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don’t think freely or innovate. “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.” Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, “It’s impossible to think different in a country where you can’t speak freely. It’s impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It’s impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That’s why we remain the most innovative country in the world.”¹⁴

Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth’s orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1′s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA.¹⁵

1. Washington Post, April 1, 2012
2. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
3. See the document on WikiLeaks
4. Washington Post, March 24, 2012
5. Ibid., March 26, 2012
6. Ibid., January 10, 2012
7. Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012
8. See the video description on Cuba’s UN Ambassador at Left Forum ’12
9. BBC News, “Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion“, April 3, 2012
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
11. New York Times, February 6, 2009
12. Associated Press, November 17, 2008
13. Washington Post, March 16, 2012
14. Ibid., March 1, 2012
15. Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1

Additionally and infamously, of course, whole wedding parties have been wiped out, by some detached and far-flung controller in the American Southwest or in Langley, VA. Is this what is meant by making war more and more “hospitable” and “sanitized”? I guess, in a sense, but not; of course, for those at the receiving end of the drone. Such questions, I think, force one to wonder about what Maddow thinks regarding the Constitution — vis a vis the war authorization for the US military conflict — in the so-called Afpak war zone.

Indeed, the aforementioned authorization for the war in Afghanistan, pertains to the US military’s actions in Afghanistan — and Afghanistan alone. [4] Thus, of course, there is no constitutional basis for any sort of military, or even drone activities in the sovereign nation of Pakistan (or any of the other nations where they have been used). And furthermore, one wonders what Maddow’s position on the two American citizens — executed under unconstitutional bureaucratic fiat is — considering that this was not addressed in the Howard Stern interview. These Americans were, according to the Obama administration, guilty until proven innocent, but; of course, never received anything like their inalienable right to a trial, or the long-hallowed and (previously) integrally American jury of their peers.

International law scholar Richard Falk does believe that drones have changed the idea of war/military conflict seriously, and that their advent should be regarded with grave interest/concern. According to Falk the drones clearly raise questions about national sovereignty, and the parameters about presently held notions — of what are the currently permissible forms of war. Falk likens legal “rationalities” for the usage of the deathly — and indeed death-dealing — military drone technology, as analogous to John Yoo style torture memo-esque scrawlings of the George Bush Jr. administration/cabal. So, if some more mature, rational, and informed legal bases/doctrines, don’t arise regarding present and impending drone technology; Falk envisions a dystopian future scenario of rampant proliferation that will be imposed upon the world, by a small number of select, drone-armed, and exceedingly powerful elite states.

Falk posits that in our Machiavellian world, where a handful of nuclear countries have been able to cajole a vast majority of the world’s nations, into the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that a similar regime could come forward — regarding these still fairly nascent military drones. Falk sees no impediment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, at present, and says that the same is essentially true of the drones. But the least evil (but still evil) route for the drones may; in fact, end similarly to nuclear armaments, in which the “great powers” — self-chosen — make elaborate and extensive use of their own specific unmanned aerial drones. And by that Falk means that some nations will use drones within their own territory, whilst more powerful international actors, will use them globally (and for attack purposes too).

Falk may be putting his realist hat on, and his spot-on theorizing may be of the Machiavellian reality/order of things, but the actually of the matter is that the drones are totally (and utterly) illegal and unfair. Like a child in a candy shop, the military-industrial complex’s eyes have bulged out, at the advent of this facile way of grievously and insufferably slaughtering people — and so Falk’s analysis is, positively, very sound in this sense. But truth, facts, and reason, I think, must be defended also, even if they are ridiculed as utopian and overly idealistic, by the egregious, sly, and unscrupulous actions — made by the technocrats, military, governmental and political elite officials — who rule our modern day Oceania-esque nation-state, and evermore integrated world.

One of the most prominent government officials of any position — or any stripe — to come out, and unequivocally attack the drones is Hina Rabbani Khar, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Khar has said that, “Drones are not only completely illegal and unlawful and have no authorization to be used — within the domains of international law, but even more importantly, they are counterproductive to your objective of getting this region rid of militancy and terrorism and extremism. Furthermore she has stated, “if one [drone] strike leads to getting you target number one, or target number three today; you are creating five more targets, or ten more targets — in the militancy that it breeds — in the fodder that it gives to the militants, to join their ranks.”

Earlier this year Amnesty International called upon the Obama administration to demonstrate the legal and factual basis of the lethal use of drones. Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific director — at the time — said that, “the US authorities must give a detailed explanation of how these strikes are lawful, and what is being done to monitor civilian casualties and ensure proper accountability. And the director moreover asked, “What are the rules of engagement? What proper legal justification exists for these attacks? While the President’s confirmation of the use of drones in Pakistan, is a welcome first step towards transparency, these and other questions need to be answered.”

Thin and paltry “justifications” for the drone attacks have, in the past, been offered by US officials, and are “grounded” upon the spurious legal basis of a US global war on terrorism with Al-Qaeda — a concept that is not accepted or recognized, by international humanitarian or human rights law. Truthfully, the ultimate question is what law — if any — recognizes, or gives any credence to the deplorable bombardments, by these egregious, brutish, feral, and essentially barbaric (and deeply) inhuman drones?

International law scholar Philip Alston has said about the drones, “I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe… this strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability is not an entitlement which the United States or other states can have without doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.”

Alston, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has proposed a summit by the “great” military powers to clarify the legal limits, and the boundaries on the extrajudicial attacks by the killer drones. If such a summit doesn’t take place, and define a fixed, immutable, firm, resolute, and unbending (drone) operational blueprint Alston says, “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense [used to attempt to legitimize the drone strikes] goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the [Charter of the UN].”

As made clear by Professor Richard Falk, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever, to continue on with these savage, mass slaying, and annihilating — and indeed, authentically diabolical killer drones. Like the opening of Pandora’s box, though, these horrid, reprehensible, and unconscionable technological creations may be with us for good. Professor Falk is a more learned man than I, so sadly, if the forces of peace and justice can’t effectively resist, and potentially put an end to these stealthful mass-murderers — run by cowards who have never even envisaged any battlefields — then they will continue to amass great civilian murder, death, heinousness, invidiousness, and inordinate barbarity too. This will more than likely be done by the nations, and regimes that trumpet human rights, democracy, liberty, transparency, openness, and unregulated; and unrestrained human thought, as articles that are necessary to their very basic foundational civic principles, and integral to their national essentia also.

The U.S. military created Project Agile in Vietnam in 1961, to apply data processing techniques to the task of measuring the allegiances of every individual in the numerous hamlets of South Vietnam. Files were maintained on every aspect of every person’s life. Every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the Saigon government and carry ID cards. Those apprehended without cards were imprisoned or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained, and the individual’s political beliefs were recorded. ²  By 1966, the U.S. military began studying the potential applicability of this program to cities and communities inside the U.S.

Although the LEAA was abolished in 1982, it had already begun to introduce military hardware and tactics into the daily programs of domestic law enforcement. LEAA’s emphasis included surveillance equipment and computer systems that compiled information on individuals such as criminal activity, biographical and physical data (scars, deformities, etc.), identifying numbers, social security numbers, operators licenses, skin tones, addresses and occupations. In addition, enormous amounts of money went toward police hardware including products such as infrared equipment, anti-sniper vans, helicopters, communication systems that enabled the police to write messages through their radios, lightweight portable video tape recorders, short landing and take-off planes, and filing systems.

LEAA was not merely designed to bolster the reputation of right-wing “law n’ order” forces inside the U.S. at a time during the 60s when there was little respect for law enforcement, but rather was empowered to create a completely new law enforcement infrastructure inside our own communities. Programs created by LEAA ranged from prison and community-based halfway houses to “Watch Your Neighbor” programs on our streets. The infrastructure was designed to render law enforcement needs a responsibility of our own communities – to make us all responsible for dealing with the prevention of crimes. Virtually nothing LEAA sponsored dealt with the root causes of crime, but rather, made the citizenry part of the detain, arrest and imprison aspects of law enforcement.

Today, while the U.S. military is building and maintaining bases throughout the world, it is providing an updated armamentarium of warfare hardware to our local “law enforcement” communities. Over the last two decades, for example, San Francisco has acquired “infrared scanning devices, combat helmets, chemical protective gloves, vehicles and even a boat as discarded hand-me-downs free of charge from the Department of Defense.” The Alameda County Sheriff’s department got an 85-foot patrol boat as well as a grenade launcher. Police departments are equipping themselves with 8 and 1/2-ton bulletproof tactical vehicles. Santa Barbara Sheriffs have taken four helicopters, and the San Joaquin County Sheriffs picked up a full-tracked tank last year even though it had previously received a mobile-command vehicle that it bought with federal grant money.³ The newest additions to this stockpile of hard-core weapons will be be surveillance drones.  The Federal Data Center in Utah has been designated as the information-gathering center of the U.S. surveillance empire: it will be responsible for gathering, maintaining and disseminating information nationwide.

Military infringement into domestic law enforcement has become an essential part of our border control policies, especially in the Southwest. “During the 1978-1992 period, U.S. immigration and drug enforcement policies and practices in the U.S.-Mexico border region became increasingly militarized. Developed during the 1980s for use in Central America and elsewhere, this doctrine is characterized by broad-ranging provisions for establishing social control over specific civilian populations, and its implementation has often been accompanied by widespread human rights violations.”⁴

Author Joey LeMay points out that “Counter-terrorism efforts abroad have expanded to include counter-terrorism efforts domestically” and that military-style tactics within the police force[s] have taken root since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  “In September 2006, the U.S. issued the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, an overview of the practices and goals that were to be implemented and accomplished to curb terroristic efforts. The document details the ideological shift of combating attacks against the U.S.:

The paradigm for combating terrorism now involves the application of all elements of our national power and influence. Not only do we employ military power, we use diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement activities to protect the Homeland and extend our Defenses, disrupt terrorist operations, and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive. We have broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.

Today’s favorite police toys include sound cannons (LRAD) to SWAT Teams, pepper gas, shotgun-style Taser projectors, and focused, invisible beams of waves that cause a severe burning sensation in the skin (AIS), the list goes on and on.

Only a police force that earns the people’s trust and respect can be effective. This is certainly the case in Afghanistan where the accelerated rate of U.S. militarization of the Afghani police force resulted in the contempt and antagonism of the entire Afghan people. As a result, the U.S. was forced to modify its strategy from containment to one of counter-insurgency.

The major problem with integrating military tactics into domestic police departments is that it transforms community participation in law enforcement into acts more common to warfare: renditions; torture; isolation cells; strip searches; racial profiling; and, the numerous excesses that identify U.S. imperial actions throughout the world. To the extent that police attempt to control the American people with drones and batons, rather than with cooperation and protection, they they are doomed to failure.

Once again in our communities, there is little credibility among community members for the legitimacy of police forces, Border Patrol, Homeland Security forces, etc. Many people fear the unleashed power of the police and react strongly to the implications of greater police power. The disrespect that the American people have for law enforcement is paralleled by the public’s contempt for Congress, the so-called Supreme Court and the Presidency. Our national preoccupation with arresting and imprisoning the largest domestic population in the world is a reflection of our murderous foreign policy.  Only when democracy is restored in the U.S. will we see an end to our ever-expanding, immune, and unaccountable police force.

1. “For fiscal year 1973, LEAA was allocated $841 million in crime-fighting funds, bringing the total funds awarded to LEAA to $2.43 billion. 85% of LEAA’s funding is directed to State Planning groups, which then turn over most of it to local law enforcement application. The remaining 15% is distributed by LEAA as it wishes.” (Hiken, Marti, Ed., “A Primer on LEAA,” October 1974, Published by the National Lawyers Guild, Seattle Chapter; officially presented to the community of Seattle and the city council
2. ibid.,  “Primer on LEAA” and Wikipedia
3. Schulz, G.W. and Becker, Andrew, California Watch, “If U.S. military doesn’t want it, cops will take it,” 3-31-12, p. 1A
4. Dunn, Timothy J., “Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978-1992.  “Dunn demonstrates that U.S. immigration and drug enforcement practices in the southwestern border region have coincided with many key features of low-intensity conflict doctrine. His findings are supported extensively by material from U.S. government documents, investigative reports from mainstream and alternative presses, interviews with federal law enforcement personnel in South Texas, and reports from human rights advocacy organizations. The study reflects a concern for human rights conditions in the U.S.-Mexico border region and is informed by the belief that the ‘official’ story is usually but one version of events and should not be accepted uncritically.”

 … she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news,
which was no longer breaking news, when
the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

— The Girl/The Scream, Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008

March was another month of tragic, needless lives lost, the searing grief of mothers and fathers for lost sons and daughters.

Shockingly stark, however, has been the impression that for the powers-that-be, for a swathe of public in the West, some deaths are indisputedly regarded as more tragic, more noteworthy than others.

On March 6th, six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Corporal Jake Hartley (20) and Privates Anthony Frampton (20) Christopher Kershaw (19) Daniel Wade (20) and Daniel Wilford (20), and Sergeant Nigel Coupe (33) died when their armored vehicle was blown up. The resulting fire reportedly burned all night.

More youthful annihilations in an invasion and occupation, illegal, ill-conceived and long lost. Human sacrifices at the altar of political ego, dying because the powerful would rather throw away the lives of others than “lose face” one hundred and twenty-five  months since the “war” started.

In the US, five of the six would have been too young to even legally order a drink in a bar, but are old enough to die for monumental imperial folly, regional foothold –  and a pipeline.

Before the month ended two more British servicemen were shot, and yet another blown to eternity.

In Parliament Prime Minister Cameron paid vacuous tribute. They died, he said, “keeping our country safe.” What nonsense! There are no Afghan hordes massing across the English Channel, planning invasion with near antique rifles – some so ancient they have Queen Victoria’s insignia on them, relics from another historic British folly.

Prince Harry, cavorting round the Caribbean, filling in time before returning to Afghanistan in an Apache Attack Helicopter – with fire power of 632 rounds a minute, plus up to sixteen Hellfire missiles – to wipe out more villagers, and their homes, hung his head and declared himself  “devastated.” Flags in their home and base towns in the UK flew at half mast.

Five days later, on March 11th, there was a massacre of seventeen Afghan villagers by an American soldier, or, say numerous eye witnesses, soldiers. Nine of the victims were children, the youngest two years old.

The names have been gathered, but to date, their ages not matched with them. Mohamed Wazir lost five daughters: Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, and Estmatullah, and his son, Faizullah.

The other known names are: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Nazar Mohamed, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Zahra, Nazia, Essa Mohamed and Akhtar Mohammed. The name of the seventeenth victim is, so far, unknown.

The wounded have names too: Haji Mohamed Naim, Mohamed Sediq, Parween, Rafiulla, Zardana, Zulheja. Since they were taken to a US military medical facility, little is known of their condition.

John Henry Browne is attorney for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the only person, so far, accused of the atrocities – which, allegedly, involved attempting to set fire to the bodies, having covered them with materials and doused them with gasoline. Browne claims that US forces have obstructed him and colleagues from reaching and questioning the survivors.

Ironically, the killings and attempted body burnings were a near carbon copy of the US murders in Mahmudiya, Iraq, six years before, almost to the day. (March 12th, 2006.)

President Obama called Aghanistan’s Hamid Karzai to express his condolences and to assure him that the “tragic incident does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Coming a month after “respectful” representatives of the US military had chucked over a hundred Holy Qurans into a burn pit, a large group of Marine snipers had been photographed posing with a flamboyant Nazi flag, and less than two months after they had been filmed urinating on dead Afghans, the Nobel President’s assurances surely sounded somewhat wanting on the sincerity front.

That impression may have been confirmed when just two days after the killings and pictures of the little broken bodies and their relatives, laid in battered pick-up trucks for their last journey, to their burial – the haunted faces of the male relatives saying more than any words – Obama and David Cameron were pictured, carefree, smirking, sharing jokes and munching hotdogs in Ohio.

Cameron, who had arrived in Washington that day, was whisked off in Air Force One to the annual US college basketball tournament, “March Madness” in Dayton to watch Kentucky’s Hilltoppers challenge Mississippi’s Delta Devils. Ohio is a swing state that is a vital plank of his strategy to win a second term in November, observe commentators.

User-friendly front page pictures of jollying at a game surely beat those of small US victims, over which Obama had declared himself “heartbroken”, in an increasingly unpopular quagmire, which a March CNN/ORC poll showed just 25% of Americans supporting.

David Cameron flew back to the UK just in time to temporarily attempt diversion from an avalanche of self-inflicted domestic problems by leaping to support fellow Libya destroyer, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy. (Even by the woeful record of British Prime Ministers, Cameron and his Croesus-rich Cabinet cronies are so out of touch with the real world, they would make Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette look like a representative of the far left.)

On March 19th, another tragedy struck more children, a father, and their   families.

At a Jewish school, the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France, a gunman, Mohammed Merah, shot dead Jonathan Sandler, a Rabbi and teacher at the school, his two sons, Gabriel and Arieh, aged three and six, and Miriam Monsonego, the seven year-old daughter of the school Principal, Yaacov Monsenego. An un-named seventeen year-old boy was wounded.

President Sarkozy said: “Barbarity, savagery and cruelty cannot win, hate cannot win …One can imagine that the bloodthirsty madness was linked to racism.”

Ironically, the gunman, of Algerian origin, with a Muslim background, three days earlier, had, it seems, killed three soldiers, in nearby Montaubon. Two were Muslim. He has been repeatedly quoted as saying he was driven by the plight of the Palestinian people and of what he perceived as the West’s war against Islam. George W. Bush’s declared: “Crusade” returns to haunt.

David Cameron told Sarkozy: “People across Britain share the shock and grief that is being felt in France, and my thoughts are with the victims, their friends and their families….†You can count on my every support in confronting these senseless acts of brutality and cowardice.”

A minute’s silence was held across France for the victims. A book of condolence was opened at the French Embassy in Washington, and when those who had dual French-Israeli nationality were flown back to Israel for burial, accompanied by their relatives, they were joined by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.

Mohammed Merah’s story is becoming as hard to unravel of that of Staff Sergeant Bales in the Afghanistan carnage. However, Merah is predictably being labeled an Islamic terrorist, whilst Bales has been whisked out of Afghanistan. His lawyer cites memory loss and post traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy faces his electorate in April and May, and with France’s finances and Libya threatening to take their toll, no sympathy stone is, seemingly, left unturned.

“What must be understood”, he said: “is that the trauma of Montaubon and Toulouse is profound for our country, a little …  a little, like the trauma that followed in the United States and in New York after the September 11, 2001 attacks”, he told “Europe 1” radio. Loss and grief as chutzpah which out-does chutzpah.

It is surely coincidence that nineteen people have been arrested in France, in connection with the murders. Exactly the same number as the 9/11 hijackers.

When London’s underground system and a bus was struck by explosives on July 7th, 2005, former New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, happened to be in town and did the rounds of media outlets, telling listeners that this was “London’s 9/11.” These shameful political non-senses trivialize losses of enormity, and all who are left to pick up the pieces of, and struggle with, the fractured, often broken, emotional aftermath.

Willfully ignored is cause and effect. Soldiers are dispatched to countries of which they know nothing, for oil and other interests, having been trained to see those in lands they occupy, uninvited, as lesser beings. Always thus, they attach derogatory names to other nationalities, sneer at lives, culture, beliefs and dress. Above all they are trained to kill.

Those who react to this injustice are simply “terrorists”, “a tragic incident”, or “collateral damage.”

Three tragedies, leaving holes in many hearts, but two, clearly, so much greater.

When will Western politicians and their allies address their own: “barbarity, savagery and cruelty … the bloodthirsty madness” their: “senseless acts of brutality and cowardice”, their murderous meddling. Their crimes against humanity?

And far away, in those little villages in Afghanistan, traumatized surviving children are repeatedly asking their parents: “Are the Americans coming back?” (And, yes, they do say “Americans.”)

St. Augustine lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, in the Roman Empire. In that empire, occupied and occupier got to know one another all too well, from Britain to  Mesopotamia (Iraq) where resistance forces forced a withdrawal Roman troops in 117.

Britons rose up against the Roman occupiers and their Queen Boudicca died fighting around 60 CE. (She’s quoted by Tacitus as determined to avenge “lost freedom, my scourged body, the outraged chastity of my daughters.”) Familiarity bred rebellion resulting in vicious Roman responses, including the suppression of multiple uprisings in Judaea from 66 to 135.

Familiarity bred contempt in India as well as British authorities recruited Indian soldiers into their army from the eighteenth century. The sepoys rebelled in 1857 in protest of promotion policies, pay and assignment issues, reports of Christian proselytization, and the rumor that the cartridges needed to load the soldiers’ rifles were greased with pork fat — a terrible offense to Hindu and Muslim religious sensibilities. The mainly upper-caste Hindu sepoys turned on their British trainers in a bloody uprising that led to the fall of what was left of the Mughal Empire and the transfer of authority from the East India Company to the British crown.

The U.S.A. is today’s Roman Empire and British Empire rolled into one. With its allies the U.S. invaded Afghanistan over 3,825 days ago. The vast majority of people in this country at the time regarded the invasion, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, as a war “of necessity” provoked by those attacks. Even many usually progressive people passively accepted the need for a vindictive response. Those who dissented were treated as naïve at best, traitorous at worst.

The facts, as packaged by officials, seemed clear: the U.S. had been attacked by al-Qaeda; al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan; the rulers in Afghanistan (the Taliban) had “sponsored” Osama bin Laden. So the Talibs needed to be overthrown, while the U.S. bombed and obliterated bin Laden’s camps.

But the U.S. wouldn’t just act in its own self-defense. It would also magnanimously liberate the oppressed Afghanis. The Bush administration posed as the champion of Afghan women in particular, depicting their plight (symbolized by the mandatory wearing of the burqa) as rooted in Taliban rule. (In fact, the burqa had been standard female attire in Afghanistan for hundreds of years, and has remained so since the Taliban were overthrown. One might hope that it will “vanish from the page of time” but that’s likely to require more than an invasion.)

In November 2001, in the opening stage of the war, Laura Bush took over for her husband in delivering the president’s weekly radio address. She told us that “ a regime guilty of “brutal oppression” of women was “now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan, especially women, are rejoicing.” The bombing missions ordered by her husband were bringing joy to the Afghan people!

Actually, while the bombing killed thousands of civilians, a lot of Afghans did welcome  the overthrow of the Taliban and the establishment of a new regime. During the first few years, plausible public opinion polls showed fairly high support for Hamid Karzai, the CIA operative hand-picked by Washington to serve as president. The prospect of being aligned with the U.S., which had aided the Mujahadeen in their decade-long war against the Soviets, and receiving massive doses of U.S. aid for roads and schools, was attractive to some. (But then, the alliance with the USSR, and Soviet aid had been attractive to many Afghans from 1978. Afghanistan like most places contains diverse political forces with differing world views.)

As time passed, Karzai’s weakness and corruption became apparent. Gradually feelings soured, as warlords reestablished control over their former fiefs; as the national police acquired a reputation for abuses including the kidnapping and sexual abuse of children; as  the Taliban and aligned movements resurged and capitalized on the dissatisfaction; as the bombings and drone strikes and night time raids on homes produced such anger that Karzai and the parliament began insisting they must stop — feelings soured. And U.S. public opinion soured on the Afghan War, validating the objections some of us had expressed at the outset.

The behavior of some foreign troops over the last year (collecting body parts as trophies, urinating on dead militants’ bodies, burning Qur’ans, the March 11 massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar) may have brought us to the tipping-point.

The “Red Team” Study

The U.S. Army has long been concerned about the fact that its soldiers fighting to support the Karzai regime and contain the resurgent Taliban have a terrible relationship with the Afghan soldiers and police they’re obliged to work with and train. A “red team” headed by Jeffrey Bordin, a political and behavioral scientist, was dispatched to Afghanistan last year to investigate. (In the Army, a “red team” is supposed to “provide commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners’ and adversaries’ perspectives.” It’s supposed, in other words, to help commanders think outside the box.)

Bordin’s study, completed last May, is entitled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force Personnel and U.S. Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide-Murders.” It’s available online.

In the report, Bordin noted that there had been since September. 2009 at least 21 instances of  “fratricide-murder incidents” in which Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) members killed 51 foreign troops, mostly U.S. forces, who had been sent to train them. (The toll has risen to over 80 since. About a quarter of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year — including three more on Monday, March 26 — have been killed by Afghan security forces.) He declared that the magnitude of the killings (referred to in U.S. military parlance as “green-on-blue” incidents) “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.” But why is there so much hostility between U.S. forces (and other foreign forces) in Afghanistan and the soldiers they’re supposed to train.

Bordin explained:

 “Factors that fueled the most animosity included U.S. convoys not allowing traffic to pass, reportedly indiscriminant return U.S. fire that causes civilian casualties, naively using flawed intelligence sources, U.S. Forces conducting night raids/home searches, violating female privacy during searches, U.S. road blocks, publicly searching/disarming ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] members as an SOP [standard operating procedure] when they enter bases, and past massacres of civilians by U.S. Forces (i.e., the Wedding Party Massacre, the Shinwar Massacre, etc.). Other issues that led to altercations or near-altercations (including many self-reported near-fratricide incidents) included [U.S. soldiers] urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals. They found many U.S. Soldiers to be extremely arrogant, bullying, unwilling to listen to their advice, and were often seen as lacking concern for civilian and ANSF safety during combat.”

(The “Wedding Party Massacre” refers to the incident in Nuristan Province in July 2008, when 47 people including 39 women and children were killed by a missile. The deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament stated that none of them had had any connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The U.S. initially denied that there had been any civilian deaths. The “Shinwar Massacre” refers to the March 2007 incident in which a U.S. convoy in Nangarhar Province killed 19 and injured up to 50 as they fired indiscriminately after a humvee was struck by a minivan laden with explosives that injured one Marine.)

According to the study, U.S. forces for their part held “extremely negative” views of the ANSF, finding among them “pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapons handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high AWOL rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs. Perceptions of civilians were also negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies and cruelty towards women and children.”

Notice that both sides complain of the other’s treatment of women and children. But while the Afghans interviewed complained of specifics — foreigners observing women in a yard from a roof; breaking down a door to enter a female’s room; taking photos of women; searching them without reason; giving children candy even though their proximity can lead to them dying in attacks — the U.S. soldiers’ complaints were more vaguely expressed. “How they treat their women and children is disgusting,” said one GI. “They are just chattel to them.”

Both complain of the other’s treatment of dogs. But the Afghans complain that the U.S. soldiers kill dogs who belong to people — dogs on leashes outside people’s homes. They do it for sport, or to shut them up if they bark, even in the presence of their owners — one of whom according to this report joined the Taliban after his dog was shot to death. The GIs kill cattle and donkeys as well, say the Afghans. The U.S. troops for their part complain that the Afghans kill stray dogs. (Of course, there’s never any excuse to torture an animal, but isn’t it possible that Afghan society has traditionally controlled the population of feral dogs? Neighboring India has a huge population of pariah dogs, who are often rabid — over 70,000 in Mumbai alone. In that city they bite 25,000 people per year. They’re a real management problem most people in this country can hardly imagine. Perhaps this issue of feral dog killing can be seen as a “cultural” issue between the Afghans and the occupiers.)

According to Bordin’s report, U.S. troops in Afghanistan not only dislike and mistrust ANSF — for reasons that seem related to the Afghans’ habits and customs, poverty, and illiteracy (90% among the Afghan troops) — but also have “negative” views of Afghan civilians in general. This, he posits, is due to civilians’ sympathy with the insurgents and because of the “cruelty towards women and children” that occurs in Afghan society.

While the relationship between the occupiers and the people was beyond the scope of Bordin’s assignment, this observation is obviously significant. If the GIs see the Afghans in general –  not just the insurgents, but ANSF (who allegedly form “covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents”), and even the bulk of the population — so negatively, how can they ever mould ANSF into a viable military and police force, meeting their own expectations? How can they ever crush the Taliban and its allies, and win over the masses?

The Main Problem is Not a Culture Clash

“A Crisis in Trust” is a statistical study that tries to examine the recognized “green-on-blue” problem. But it misses the forest for the trees. The “factors fueling most animosity” are factors generic to invasions and occupations: the arrogance and condescension of the invaders; the insistence on regulating movement of people in the invaded country; the response to (real or imagined) attacks with overwhelming firepower that inevitably kills civilians; the need to recruit local, often unreliable snitches; night raids, etc. These have nothing to do with “cultural incompatibility” but with the arrogance of power bound to produce indignation. How ought Afghans to respond to such national humiliation? Should anyone be surprised that their indignation has mounted over ten-and-a-half years?

In what Bordin calls the “first tier” of Afghan complaints about U.S. troops is the charge that they are “extremely arrogant.” This is related to other “first tier” issues, specifically: night raids, disrespect for Afghan women, roadblocks, refusal to allow Afghan troops to pass U.S. convoys, indiscriminate shooting of Afghans following attacks, killing of many civilians, constant cursing (including calling Afghan troops “motherfuckers”—which is deeply resented), and publicly searching any Afghan soldier entering a U.S. base.

But how can the U.S. troops not be arrogant? Their basic training is designed to inculcate a sense of righteousness about their role. They’re conditioned to believe that they’re on a heroes’ mission to defend family and friends at home, and keep the U.S. safe from another 9/11 type attack. They need to do this by containing the Taliban resistance, which they’re encouraged to associate with al-Qaeda. (They’re also encouraged to associate the Taliban with Iraq and any “bad guy” Muslim force they might read about, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami forces, Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas, Somali pirates, Gaddafi, etc. While they’re routinely told “We respect Islam” they’re also encouraged to see the world in simple “us vs. them” terms, and it just happens that all the enemies are Muslims.)

This simplistic “war on terror” mentality, pitting the “good” warrior against a vague, omnipresent Evil is a key aspect of the problem, for both them and the Afghans. The invaded population may be tradition-bound, largely illiterate, religious fundamentalists. But the invaders are fundamentally deluded about their mission. This is by design, part of the boot camp experience.

Things the Invaders Aren’t Supposed to Know

The troops aren’t briefed about the fact that the Taliban regime — bad as it was – had, and has, a considerable social base. It was preferred by many Afghans to the warlords of the Northern Alliance who are now back in power in much of the country. They’re not told that the Taliban is rooted in the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen of the 1980s which the U.S. eagerly supported, deliberately pitting Islamic fundamentalism against the pro-Soviet regime and its secularist policies. They don’t necessarily realize that U.S. policy helped generate the enemy they now face.

They’re not told that the Taliban took power in most of the country in 1996 with help from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, which had worked intimately with the CIA throughout the 1980s. (As the late president Benazir Bhutto once noted in an interview, longtime U.S. ally Pakistan supported the Taliban because it seemed most likely to insure the stability of Central Asian trade routes.)

The troops aren’t told that the Taliban never invited bin Laden into their country. They’re not told that the U.S. agreed in 1996 to allow bin Laden to fly out of Sudan in a C-130 transport plane with 150 men, women and children on board, to refuel in pro-western Qatar (where he was greeted warmly by government officials) and to relocate to Afghanistan where he was welcomed and hosted by anti-Taliban chiefs. (He settled in Qandahar in May 1996. The Taliban only acquired control over Kabul that September.)

They’re not told that the Taliban once in power tolerated bin Laden’s presence and let him maintain his training camps (initially established with CIA help) out of appreciation for his assistance in the war against the Soviets when he was working with the U.S. (They also appreciated his financial assistance to them, at a time when only Saudi Arabia and Pakistan recognized their regime and provided aid, and felt obliged to observe the Pashtunwali code requiring hospitality for strangers.) But they never embraced his program for a global jihad. Indeed they claim that after the USS Cole incident off Yemen in 2000 they placed him under detention and cut off his communications.

U.S. troops aren’t told that Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002, and later the ambassador to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then the UN — the man who arranged for Karzai to become president –had six years earlier actually written an op-ed supporting U.S. engagement with the Taliban!

“The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran,” the former State Department official declared in the Washington Post in October 1996. “It is closer to the Saudi model.” He later, as a Unocal executive, hosted Taliban leaders at his Texas ranch to discuss a gas pipeline deal in the late 90s.

They’re not told that after the Taliban successfully banned opium cultivation in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised their effort and delivered $43 billion in aid to them. They’re not told that the Taliban not only sought good relations with the U.S. before 9/11, but even (as reported on Counterpunch) agreed to turn bin Laden over to the U.S. as early as November 2000. It was willing to do so unconditionally after the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. government never accepted the offer.

(The Taliban issued a statement on September 12, 2001:  “We do not allow Osama bin Laden to use Afghanistan’s territory to launch attacks on any country in the world… We denounce this terrorist attack, whoever is behind it.”)

The troops aren’t told that the current U.S.-backed president Karzai was briefly the foreign minister of the Taliban government (in 1996) and that he still insists there are “good men” among the Taliban. He’s even offered to welcome Taliban chief Mullah Omar to Kabul for negotiations. In 2008 he appealed to Taliban chief Mullah Omar “to return home under guarantees of safety to help bring peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. sternly objected, prompting an indignant public statement from Karzai that the U.S. had no veto rights on inter-Afghan matters.

The troops aren’t told that none of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans and that only two of them were known to have ever been in that country at any point for any reason. They’re certainly not told that Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke falsely when he told a press conference after 9/11 that all of the hijackers had been trained in Afghanistan.

U.S. troops aren’t told that many — maybe most — Afghans aren’t even aware of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. (A 2010 study showed that 92% of people in the Pashtun south have never heard about them!) And even if they learn about them, they don’t understand why they would justify the invasion and occupation of their country. It’s not hard to understand why many would assume that the invaders are waging a war on their religion.

U.S. soldiers are encouraged to believe the Taliban and al-Qaeda are closely connected, if not one and the same thing. But this is simply untrue. The Taliban is an inward-looking, Pashtun-Afghan nationalist movement. It wants to impose a version of Muslim law upon a country torn by war since 1978. But it’s shown no interest in joining an international jihad. It merely wants to do what Afghan resistance movements have done from the time of Alexander the Great (which, by the way, was a millennium before the introduction of Islam). It wants to drive the invader out.

Al-Qaeda, now based in Pakistan and Yemen, is actively promoting a global confrontation between Islam and the West. But the Taliban has repeatedly declared it will not allow attacks on other countries from Afghan soil when/if it regains power. (And again it has consistently stated it had no knowledge of al-Qaeda plans while bin Laden was in the country.) Intelligence officials in Pakistan have stated that the Taliban has broken with al-Qaeda and would, if returned to power, crack down on any remnants of the organization in the country.

The U.S. troops are not mainly in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from making Afghanistan its base for a global jihad. It’s unlikely that, even if the occupying forces withdrew tomorrow, this decentralized web of groups of unknown size, with franchises and affiliates in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, would be able to transform Afghanistan into a headquarters for launching attacks on the U.S. (Anyway, weren’t the 9/11 attacks planned more in Germany and Florida than in Afghanistan?)

The foreign troops are not in Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, or anyone connected to attacks on the U.S. They’re, rather, to create and leave behind, whenever they leave, a “stable” country with a friendly regime, an effective security apparatus that will contain any “Islamist” forces the U.S. regards as potentially threatening, allow the presence of half a dozen U.S. military bases in the country (close to Iraq, Pakistan and Iran) and cooperate in the construction of a pipeline that will bring Caspian natural gas to the Indian Ocean. (The latter is of major geopolitical importance to Washington since most gas from the region is now piped through Russia, and the U.S. wants a pipeline that also avoids Iranian territory.)

Some of the troops have come to question their mission. Some have even been radicalized by their Afghan experiences and have become antiwar, anti-imperialist activists. But few fully grasp that they’re imperialist invaders, and so receiving the same treatment the Soviets experienced in the 1980s when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. So they cannot understand why the Afghan soldiers they’re supposed to train are so unenthusiastic, and why in general the people are so unwelcoming and unappreciative.

According to the Red Team study, most soldiers’ “perceptions of civilians” are “negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies.” But wasn’t this the case in Vietnam and Iraq as well? Or for that matter the Philippines from 1899 to 1902? Weren’t U.S. soldiers conditioned to expect warm receptions shocked to find the local people so cold and so prone to support the “enemy” instead of themselves?

The Sgt. Robert Bales Case

No one wants to be in a foreign country, asked to accomplish the impossible, surrounded by sullen people who find you rude and vulgar and want you to leave. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales surely didn’t.

Bales, relocated over Afghan objections to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is accused of going on a rampage the evening of March 11 in Panjwai district in Qandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. He’s been charged with the premeditated murder of 17 Afghan civilians.

According to some reports, a roadside blast in the village of Mokhoyan, blew off the leg of one of Bales’ buddies on March 7 or 8. Villagers say U.S. troops rounded up all the adult males in the village, lined them up against a wall and told them they would “pay a price.” It’s, of course, not clear that this alleged incident influenced Bales’ subsequent actions in two villages. But the “Qandahar Massacre” may be the worst, clearest instance of a soldier to date expressing “negative perceptions of civilians” due to their “insurgent sympathies.”

Bales has his sympathizers, who see him as the victim of repeated deployments in places where U.S. soldiers confront resentful populations. They see him as someone who just “snapped” at a certain point, such that he decided to march off and shoot Afghan women and children, and burn their bodies. “I kind of sympathize for him,” a former neighbor told AP, “being gone, being sent over there four times. I can understand he’s probably quite wracked mentally, so I just hope that things are justified in court. I hope it goes okay.”

This is entirely in the tradition of unconditional “support for the troops” deeply entrenched in our culture. There was widespread outrage in this country when Sgt. William Calley was convicted of mass murder of Vietnamese in 1971. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter established “American Fighting Man’s Day” and urged Georgians to show Calley support. The governor of Indiana asked that all state flags to be flown at half-staff for Calley, and many states’ governors protested the verdict and demanded clemency. How, they wondered, could the U.S. court system persecute a hero-soldier who, fighting for his country and for freedom, just happened to slip up a little on the rules and kill between 22 and 500 Vietnamese civilians?

But Laura King, in the LA Times, takes the opportunity to assert a high American standard of morality, juxtaposing it against an Afghan one. “In American minds, “ she writes, “the moral distinction between the accidental and the deliberate, between the carefully judged risk and the deranged act, is incalculable. But for Afghans, the result — the shrouded bodies, the wailing relatives, the bite of shovels into dusty ground — speaks to the numbing sameness of unexpected and violent death.”

In other words, the “American mind” is highly moral, and while forgiving episodes of Accidental “collateral damage” it recoils in disgust at any deliberate act of terror. King seems to echo Bales’ own words to a home-town reporter in 2007. The soldier after an Iraq deployment expressed contempt for anyone who would put “his family in harm’s way,” adding “I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy.” For this accused mass-murderer, Americans are, by definition, “good guys.”

Whatever her intentions, King’s piece seems almost an apologia for U.S. imperialism. U.S. citizens as “their” forces invade maintain this “incalculable moral distinction” between what the soldiers do deliberately and what they do by accident. But the poor natives are unable to distinguish between “the numbing sameness” of the accidental killing of civilians (the “collateral damage” of airstrikes or roadblock incidents) and the occasional deliberate targeting of civilians.

Isn’t the point that the invasion itself was a very deliberate event? A crime against peace? And that such invasions usually produce these sorts of results?

“End of the Rope”

Ekil Hakimi, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., told CNN recently that Bales’ rampage was “not the first incident; it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.”

Hakemi is very much in the pro-U.S. camp. And yet even he complains to the U.S. mass media that the U.S. is routinely slaughtering civilians in his country.

The Afghan parliament has voted — unanimously! — to withdraw from the existing military agreement with the U.S. in protest of the removal of Bates from Afghanistan and the Afghan legal process. The legislators (even though they obtained their own positions as a result of foreign occupation) see it as an insult to the nation. Karzai probably won’t sign the law; he is, however much he postures as a nationalist, dependent on U.S. aid to secure his own position. But isn’t it significant that even a parliament established under U.S. hegemony, excluding any Taliban forces, favoring the warlords grateful for U.S. support, is making such a statement?

Meanwhile Karzai’s demanding that foreign troops withdraw from villages and return to their bases, declaring U.S.-Afghan relations “at the end of their rope.” These are surely positive developments

Some of those most closely aligned to the U.S. in Afghanistan are saying: Please go away. We don’t like you. Even if we once did, we don’t anymore because you’ve killed too many of us, and insulted and offended us in too many ways. You have overstayed your welcome in our country.

And the U.S. troops are saying: We don’t like these people, and we’re shocked by their ingratitude and hostility.

Of course, mutual animosity shouldn’t generally be a cause for celebration. But mutual animosity between occupied and occupier is normal, and certainly (as Mao Zedong put it) “it’s right to rebel” against oppression. And don’t the host of Afghan grievances cited by Bordin constitute oppression?

At this point the level of animosity has become impossible to conceal with cheery reports of “progress” such as that delivered to Congress by Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, earlier this month. Fallout from the Qandahar Massacre is causing some to predict or urge a speedy pullout. Retired General James A. Marks, senior Army intelligence officer at the time of the Iraq invasion, has said it “not inconceivable” that that massacre might prompt a U.S. withdrawal “in weeks.”

The My Lai Massacre helped turn U.S. public opinion decisively against the Vietnam War, and so maybe we can say that Calley’s victims did not die entirely in vain. The silver lining to the Qandahar Massacre might just possibly be an early withdrawal from Afghanistan. Optimally, these episodes reflecting mutual contempt in Afghanistan might actually bind people in both Afghanistan and the U.S. together — in revulsion towards imperialism.

“Good morning, everybody,” the president intoned cheerily during a January 5 visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s latest war policy. “The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way.”

Obama was even more effusive during his State of the Union Address January 25, declaring of the military that “this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world….

“These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s armed forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.”

Yes, just imagine! Within days and weeks of these tributes this took place:

• A video of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects became public, obliging the American secretaries of Defense and State to issue apologies to the Afghan government and people.

• The Pentagon reported the rate of violent sexual crime within the armed forces increased 64% since 2006, noting that “rape, sexual assault, and forcible sodomy were the most frequent violent sex crimes committed in 2011.” There were 3,191 reports of sexual assault throughout the military last year but Secretary of Defense Panetta acknowledged in January that a more realistic estimate for such assaults “actually is closer to 19,000.” Active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21 account for more than half of the victims. Women are 14% of the military ranks but account for 95% of sex crime victims.

• A just discovered photograph emerged in February of another group of Marines posing with the exact replica of the Nazi SS flag. Outrage over the photo, the press reported, “threatened to snowball into the latest war-zone scandal for the Marine Corps.” The Marine commander declared, most improbably, that they didn’t know what the flag stood for. The murderous black uniformed Waffen-SS was a military wing of the Nazi Party.

• The retired commander of Special Operations forces, Lt. Gen William G. Boykin, known for his harshly anti-Muslim remarks, withdrew from speaking at West Point’s February 8 National Prayer Breakfast after protests. Following the 9/11 attacks, the general “described the fight against terrorism as a Christian battle against Satan,” reports the New York Times. “Since his retirement in 2007 and a new career as a popular conservative Christian speaker, Boykin has described Islam as ‘a totalitarian way of life’ and said that Islam should not be protected under the First Amendment.”

• The last and most responsible of the Marines charged in the 2005 Haditha massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, received no jail time after he pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty in order to avoid charges of involuntary manslaughter, Democracy Now! reported. “Under his sentencing, Wuterich now faces a maximum penalty of a demotion to the rank of private.”

• USA Today reported Jan. 26 that “The Justice Department is funding an unusual national training program to help police deal with an increasing number of volatile confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans. Developers of the pilot program, to be launched at 15 U.S. sites this year, said there is an ‘urgent need’ to de-escalate crises in which even SWAT teams may be facing tactical disadvantages against mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare.”

• Lance Cpl. Jacob Jacoby, 21, a Hawaii-based Marine accused of viciously hazing a Chinese American fellow Marine in Afghanistan — who later killed himself — pleaded guilty January 30 to assault and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He had repeatedly punched, kicked and publicly humiliated Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, also 21, who committed suicide with a machine gun April 3 shortly after the abuse. Two other Marines accused of hazing Lew will have separate courts-martial later.

• A retired Navy SEAL sniper, Chris Kyle, has just published a book titled “American Sniper — The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.” He racked up 160 officially confirmed “kills” in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2009. “The number [of kills] is not important to me,” he writes. “I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”

• The military pre-trial of Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Md., adjourned March 16 and will resume in late April. Manning is the 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst and whistle blower accused of leaking documents known as the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs, as well as embarrassing U.S. diplomatic cables, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. His “crime” includes circulating a video showing the avoidable killing of Afghan civilians and two Reuters journalists by a U.S. Apache helicopter crew in Iraq.

• President Obama had little choice but to apologize to President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people February 22, after Army troops , following orders, were observed burning copies of the Muslim holy book the Koran on a U.S. base in Afghanistan. The incident, following the earlier desecration of corpses,  touched off a number of protest demonstrations resulting in the deaths of about 40 civilians and several U.S. soldiers. Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee, March 20, Gen. John Allen declared that since January 1, “the coalition has lost 60 brave troops in action, from six different nations. Thirteen of them were killed at the hands of what appear to have been Afghan security forces, some of whom were motivated, we believe, in part by the mishandling of religious materials.”

• President Obama was obliged to once again apologize for the actions of a U.S. Army soldier, or several soldiers as eyewitnesses insist, who on March 11 murdered 16 Afghan men, women, and nine children, aged two to 12. The incident took place in two small, poor nearby villages, in the darkness of late night when the military usually makes it raids in search of alleged opponents of the 10-year American war and occupation.

In his statement deploring the murders as “tragic and shocking” President Obama also said he “will bring the full weight of the law down upon anyone involved.” Several commentators have noted that those also “involved” included the White House and Congress that have been conducting and funding this cruel war for a decade at a terrible cost to the Afghan people.

The Bush and Obama governments have invested nearly $500 billion in the war, but two-thirds of Afghanistan’s 30 million people are living below the poverty line, and unemployment is over 50%. Afghan children, according to a World Bank report this month, suffer one of the highest levels of chronic malnutrition in the world. Over 50% under the age of five are chronically malnourished. Hundreds of small kids die daily from hunger.

The U.S. government has never apologized or assumed any responsibility for the wretched conditions it has imposed upon the people — and be assured that the reported instances of war crimes, atrocities, and abuses attributed to the Pentagon’s foreign legion are but a small portion of the horrors that take place repeatedly but are never observed, or photographed or written about.

It is worth remarking upon the fact that when President Obama had to apologize a second time in March for the reprehensible conduct of the “best-trained, best-led” military in history he made sure in his statement to declare that the mass murder “does not represent the exceptional character of our military.”

Exceptional indeed. As the president said, “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.”

Balandi is located in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, which has seen some of the toughest resistance to the US-NATO occupation of the country. Kandaharis have received a bad reputation for spoiling the war party devised by the US, NATO, and their corrupt local allies.

In a way, Balandi is a microcosm of Afghanistan.

When the US-led bombing campaign of Afghanistan commenced in October 2001, many commentators cheered. In a strikingly unequal war – with the world’s most advanced nations attacking the world’s poorest – the US wanted to teach al-Qaeda terrorists a lesson. The latter quickly disbanded and poured through neighboring borders across the region (the violent network is now being sighted in several Arab countries). Meanwhile, the Afghani people shouldered the brunt of the war. Tens of thousands have since perished in a vengeful war they had no part in creating.

Many commentators have supported the war, rationalized it, or simply pretended it was not happening. The Afghans seemed to be dispensable on account of their being less ‘civilized’ somehow. The war was presented as a ‘good war’, with a rationale that swayed the likes of Christopher Hitchens, who stated: “‘Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age’ was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age” (Daily Mirror, November 2001).

Even those who were actually committed to human rights and international law found some sort of logic in the war in Afghanistan.  “To my lasting regret I supported the war initially as an instance of self-defense validated by the credible fear of future attacks emanating from Afghanistan,” wrote Richard Falk, a renowned human rights scholar and UN envoy. However, he came to realize that “senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behavior” (Foreign Policy Journal, March 15).

The words “senseless” and “morbid” don’t begin to describe the dirty war in Afghanistan. A recent indication of callousness was on display in Washington, as President Barack Obama welcomed British Prime Minister David Cameron to the White House. Our alliance is “rock-solid,” Obama said. “Our world has been transformed over and over, and it will be again. Yet, through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant: the rock-solid alliance between the US and the UK.” The intended reference was mostly about Afghanistan, as the latest massacre of Afghan civilians prompted a call by the country’s president, Hamid Karazi, to ask the US to redeploy its troops out of villages throughout the country.

“Rock-solid” means the US and its allies will stick to their plan of not ending their combat operations until 2014, and then, through a US-Afghan memorandum, maintaining a permanent military presence. Considering the alarming killing rates of Afghans, the term ‘rock-solid’ could also indicate numerous more deaths of innocent people simply because Obama doesn’t want to be seen as “soft” and inconsistent during an election year.

But Afghans cannot maintain this charade for long. Expectedly, the Taliban will no longer engage the US in direct or indirect talks. As for the country’s weak president, he cannot find the right balance of accommodating the US plans and managing the active anger brewing among his countrymen.

The original orchestrators of the Afghanistan war are waking up to the new reality. The Afghans will accept no less than a full US-NATO withdrawal from their country, no matter the cost of that freedom. Empowered by an inflated sense of military superiority, the Bush and Obama administrations failed to grasp what has become a historical imperative: Afghanistan belongs to its people, who will fight to reinstate that fact over and over again.

Freedom is an absolute value. Its meaning is not diminished by war or military occupation. The moral clarity of the Afghan struggle for freedom in 2012 remains as strong as it was in 2001. What may prove ominous in future months is the fact that even the feeble excuse for war – that it was actually a “war on terror” – is hardly as ubiquitous as it once was. The war now merely exists to save face, to assert a degree of American dominance, and to arrange for some beneficial future that allows the US to reap unclear gains. This lack of moral and strategic centrality is turning the war into something sadistic, strange, racist and utterly inhumane.

The US is turning its citizens into ‘pathological killers’ wrote Falk. “American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, Koran burning, and countryside patrols whose members were convicted by an American military tribunal of killing Afghan civilians for sport… (Whatever US officials say to explain all of this) has become essentially irrelevant.”

In a meeting with Karazi, an elder from Balandi asked the president: “They killed so many of our loved ones, and do you have an answer why?”

No one is likely to offer an answer, for pathology cannot always be explained by carefully worded diplomatic language. What is clear, however, is that the recent spree of violence and humiliation will further fuel the determination of Afghans to end yet another bloody episode of their history on their own terms. “I don’t want any compensation. I don’t want money, I don’t want a trip to Hajj (pilgrimage), I don’t want a house. I want nothing but the punishment of the Americans. This is my demand, my demand, my demand and my demand,” said another elder (Al Jazeera, March 17).

Speaking of demands, what are the US’ demands and objectives? Do American soldiers even know what they are fighting for, or whom they are fighting against? (Bales’ victims were mostly women and children.)

Former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said in March 2003: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Richard Falk is right; senseless and morbid wars do produce senseless and morbid behavior. They produce bizarre logic as well.

All across the country cities are seeing record or near-record highs, a string lasting nearly two weeks. It’s as though Spring, 2012, can’t wait. Instead of the usual sequence of blooming flowers and trees, it’s as though everything is condensed and blooming at the same time. Very strange.

Many of us see this as another obvious example of aberrant weather due to global warming. Our use of fossil fuels continues almost unabated, as energy corporations leverage their stranglehold on our energy systems to push for more dirty oil and natural gas use. Their failure to value our planet, when it is so obviously stressed, is but one of their many crimes of corruption, legal or not.

This strange, early spring points to our federal government as well, and its failure in its basic duty to protect us from such undue corporate influence. Indeed, not only is the government hapless in the face of this climate crisis, it’s actually an accomplice to big oil in this process. Energy subsidies and tax abatements are still the norm. Our government is literally paying big oil to slowly kill us off.

But could there be more to wild weather than just global warming? More and more of us recognize that we do not inhabit a mechanical world. Life on Earth is more than a machine. It’s alive, and it’s our constant experience. We live here, in these bodies and in this experience of life. And we’re learning that life contains energies and awareness we have long ignored.

What of the emotional reprieve from this early bounty of warmth? What of the energy of so many of us able to be outside much earlier in the year than is typical? What about the cerebral curiosity from experiencing such out of whack weather?  While still anecdotal data, this anomaly of record and near-record temperatures across so much of the country may portend a year of great abnormalities, and not all those related to weather.

We see a spring that can’t wait in the Occupy Movement. After a relatively quiet winter, Occupational activities are on the upswing, with the promise of a summer of political and activist actions like never before. Occupy is finding its focus and its grounding, and and the implications are yet to be understood. There are actions planned around the G8 and NATO Summits; plans for May Day and July 4th;  plans to interject ourselves, however we may, into this corrupt system to clog it; and plans to extricate ourselves from this system to starve the beast.

But this fateful spring belongs to far more than Occupy and those uprising across the planet. It belongs to all of us, human and non-human members of Life on Earth. It belongs to us more than ever because we are recognizing that we belong to the Earth like never before. We are finding our connection to Earth and our kindredness to each other, even as the corporate media keep trying to pull our focus ‘off the ball’ of our Life here together in this moment.

The surge of energies being unleashed in these times is profound. It is seen in the negative energy that causes a ‘hater’ named George Zimmerman to cross the line and kill a young African American,Trayvon Martin, in Florida. It may be the delusional Staff Sergeant Robert Bales whose ‘too much war and too many tours’ past led him to murder 16 Afghani people. It may be the continued stridence of Israel in addressing their Palestinian neighbors, or the over-reaching of Wall Street executives even after it has become apparent that their behavior took down our economy and wrecked millions of lives. This negative energy has been at the heart of the global system for a generation.

But the greater portion of these emerging energies seem designed to heal. The local food movement, sustainable energy production, efforts to reverse the massive influence of corporations on legislators, and efforts to end the permanent war paradigm are all gaining strength. Millions of us our finding our voices like never before. We’re sharing our brotherhood and sisterhood with a new-found trust and endearing warmth. Energies of peace and love are emerging spontaneously, in spite of the resistance from the controlling powers. Energies that will no longer allow the Juggernaut of corporate power to destroy our lives and our Earth in the unholy lust for power.

Finally, there are other curiosities of our time – Spring, 2012. There is an alignment taking place this year between our sun and the galactic center. There is the Mayan prediction of the ‘end of the world’ coming before this year ends – which could mean the end of the corrupt culture we’ve all be subjected to. And there is the growing view within science that our reality is ‘holographic’ – amenable to our attention and reactive to consciousness.

This spring cannot wait because we cannot wait. Our broken system must be replaced by a system of ethics – principles like peace and love – because if we do not change, we die. This spring that cannot wait may be the very force of Life, conspiring with Sun and Earth, to bring about the end of globalization and to create a new narrative of peace and love.

As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set their sights on the “prize,” Iran’s vast petrochemical wealth, multiple themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.

Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran’s alleged links to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion calls for “regime change.” It would serve us well however, to explore the recent history of the secret state’s reliance upon the illicit trade and how such dalliances advance America’s wider geopolitical goals.

Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars

In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and “Castro-Communism” who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As money and weapons flowed to “our boys,” the Contras, they repaid the favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that “go-go” decade.

Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: “The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America’s first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s.”

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Argentina’s death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.

Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime syndicates. Both men were billionaires who’s wealth derived from control over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945 for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly stated: “I am the world’s richest fascist.” Both Kodama and Sasakawa operated alongside old “China hands” such as Paul Helliwell, who created CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.

Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind the throne of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup, facts you’re not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.

As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant magazine, “In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia.” In his most recent book, Scott noted:

The members of Helliwell’s small OSS detachment in Kunming (Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug triarchies and the WACL’s history. In addition to Helliwell’s support for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt’s contribution in Mexico, APACL’s formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also involved with WACL death squad patrons … and was eventually indicted himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)

Shortly after WACL’s formation, the organization was joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko, then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state allied with the Third Reich. In the “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Stetsko declared that Ukraine “will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the Vatican’s infamous “ratlines” and took up the anticommunist cudgel for the United States while working alongside European and Latin American fascists connected to global drug networks.

As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by Argentine “dirty war” specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links to both the CIA and NATO’s Gladio network, put his unique “skills” to use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte–’The Fiancés of Death’–as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez, described as the ‘King of Coca,’ overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)

Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry reported that “many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan contras.” By “1981,” Gurvich and Parry wrote, “President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building up the contra army.”

Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the CIA’s underworld “friends” made up to $60 million per month; chump change by today’s standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by 1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.

In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents, when Escobar was run to ground “key evidence” linked “the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive … to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.” According to the Archive, “The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.” They had; a pattern that persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. “war” against Mexico’s powerful Cartels.

As we now know, this great drug war “victory” in practice favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent “claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs.”

“Kent’s memorandum,” journalist Bill Conroy disclosed, “contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

“The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a few ‘bad apples’ who need to be reported to their superiors, these allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up orchestrated by ‘watchdog’ agencies within the Justice Department,” Conroy wrote.

This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.

Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.

When the “Great Triangulator” Bill Clinton took the helm in 1993, it was Slobodan Milošević who reprised the role of the century as Europe’s “new Hitler.” With the Cold War over, the Soviet “menace” a fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic “reforms” all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical anachronism had to go, and so it did.

Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal. Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in “protected” drug operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.

Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began working their magic in the Balkans.

Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany’s close allies, the secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of Western “humanitarian interventionists,” an Islamist fraudster who had expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help “liberate” Bosnia. As with NATO’s current “regime change” ops in Libya and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed into Al Qaeda, the “database,” poured into the region.

While Osama Bin Laden’s minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia, merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing Saudi-financed Wahhabist “charities,” later in the decade they gained entrée into Kosovo where they joined NATO’s newest “best friends forever,” the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and prostitution rackets across Europe.

In 1999, The Montreal Gazette published an exposé reporting that “Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S. authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the drug.”

Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was “no question” that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA’s drug ties.

“They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could,” Levine said. “As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that “While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was ‘preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs’.”

“In order to thrive,” Chossudovsky averred, “the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans ‘cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties’ including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment.”

Following NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign, a template for today’s State Department-fomented “humanitarian interventions,” the former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi’s “boys” had pushed aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.

It was a victory all around.

We should keep Chossudovsky’s point in mind today, as “undercover political lobbies” such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) “cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,” showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars in “speaking fees” from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.

The New ‘Heroin Connection’

If the prospect of a “nuclear-armed” Iran isn’t enough to send red-blooded, God fearin’ Americans into a tizzy, then consider this zinger from RFE/RL: “U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic.”

That’s right, the CIA’s former propaganda mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration “has named a general in Iran’s elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking heroin from Afghanistan.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “General General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force office in Zahedan,” has been designated a “narcotics kingpin.”

We’re told that Baghbani has been accused “of aiding Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well helping send weapons to the Taliban.”

Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO’s Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?

According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:

Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is ‘probably the world’s largest producer of opium for export’ and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.’ U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai’s warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the source of what amount to protected drug rackets–the CIA and NATO–RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive war.

But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that “Russia’s top officials have described the situation as ‘narco-aggression’ against Russia and a new ‘opium war’.”

“The Russian press,” Blagov wrote, “has been even less diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped abroad on US planes.”

Commenting on the “creative destruction” wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail that the West’s “economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.”

According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”

“How can this have happened, and on this scale?” Murray wonders. “The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government–the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

But let’s not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom’s “new Hitlers”!

Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters reported, while Iran “is a main transit route for bringing heroin and opium to Western markets from Asia … the United Nations’ top anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics.”

“Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories (from Iran),” said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).”

“This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate seizures,” he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium, morphine and heroin. “Last year it was 300 tons.”

If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters disclosed, “Iran’s campaign was showing results with the country seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to 5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;” a telling statistic not likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.

Indeed, UNODOC reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan have entered into an agreement “designed to strengthen drug control among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations targeting the major transnational networks.”

“All three parties,” UNODOC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov averred, have launched a “Triangular Initiative” that has already boosted “their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities.” Tellingly, a “joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations.” (emphasis added)

According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell “has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers.”

This is certainly not the message that war planners in Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the Obama administration has the media’s ear and can exert influence over own America’s benighted “War on Drugs”?

When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker’s eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia, pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns “walk” across the border, right into the hands of the CIA’s favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.

In fact, Narco News revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had “entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.”

Conroy disclosed that “US prosecutors do confirm in court filings that another high-level Sinaloa ‘Cartel’ member, Mexican attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10 years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa organization.”

“Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, “acted as the intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings allege.” Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico’s largest drug gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across the Americas, the “US government, in court pleadings filed in September, lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.”

What might threaten America’s “national security,” pray tell?

As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed last summer, when “embattled” acting ATF director Kenneth Melson testified before Congress he refused “to go down for a program [Fast and Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating.”

Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Melson told congressional grifters that “the evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”

As Hopsicker pointed out, those “shadowy other government agencies” is “the very definition of the CIA.”

Hopsicker asked: “If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?”

“Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF’s Operation Gunwalker?”

As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, “a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)” Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped “terrorist” suspects on CIA “ghost flights.”

But that’s all the past, we should “look forward, not backward.” Why bother with “ancient history” when there’s a new war to gin-up?

According to the Treasury Department press release, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official.”

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen.

If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and given Cohen’s role as Obama’s point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the charges reek to high-heaven. “General Baghbani,” we’re told, “allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into Iran.”

Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal, charge that “Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its operatives into Afghanistan.”

We’re told that “several [unnamed] Taliban commanders based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda operatives en route to Afghanistan.”

LWJ’s “proof”? Why none other than a 2010 statement from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that “Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons”! Case closed, right?

But as with last year’s discredited Iranian “Qods Force” plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri, has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.

Mehr News Agency reported that “Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government’s involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).”

According to Mehr, “Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based.”

Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that “the person in question has been travelling to different countries under the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number was K10295631.”

As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of Mexico’s violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.

As journalist Gareth Porter noted in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, “the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to ‘attack’ the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped ‘in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,’ according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.”

Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure, cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of America’s shadow war.

With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug scourge.

And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in 2009, “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.

I went to turn her over and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed.  The baby’s face was half gone.  My mind just went.  The training came to me and I just started killing.  Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything.  We were told to leave nothing standing.  We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians.  They was the enemy. Period.  Kill.

— Soldier testifying to his part in the My Lai massacre, Vietnam, 16 March, 1968

So the US military and administration are terribly, dreadfully, grievously sorry for the deaths of all those Afghan villagers killed by a ‘suspected’ lone staff sergeant who’d lost the plot, had a breakdown,  suffered a brain injury.  I’m not going to address all the holes in the story that is being told, in a desperate effort to convince the public this is something that has never happened before and never will again (the Western public that is.  Afghans know better.)  Other news watchers will do a better job than me.

No.  What really angers me is the use of language I have heard so many times before.  Not really his fault, you understand.  It was just that war had got to him.  You’d got to feel sorry for him really, lost in ‘the fog of war’ as he was.  One might – if one didn’t suspect that he was not alone; that this wasn’t an isolated incident; that one hadn’t heard all the same lame excuses last week or last month about another ‘tragic’ (and ‘isolated’) event; that he (or they) weren’t doing what so many soldiers have done before: slaughter innocent civilians because they had been trained to see them as ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’ or whatever dismissive name the current conflict is using to diminish the humanity of the people whose country they have invaded.

It happens in every war, and not once, but again and again. My Lai was not the only atrocity in Vietnam, not by a long way.  And as Jonathon and Orville Schell wrote in a letter to the New York Times*: ‘Such atrocities were and are the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people.’  It applies particularly to American forces that have fought war after war in the underlying belief that in order to ‘civilise’ the savage you have to kill him (and here I would recommend you read The Deaths of Others by John Tirman).  In this well researched and thoughtful book, Tirman looks at the appalling numbers of civilians who have died in America’s wars, and the absolute uncaring apathy of the American public towards those deaths, even while they care so much about the death toll among their own ‘heroes’.  And before the rest of us pat ourselves on the back, remember that all states with an imperial or colonial past have taken this attitude towards the citizens of the countries they have invaded, occupied, conquered and stripped of resources.

The atrocity in Afghanistan a few days ago is just one of many, and it cannot be talked into forgetfulness.  One cannot excuse it by saying it is part of ‘the tragedy of war’.  No.  The tragedy is that so many refuse to see the victims as having any real presence in the event, any rights, any humanity.  Again and again we refuse to acknowledge the victims or to recognise that our ‘heroic’ soldiers have wilfully and knowing murdered innocent  people.  The ‘fog of war’ is not to blame for this deliberate blindness, and it is deliberate.  What is to blame is the arrogance of belief that some people have more right to life than others.

So – I am tired of the language of war.  I am tired of the denials, the lame excuses, the justifications, the heartfelt and unreserved apologies and the finger pointing at just one singular mad individual.  I am tired of generals saying the US forces ‘do not kill civilians’; that this orgy of killing, torture or abuse was an ‘isolated incident’; that all those killed were’ terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’; that there would be a ‘full investigation’; that ‘lessons would be learned’.

Above all, I am tired of Obama being ‘heartbroken’ at the news from Afghanistan.  The only way I could express myself over his breaking heart would be to resort to a whole page of very coarse swearing.  I could but I won’t – there is enough filth being created by US forces or ISAF or NATO in their illegal war-making around the Middle East and beyond.

So Obama’s heartbroken.  Would that he were. Would that he were burying his parents, wife, children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters and friends.  Would that his house had been bombed into a heap of rubble. Would that he was sitting under a sheet of plastic in the coldest winter weather outside the gates of Washington, with no food, no medical care and no comfort except that somewhere the other side of the world a self-important man was ‘sorry’, was offering an apology.  Would he know what heartbreak meant then?

And I am really tired of the media, the TV channels and mainstream press supinely parroting the statements they are given about isolated incidents, rogue soldiers, alleged and apparent killings by a suspected single member of the US forces.  Was it only last month they were reporting another ‘isolated incident’?  How many times do they have to report a story like this before they stop repeating the rubbish that it is a one-off, could never happen again, due to a single rotten apple that’s had a breakdown?  Will they ever get honest enough to look back at last week’s news without doing their share of copy-and-paste when writing this week’s piece?  And will they ever wonder in print how many similar incidents have gone unreported?  That perhaps this kind of thing is all too common?

And when will the public wake up and recognize that this is what war is; this is what soldiers do; this is what they are trained to do when fighting wars; that there are no heroes in war, just countless obscene and unnecessary deaths.  And when, oh when, will we learn to care about the death of people other than our own?