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.

Starting from the adopted home base of Killadelphia — city of descending tough guy mayors like Frank Rizzo, MOVEabomber Wilson Goode and, now, raccoon-killer Michael Extermi-Nutter, a city where the pedophile priests and NAMBLA-pamby football coaches roam and the streets overflow with the cheapest narcotics (Philly cheese steaks), a city where the homeless and their outdoor nuisance feedings are now “raptured” out of sight from the brand new Barnes Foundation building and where Christian forgiveness is reserved for dogfighting millionaire quarterbacks (so long as they convert on third and ten) — I drove 2700 miles to San Diego.

The Pennsylvania turnpike, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were all uneventful. But somewhere in southern Missouri, towering over the puppy mills (and really blossoming in Oklahoma), the Intercontinental Ballistic Crosses (ICBCs) started to appear — gigantic symbols of the Lord, having nothing to do architecturally with the churches they dwarfed, just proudly smiting the earth amid funny church signs and the dubious morality of the “Kum & Go” convenience stores. I imagined that people woke up one morning and found the ICBCs erected overnight, unaware that they were actually defused Russian ordnance from the Cold War. I think when Gorbachev found his marbles and went home, he changed the targeting a few degrees and, in a kind gesture, fired the empty crosses where they would be most appreciated.

Ohio is just as religious as Oklahoma but you won’t see these showy crosses along the highways of the buckeye state. The reason is that Ohio is very poor and if these crosses weren’t secured really well, they’d end up torn apart and sold for scrap or tinkered with in somebody’s barn; some crafty person might take a blow torch and tin snips and fashion them into howling wolves, grizzly bears, soaring eagles, coyotes wearing bandanas and other iconic symbols of American freedom that nobody in work-till-you-drop Ohio has ever actually experienced. Or, whole ICBCs might be laid out in the parking lot of the Caesar Creek Flea Market just like any other self-defense weapon we have a God-given right to carry — whether we can carry it or not. A mechanic from Donnelsville might turn the tiniest ones into formula one crosses and race them at the Kil-Kare Speedway in Xenia. So long Akron Soap Box Derby, hello Crucifix 500.

(It may surprise you to learn that should there ever be a revolution in America, Ohioans will be at the forefront. This is because Ohioans understand that laws are bullshit. The first step of revolution is lawlessness because anything lawful you can do is totally ineffective, and anything effective that you can do will soon be outlawed. For instance, no one in Philly will ever — again — lead a revolution because they all think it’s normal to sit obediently in traffic for two hours. In Ohio, if there’s a wreck on I-70 and people have to sit for longer than ten minutes, you’ll see cars backing two miles down the shoulder to get off at the previous exit or pick up trucks driving over the most broken down fence they can find through somebody’s field. And the cops know to mind their own business which is not the people’s business. “Waiting” is for rude loud REMFs from New Jersey, whose state bird is the tufted nowherefastgoomba. People from New Jersey think they’re whip smart but they don’t know the answers to the simplest questions — like: What’s the difference between a hillbilly, a briar and a briar-hopper?)

But don’t imagine that God is troubled by the uses that Ohioans might find for crosses. God loves Ohio’s hillbillies — that’s why He didn’t ruin our lives with money. I didn’t even know I was a hillbilly till I moved to Philadelphia several years ago. Then I found out I have a drawl and that I operate on “Ohio time,” meaning I’m slow as agave nectar. Apparently, East Coasters can see their entire lives pass before their eyes before I can get the next word out. We Ohioans know that hillbillies, proper, are from Kentucky and we make all kinds of fun of them.

Where does that put Tennessee, you might ask? For the answer, I recommend that you stand high on Route 449, just entering Pigeon Forge, and look at all the booths and shops and stalls and shelves and tables that line both sides of the road for what seems like miles, the people let outside and doing their business on God’s creation, the beautiful junk sale of America all tamped down by a bosomy haze, said to be fog but really just smoke from round the clock gun blasts. Like a lot of sanitized American history, they don’t teach you in school that this area was originally called the Great Gunsmoky Mountains. Then have one more cup of coffee before you go to the valley below, onward to Dollywood where you will bounce off the sweltering human wall paper of sexist t-shirts, rebel flags, hunting caps and, unlike any other amusement park parking lot I’ve ever been in and for no discernible reason, white guys walking around with shotguns and rifles. (It’s OK, Dolly, the Thunderhead coaster makes up for everything.)

What’s Alabama like, you persist in asking? It’s like this: Once, on a roller coaster trip, a friend woke up from a nap and saw I was driving his brand new company car 100 mph in a 70 mph zone. “What the fuck are you doing — slow down!” he shouted. And I said, “Go back to sleep, everybody’s passing me, they’re pissed off I’m going so slow.” See, Alabama might have some revolutionary tendencies.

But I digress. Back to Oklahoma.

Interspersed with the funtasmal play of crosses and Kum & Gos there are also large highway signs noting five Oklahoma people treasures: General Tommy Franks, Toby Keith, Garth Brooks, Will Rogers and Mickey Mantle. (WARNING: two first names = trouble ahead.)

Right away I don’t like these signs because 40% of the people on them either directed (Franks) or vocally supported (Keith) America’s monstrous wars of aggression and racist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t have a permit to carry my paranoia, negativity and vengefulness into Oklahoma but, being an unlawful Ohioan by birth, I did it anyway, and I found these signs to be jingoistic, probably racist, probably expressing a certain (highly crappy) political viewpoint rather than some innocuous list of meritorious Oklahomans, and all probably geared toward reminding us white people the required every five miles and every five minutes that we’re still on top, goddamit, whether it’s kicking dark-skinned ass across the ocean or making it magically disappear in the “homeland” — like the African-American author of “Invisible Man,” Oklahoman Ralph Ellison, who’s probably in line to get his name on a sign right after a Toby Keith roadie.

I can see Will Rogers being on this list. And Mickey Mantle, too — although if I wanted the greatest American athlete of the previous century, according to a 2001 ABC Wide World of Sports poll, it would be Sac and Fox Nation Jim Thorpe. And although I don’t like “new country” music; I understand putting Garth Brooks up there because, wake up and smell the tofu chicken fried steak (yeah, Brooks and wife Trisha Yearwood are now vegan): Brooks has sold more records than anybody except Elvis and the Beatles — more than Sinatra, Dylan, the Stones and Johnny Cash. But if I chose an Oklahoma musician it would be the communist Woody Guthrie. Brooks (let alone Toby Keith) will never have the influence on other musicians or the country as a whole that Woody Guthrie continues to have. Guthrie wrote the most communistic popular song, “This Land Is Your Land,” that American school children are still joyously belting out, and he’s famous for having a sign on his guitar which read: “This machine kills fascists.” If Gen. Tommy Franks was a troubadour his guitar would say, “This machine kills women and children” and, with every strum, white phosphorus would blow from the hole as he sang his greatest hit, “Lord, I Don’t Do Body Counts.”

So I called the Oklahoma Department of Transportation to find out what’s up with these signs. What I found out is that my carefully considered thesis was wrong because these signs went up in 1994, way before the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq, and I mean the 2003 George W. Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq, not the 1990-1991 George H.W. Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq which, actually, Tommy Franks was also part of, though not in the “starring” role.

America, I know you can forgive me about being wrong about this because you forgave Condi Rice scaring the bejesus out of you talking about a a nonexistent “mushroom cloud” and Colin Powell talking about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and Dick Cheney talking about the nonexistent Saddam/al-Qaeda connection. You know, all the mass murder that your nonexistent empathy leads to.

Still, to show what a tussle God and the Devil go through in Oklahoma I give you, in this corner, ruling class gangsters like General Franks, neo-con CIA spook Jim Woolsey and gay-bashing Family Research Council director Tony Perkins.

But in the other corner, punching way above his weight: a young gay Oklahoma man, a peace hero, a working class hero, the kind of stand up and be counted person that America always says it loves, let’s hear it for Private First Class Braaaaaadley Maaaaaanning who, if he actually did release the classified documents of American war crimes to WikiLeaks, is a great patriot and that most rare specie on earth, an American CITIZEN — someone who believes in an informed and engaged populace, who believes that America’s misleaders should be held accountable and taxpayers should see how our money’s spent, who believes that the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles matter more than the emetic decrees of Baracchio Obama whose ears get bigger with every promise he breaks — presumably, all the better to “listen” to us in his panopticon surveillance state. (Right on, Big Brother! Disempower to the sheeple! Gimme five — no, no, hold up, not five years in prison, not five bucks an hour, not five more tours of Ragheadistan, I don’t want your reelection platform, just gimme five — oh, you wouldn’t understand…) And Manning not only believes in being a functioning American citizen but is willing to go to jail for it, possibly for the rest of his life.

(Cartoon intermission. Here’s how fractured this fairy tale is: Baracchio, formed by his creator Goldman “Geppetto” Sachs, has morphed into Dumbo the Republican elephant while Pinocchio at least changed part-way into the Democrat’s symbol, the jackass. Can’t Joe Biden give a blowhardy speech to all the insects on the White House lawn in the hope that a Jiminy Cricket hops forward to give Baracchio a little conscience?)

Contrast Manning’s courage and self-sacrifice with the video game drone killers bombing people from 7,000 miles away or the silence of Baracchio’s vacant liberal lambs, who had such a blast trashing the Texlexic bumpkin (before war crimes were cool), and whose racist floodgates are now officially open to “get tough on” and slaughter people of color around the globe just like their secret idols, the right wing fascists. Manning is not a “good German” — guess we should update this to “good American” — but he’s a great Oklahoman.

To better honor Gen. Tommy Franks I suggest that Oklahoma have a million crime scene silhouettes painted on the roads representing the Iraqis that Franks is partly responsible for killing and erect four million minaret-shaped reflectors along the shoulders representing the Iraqi refugees he helped make. The whole state could be haunted, just like this entire country needs haunted until it stops its savage destruction of other nations. The American military has every advantage in the world but is still getting kicked out of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite trillions spent and despite hundreds of thousands of American soldiers wounded, maimed and mentally destroyed and over 6,400 killed. And Bradley Manning gets put in a cage — this is all that the world needs to know about the in-your-face evil rot that is America. And what have the “good Americans” done — aside from their children baking cookies for the troops in the beginning? Nothing — they’re more immature than their children: they won’t fight the wars, they won’t end the wars, they won’t even pay for the wars — that’s on their kids’ dime. They lost interest in the broken Iraq and Afghanistan toys a long time ago. KMAG YOYO indeed.

Oklahoma has never produced a leader, a president, of the white settler nation of America while Ohio has produced eight of them. And this white settler nation has never had a woman leading it, unless you count Eleanor Roosevelt. Oklahoma, however, has produced the leader of a nation, the Cherokee nation and a woman to boot, Wilma Mankiller. Oklahoma, you have leaders and heroes, maybe you just don’t like their color, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or political beliefs. Jim Thorpe, Bradley Manning, Woody Guthrie, Ralph Ellison, Wilma Mankiller … shhhhhh. You might as well have roads signs that say: Leaving the MediOKre State — Please Drive Through Like Hell Again.

The real problem with Oklahoma isn’t the ICBCs or the lack of recognition for many of its heroes and leaders. No, the real problem is that Oklahoma conquered the world, starting in the 1930s. I knew the world was conquered, and I unfriended it a long time ago, but I didn’t know exactly how it got conquered until recently.

Back in the 1930s, the zeitgeist was buzzing like flies on shit in Oklahoma. Wiley Post became the first person to fly around the world in 1931 and he designed the pressurized flight suit in 1934 (he later died in the same plane crash as Will Rogers.) And in 1935 electric guitar pioneer Bob Dunn made one of the first recordings (western swing) of the electric guitar for Decca.

And, for our purposes, several Oklahoma visionaries wandered alone in the flat dusty non-wilderness, unknowingly creating a great and powerful new religion that would rapidly eclipse and make all others seem really boring: engineering professors Holger Thuesen and Gerald A. Hale invented the parking meter (1935), Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Oklahoma City Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain, invented the shopping cart (1937) and police officer Clinton Riggs first conceived of the highway yield sign (1939). These prophetic Oklahomans understood that modern Americans and their wheeled contraptions needed to be rounded up, tamed and organized for the coming religion of Stuff — their innovations helped the faithful forage for it more safely, haul it more efficiently and wait our turn for it more fairly. The streets of heaven were to be paved with… more pavement, lots of pavement, and the purpose of life was revealed to be buying and spending and acquiring. Goldman, in particular, stands taller each day because his ingenious shopping cart is now the home on wheels for millions of Americans, but without the pollution and waste of resources associated with a motor home or the upkeep of the stationary kind.

And it all led inexorably to the temples of Oklahoma-based Walmart, the pointy end of late monopoly capitalism’s spear, where the believers, though speaking in tongues, can be understood to say: “I saved 5 cents on the knife used to cut my own throat! Hallelujah!” And if you need further proof that this religion has arrived, (i.e., they’re fighting about it), attend the Black Friday service or the midnight madness prayers where the lumpen shoppetariat tramples and pepper sprays other worshoppers to “save” and get “saved” the most. As a kind of Crackerjack prize, there’s also self-flagellation but it doesn’t happen on the pilgrimage — it happens 30 days later upon opening the mail, at 23% interest compounded anally for however long you can take it.

This land isn’t my land and it’s not Woody Guthrie’s land. Oklahoma, this land really is your land. It’s a Piggly Wiggly world.

I’d like to thank the people at the Oklahoma Department of Transportation who answered my questions about the highway signs, though one did wonder, “Where are you’re going with this, Randy?” As you can see, as with most things in life, there’s never really anything to worry about.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats (1919)¹

In the past decade or so, millions of people endured shockingly brutal, lawless war-making and state terror on the part of Bush and his accomplices.  While millions were caught up in the whirlwind of destruction released by Bush et al., others back in the Homeland shook their heads in disbelief and disgust—and now shoulder the burdens of the staggering national debt and general wreckage of the economy.

A renewed interest in the psychoanalytic study of U.S. presidents has therefore emerged, most notably in analyst Justin Frank’s Bush on the Couch (2004).  Such character-studies are proving useful in evaluating candidates before they take office — or predicting the likely course of their decisions once they have been sworn in.  Indeed, Dr. Frank has recently published Obama on the Couch, an insightful study focusing on the troubled circumstances of Obama’s upbringing and his consequently over-conciliatory leadership style.  Highly informative and often convincing, the book to my mind is still entirely too sympathetic to Obama, a man whom Dr. Frank declares to be “generally in excellent mental health.”²  Certainly Obama’s penchant for blithely rationalizing illegal wa-making—or ordering illegal Drone attacks and assassinations—raises considerable doubts.

Any remaining illusions about a democratic electoral process, battered by the Supreme Court-enabled selection of Bush in 2000, have now been entirely shattered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010).  Yet Republicrat candidates, puppets of Goldman and other corporate patrons, nonetheless choose to run for personal motives as well.  Needless to say, those who aspire to the office of the U.S. Presidency are not overly conscientious about the veracity of what they say, claim to believe, or appear to act.  But what motivational force impels them to seek the office in the first place—undergoing a year-long rollercoaster ride of campaigning and primary contests (applause, adulation—but also demeaning ingratiation, placation, dissimulation, and constant travel)?

There is no single answer.  Manifest motives obviously include representing the interests of their super-wealthy patrons through passing legislation and curtailing regulatory enforcement (Romney).  But underlying personal motives may also include, among others:

1. an authoritarian  desire to impose their will upon others, forcing recalcitrant citizens or defiant client-states into submission (Cheney; Hillary Clinton?);
2.  an irresistible urge for destructive power on a mass scale, thereby satisfying sadistic (Bush) and/or predatory-vengeful impulses (Cheney).  Of course, once in office, the adrenalin-rush of exercising power on a grandiose scale — whether ordering Drone assassinations or “taking out” troublesome dictators, is a satisfaction few modern presidents have refused.

But perhaps the most common motive, unmistakably exhibited by Bill Clinton, is the pressing need for narcissistic self-aggrandisement.  My initial impression of the candidate Barack Obama was shared by many: the sense of a lack of any real convictions behind the often-soaring rhetoric of uplift and “hope.”  Obviously not all speechwriters are up to such phrasemaking as “a kinder, gentler nation” or “a thousand points of light” (P. Noonan, 1988-89), but Obama’s campaign rhetoric was a watered-down pablum of can-do inspirationalism and embarrassingly hackneyed, patriotic drivel.

Yet Obama’s paramount skill, his instrument, is undeniably his rhetorical talent. (“It’s a gift.”)  Indeed, Obama has often expressed admiration for President Reagan, B-movie actor in the “role of a lifetime,” whose stirring proclamations of nationalistic revivalism became the drum-and-fife soundtrack for his frighteningly reckless escalation of the arms race, murderous (secret) funding of Central American death-squads, ruinous budget-deficits, and disastrous de-regulation.  However modest his acting ability, Reagan used his oratorical skills to persuade Americans to believe him, trust him—and re-elect him.³ Yet unlike Reagan, who offered a simplistic vision of moral certitude, Obama is a more nebulous “leader”—one who, having attained the coveted office, does not necessarily want to take us anywhere.

Of course, even in ancient Greece people were wary of the hypocritical dissembling of politicians and others who presented themselves as wise leaders.  Socrates, as portrayed by Plato in Gorgias, rejects rhetoric as a skill of misleading persuasion or clever, but specious, reasoning (later termed, unfairly to the Sophists, “sophistry”); and Aristotle condemned “base rhetoric” as a tool of deception, manipulation, and control.

Curiously, having attained the coveted office of President, Obama’s manner of speaking began to seem increasingly pedestrian, detached, unengaging and unengaged.  A kind of sing-song delivery, weighing this but considering that, might be considered simply the pedantic, judicious style of a former law professor.  Yet it allowed him a smooth, if tedious, voyage between a reactionary Scylla and a centrist Charybis–to the safe-port of comforting Platitude.

In his recent book, psychoanalyst Justin Frank describes a childhood deficient in stable attachments and consistent guidance: an absentee Kenyan father who abandoned him, an Indonesian stepfather (temporary), and a Kansas-born mother who often parked him with his grandparents while she pursued anthropological fieldwork and employment elsewhere.  Such shifting and transient parental care could hardly have promoted a secure sense of stable, supportive attachments and the confidence of being unconditionally loved.  One might add that such an unusually multicultural upbringing, with its shifting social norms and caretakers, would naturally encourage a cultural if not moral relativism—a tendency which could only have been enhanced by the professional ethos of his anthropologist-mother.

I offer a more parsimonious, if less nuanced, viewpoint than Dr Frank and others.  Undervalued as a child — with a compromised social identity, damaged self-esteem, and the sense that love and acceptance could only be won through “specialness” — Obama would eventually pursue “the highest office in the land.”  He would, as it turned out, over-achieve his psychological imperative—proving indubitably to himself as well as others that he was indeed a highly “superior” person of ultimate status in society.  “Compensatory narcissism”: attaining the office was an end in itself, the ultimate status symbol and ego-prop for an otherwise “hungry” self-identity.  He did not aspire and attain the office in order to implement policies for the betterment of the citizenry or for world peace.  Rather, as we have seen, he will adopt whatever policies likely to be of advantage in securing a four-year extension of his exalted rank.  (Obvious example: this former law professor ordered the assassination of bin Laden on May 1, 2011—exactly eight years to the day after Bush kicked off his re-election campaign under a triumphal “Mission Accomplished” banner.)

What did Obama wish to accomplish as president?  What are his doctrines of public policy in terms of the civic values embodied in the Constitution and the landmark legislations of the past?  Does he believe in the “economic bill of rights” once outlined by FDR?  Does he believe in a National Health Insurance program as a citizens’ entitlement (first proposed by Truman in 1945)?  Does he believe in traditional standards of fairness and justice (as in the plight of foreclosed homeowners vs. bailed-out banks)?  Does he believe in international laws regarding legitimate war crimes tribunals (which, having indicted such figures as Milosevic and Charles Taylor, could also have indicted both bin Laden and Bush et al.)?  As a former constitutional law professor who has ordered assassinations of U.S. citizens and signed the NDAA bill, does he even believe in the Constitution (and Bill of Rights) which he swore to defend?  Ultimately, does he believe in anything—except persuading the public to support the exalted self-aggrandisement of President Barack Obama?  We have become so accustomed to politicians, once elected, “selling out” and “betraying their principles”—that we may fail to recognize the absence of any principles in the first place.

1. In the ironic sense of David Halberstam’s phrase “the best and the brightest”: largely Harvard-educated meritocrats “entitled” to elite-positions of wealth and power, such as Obama and the bankster CEOs who also summer on Martha’s Vineyard.
2. Justin Frank, Obama on the Couch, p. 3.
3. With regard to the “impression-management” of political actors, Plutarch recounts how in the 6th century B.C. the Athenian lawmaker Solon, hearing that “Thespis, at this time, beginning to act tragedies, and the thing, because it was new, taking very much with the multitude,” decided to see Thespis engage in his play-acting.  “After the play was done, he addressed him, and asked him if he was not ashamed to tell so many lies before such a number of people; and Thespis replying that it was no harm to say or do so in play, Solon vehemently struck his staff against the ground: ‘Ay,’ said he, ‘if we honor and commend such play as this, we shall find it some day in our business.’”- Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.  Trans. John Dryden (1683).

Clearly, thinking outside the box is not how our system deals with serious issues.  When having lunch with fellow educators and arguing about the crimes, especially against the Constitution and on war,  of both the Bush and Obama administrations, my frustration is palpable.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republicans enjoy being in the box whereas the Democrats don’t even know they’re in one.

On issues of war and economics, the Republicans and many Democrats I talk with clearly support the idea  that the US is a world economic power and needs to maintain it in any way they can.  They might acknowledge the wrongs committed but see it as necessary.  OK, that’s where dialog comes in.  My partisan Democratic friends, especially in the teachers’ lounge of my school, are simply oblivious to the wrongs or come up with every conceivable way of minimizing it or laying blame elsewhere. The most common response to the economic disaster that we’re in due to Obama’s Wall Street cabinet is that the Republicans won’t let him do what needs to be done. Another gem is that in politics you can’t always get what you campaign on and its corollary, the political climate is not ripe for what you’re asking.

Bush controlled the Congress. Obama is certainly the antithesis. He punted every major decision to them. Whether it be health care or Don’t Ask, President Obama relinquished the bully pulpit for the collaborative approach of having the other arm of government have a role, but in most cases, the only role.  If only President Obama, when he was elected with an American-style mandate, and with a Democrat-controlled Congress, were to have rallied the pro-Single Payer (Medicare for All) populous, a majority of Americans, for universal health care, it would have passed over both Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress.  He simply could have equated the health insurance industry with the likes of Al Qaeda.  Who would have had kind words for, or dare to come out and defend, the insurance industry? If not Single Payer, then at a minimum, a public option would be the law today, paving the way for universal coverage.  But President Obama preferred the box that we’re in. Yes, I’m implying that he falls within the Republican view of the box theory since he earlier sided with the industry by giving them what they wanted, and no public option, as long as they didn’t pull a Harry and Louise on him.

Missing in the dialog is acknowledgment of reality.  “No we’re not in a Police State because we’re not living like under Nazi Germany.”  True, unless you’re an undocumented alien or whistle blower- military or civilian-, where you’ll be tonight or tomorrow is likely known.  The drone war, supported by a majority of ‘progressives’ in America, is just a way of achieving a military solution without requiring the presence of American boots on the ground.  Rachel Maddow’s all for it so it must be the progressive thing to do when it’s done by a Democrat in the White House.  “Why make a case of habeas corpus?  Abraham Lincoln suspended it and thank God for him. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”

What is the ‘box’?: the capitalist economy. With it comes imperial wars for others’ natural resources (Why is our oil under their sand?); support for military coups against democratically elected governments (Honduras and the Maldives); support for apartheid regimes and theocracies in the Middle East yet mouthing praise for the Arab Spring, as long as it’s in the ‘right’ countries; wages far below needs; reform of health insurance but not health care reform; homelessness and foreclosures when vacant houses, owned by banks and local governments, sit idle; public education under severe attack by both Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize it, bust the unions, and, of course, blame the teachers for not increasing test scores that have no baring of the real learning that is taking place; for-profit prison population booming (especially for the undocumented being prepared for deportation); etc.

Electoral reform is certainly needed to remove the box of capitalism from discussions on solving our problems. As it stands, it is virtually impossible for a variety of Third Parties to have ballot access in every state. There’s too much of a fear that it would cause the demise, in particular, of the Democratic Party. After all, if their platform isn’t marketable and another’s is, then they would go the way of Betamax.  The Republicans can stay as the legitimate 1% Party; the Democrats would do best to merge with them. How can we have electoral reform when states like Virginia require a 10,000-signature petition (not terribly difficult, but onerous) yet require a minimum of 400 in each county? Can you imagine that many supporting a Socialist party in Pat Robertson’s neck of the woods?

Dialog on issues can work as long as there is a recognition of reality and ownership of responsibility for why things are as they are. Without it,  it’s status quo.  Your everyday, typical Republican, on matters of war and economics, needs to see how the system is not working for them, except for those in a minority that it does.  Democratic partisans and Obama die-hard supporters need to truly question their values and principles and objectively see if their party truly stands by it, or equivocates to the point of non-recognition of the principles.  Maybe easier said  than done but the box remains strong, or invisible, as long as thinking remains stagnant.

No longer the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies, a highly-profitable Surveillance-Industrial Complex emerged in the 1980s with the deployment of the NSA-GCHQ ECHELON intercept system. As investigate journalist Nicky Hager revealed in CovertAction Quarterly back in 1996:

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual’s e-mail or fax link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks. Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

With the exponential growth of fiber optic and wireless networks, the mass of data which can be “mined” for “actionable intelligence,” covering everything from eavesdropping on official enemies to blanket surveillance of dissidents is now part of the landscape: no more visible to the average citizen than ornamental shrubbery surrounding a strip mall.

That process will become even more ubiquitous. As James Bamford pointed out in Wired Magazine, “the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 to the 24th bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes–so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)”

“It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015,” Bamford reported, “reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) … Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.”

A former top NSA official turned whistleblower, William Binney, who resigned in 2001 shortly after the agency stood-up the Bush regime’s warrantless wiretapping programs (now greatly expanded under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama), “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and told Bamford, “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Last week, Binney said on Democracy Now when queried whether there were any differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, “Actually, I think the surveillance has increased. In fact, I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about U.S. citizens with other U.S. citizens.”

Add to that the Transportation Security Administration’s invasion of “travel by other means,” as Jennifer Abel pointed out in The Guardian, through the agency’s usurpation of “jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit,” and it should be clear to Americans (though it isn’t) that there is no way of escaping the secret state’s callous trampling of our rights.

Commenting, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the “domestic NSA-led Surveillance State which Frank Church so stridently warned about has obviously come to fruition.”

“The way to avoid its grip is simply to acquiesce to the nation’s most powerful factions, to obediently remain within the permitted boundaries of political discourse and activism.”

“Accepting that bargain,” Greenwald noted, “enables one to maintain the delusion of freedom–’he who does not move does not notice his chains,’ observed Rosa Luxemburg–but the true measure of political liberty is whether one is free to make a different choice.”

But in a militarized Empire such as ours the only “choice” is to shut up, keep your head down — or else.

‘Lower Your Shields and Surrender Your Ships’

Militarist solutions to intractable social contradictions, the oft-maligned class struggle, do not appear out of the blue. Indeed, NSA’s ECHELON system, the template for STELLAR WIND and the agency’s associated email and web search database known as PINWALE, were technological responses by Western elites to challenges posed by the “excess of democracy” decried by Samuel Huntington and his cohorts in The Crisis of Democracy, published by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission.

Social critic Andrew Gavin Marshall observed that for Huntington and the right-wing ideologues who mounted an intellectual counterattack against the democratic “excesses” of the 1960s, the “massive wave of resistance, rebellion, protest, activism and direct action by entire sectors of the general population which had for decades, if not centuries, been largely oppressed and ignored by the institutional power structure of society,” were “terrifying.”

Fast forward to today. As the global economic crisis deepens and hundreds of millions of people worldwide reject the “austerity” boondoggles of the financial sharks who brought on the crisis through massive frauds disguised as “investment opportunities,” our corporatist masters are fighting back and have turned to police state methods to prop-up their illegitimate rule.

Nor should it surprise us, as George Ciccariello-Maher pointed out in CounterPunch in the wake of last summer’s London “riots,” a mass response to police murder (coming soon to an “urban exclusion zone” near you!): “Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: ‘the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…’”

Call it the great fear of those lording it over the slaves down on the global plantation!

Combining attributes of Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” and George Orwell’s ubiquitous “Big Brother,” the National Security State, as it works to stave-off its own well-deserved collapse, seeks to root out and marginalize “dangerous” individuals and ideologies thereby “inoculating” the body politic from what were euphemistically called in the halcyon days of J. Edgar’s COINTELPRO operations, “subversive elements.”

It matters little whether today’s “usual suspects” are landless peasants, displaced workers, investigative journalists, civil libertarians or innocent citizens mistakenly caught in one dragnet or another: “threats” will be “neutralized” or more pointedly, in the evocative language employed by spooks: “Terminated with extreme prejudice.”

Operating alongside tried and methods — police repression and violence — contemporary crackdowns are guided by “robust situational awareness” gleaned from the wealth of personal data stored on multiple digital devices (the spies in our pockets) and in huge databases. As Cryptohippie averred: “An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

“When we produced our first Electronic Police State report,” the privacy professionals wrote, “the top ten nations were of two types:

1. Those that had the will to spy on every citizen, but lacked ability.
2. Those who had the ability, but were restrained in will.

But as they revealed in their 2010 National Rankings, “This is changing: The able have become willing and their traditional restraints have failed.” The key developments driving the global panopticon forward are the following:

• The USA has negated their Constitution’s fourth amendment in the name of protection and in the name of “wars” against terror, drugs and cyber attacks.
• The UK is aggressively building the world of 1984 in the name of stopping “anti-social” activities. Their populace seems unable or unwilling to restrain the government.
• France and the EU have given themselves over to central bureaucratic control.

As Marxist critic and Situationist troublemaker Guy Debord pointed out decades ago in The Society of the Spectacle, “the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content.”

Mark that well.

Rejecting the orthodoxies and received wisdom of his day, Debord argued that “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

It is again worth noting that the much-vaunted “global village” which sprung to life with the widespread deployment of the internet in the 1990s, as a profit-center for the giant telecoms and a spy machine for the secret state, was, after all, a casual by-product of the Pentagon’s quest for a wartime digital communications system.

But now that every facet of daily life has become a war theater, what are we to make of the electronic walled gardens offered for sale by Apple, Facebook and Google, replete with their multitude of proprietary apps which, like Bentham’s “panopticon,” have become prisons of our own choosing?

Ponder Debord’s rigorous theorems in this light; substitute “cell phone” or “GPS” for “automobile,” and “internet” for “television” and it becomes clear pretty quickly that unbeknownst to the militarist inventors of the “digital highway” they had stumbled upon the perfect means for enabling a global control grid.

As Debord averred: “If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the ‘mass media’ that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics.”

“Internal dynamics” geared only towards its own survival and reproduction come hell or high water. Endless wars on “terror,” “drugs,” “crime,” take your pick. Prison-Industrial Complexes? Genetically-engineered plagues? Ecological collapse? Step right this way! There’s an app for that and much, much more!

Indeed, “if the social needs of the age in which such technologies are developed can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact between people has become totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication, it is because this ‘communication’ is essentially unilateral,” that is, “the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.”

Keep in mind that Debord’s seminal text was penned in 1967, long before the wet dreams of securocrats had been brought to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Once a disquieting and uncanny shape looming on some far-off, dystopian horizon, the world of smart phones and dumbed-down people is, simply put, an Americanized Borg cube where “resistance” is always “futile.”

The question is, in our fallen Republic does anyone even notice?

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.

How can you make a war on terror when you are actually the terrorist?

— Unknown

America’s 2003 assault on Iraq, already devastated by thirteen years of sanctions, infrastructure destruction consequently unrepaired from the 1991 bombing was, in the ridiculous annals of names the US military gives to their slaughter-fests, entitled “Shock and Awe.”

This approach to nation destruction is technically known – reminiscent of a sick sexual predator – as “rapid dominance”, the concept based on use of “overwhelming power.” It was devised by two arguably psychologically challenged military strategists, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, in 1996.

Their days devising Machiavellian “shock” included destroying all means of  “communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure must (cause) the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of … society  (rendering) ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction.”

Further: “Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure … so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.”

In an interview with CBS Ullman stated:

You’re sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you’re the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped out.

You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, their water.

Iraq’s water had been deliberately targeted in 1991, on orders to the twenty seven country coalition from Central Command and had never recovered, as was intended. “We estimated it will take Iraq’s water six months to fully degrade”, stated the circulated instructions, which also advised,”Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable …”

Ironically, in an unprecedented action after 1991 hostilities ended, UN Security Council Resolution 687 held Iraq responsible, indeed liable, for all damage, including the Coalition destruction of its water supplies, targets prohibited by both Hague and Geneva Conventions.

Then, after twelve years of deprivation and bombing, of deformed and dying children poisoned by the radioactive and chemically toxic Depleted Uranium (read nuclear waste) weapons used in 1991, Iraqis were subject to further toxic “shock” of enormity, but certainly no “awe.”

As Baghdad’s great bridges spanning the Tigris, which I had walked and driven days before, burned and fell, for the second time in a decade, as the flames consumed Harun al Rashid’s  eighth century “Round City”, and its history was raped by looters, as it shook and tumbled, Iraqis hid in cupboards under stairs – or just waited to die, as Hades itself erupted around them – and Washington and Whitehall called it “liberation.”

Perverts in US and British uniforms put bags over peoples heads, tied their hands, chucked them into transportation and took them to hastily opened prisons, where they were stripped naked, tortured, sexually abused, murdered.

Fellow perverts took “trophy pictures” of the dead – and trophy fingers, bone fragments and worse, as momentos.

Journalists attempting to relay reality were also targeted and murdered by invading forces, setting a trend. Iraq is now the most dangerous place for journalists on earth and the third most corrupt.

On April 9th, the day Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by US marines, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it “a very good day.” Destruction by occupying forces of cultural history, ancient or modern, is, of course, another war crime. It is also low life vandalism and a damn cheek of – literally – historic proportions.

Anthony Shadid was a journalist who survived the invasion’s forces, but lost his life in Syria last month. His testimony to Iraq’s tragedy and his own courage as the carnage enveloped, remains part of his legacy, in countless words.

As the morgues filled to overflowing (victims were soon piled in refrigerated trucks outside) he visited the Mosques where the “caretaker” of humanity’s last hours on earth tended to the dead.

Haider Kadim, was carefully washing the body of fourteen year old Arkan Daif, killed with two friends. He had suffered: “a hole in his skull, when the sky exploded.” His relatives described Arkan as “like a flower.”

“It’s very difficult”, said Haider, his labour of love and respect over and the men closing the coffin.

Earlier in the week “he had gone to another Mosque to help bury dozens, when a blast ripped through a teeming market nearby. The memories haunted him. He remembered the severed hands and heads that arrived; he recalled bodies, even that of an infant, with more gaping holes.”

Even funeral parties, from day one, were attacked. Shadid records an eighty year old lady, whose family had risked the missiles to take her to be buried in the ancient cemetery in southern Najav, Shia Islam’s most holy site.

They never made it. U.S. forces, wrote Shadid, attacked the three cars, one carrying her body. It was March 31st, 2003.

Troops then moved in to the nations’s palaces, painted murals of missiles raining down on the walls – and subsequently held Christian Baptism ceremonies in the swimming pools, having brought in an “Alpha” Christian indoctrination course, enthusiastically run and embraced by the self- appointed “Vicar of Baghdad”, Canon Andrew White, who also came in with the tanks.

White’s  party piece for visiting journalists is to present them with a copy of one of his books and comment that he is signing it with the pen he lent Prime Minister Maliki to put his signature to Saddam Hussein’s death warrant. History does not relate how a man of the cloth became involved in this ghastly act.

Dismiss any doubts about it not really being a “Crusade” and that being another George W. Bush “miss-speak.”

By May 1st, to declare “Mission accomplished”, George W. Bush landed on USS Abraham Lincoln in a little flying suit, his manhood apparently encased in lead. Seldom “in the field of human conflict”, has a Commander in Chief looked such a prat. (Apologies to Winston Churchill.)

The episode, did, however, perhaps encapsulate the gargantuan, tragic, fantasy-land concept of the whole illegal, ill conceived Iraq invasion, the venture of a very “New World”, into the “Cradle of Civilization” and, as Petra, it’s archeologically ancient cities “half as old as time.”

In addition to retaining President George W. Bush’s many excesses, such as the Patriot Act,  new information about the erosion of civil liberties emerges repeatedly during the era of President Barack Obama from the federal government, the courts and various police forces.

The Supreme Court added judicial insult to personal injury April 2 when it ruled 5-4 that jail officials may strip-search anyone arrested for any offense, even a trifle, as they are being incarcerated, even if they are awaiting a hearing or trial. The four ultraconservative judges were joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

According to the ACLU’s Steven R. Shapiro, the “decision jeopardizes the privacy rights of millions of people who are arrested each year and brought to jail, often for minor offenses. Being forced to strip naked is a humiliating experience that no one should have to endure absent reasonable suspicion.”

A day before the strip-search outrage, the New York Times reported that “law enforcement tracking of cellphones… has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show…. One police training manual describes cellphones as ‘the virtual biographer of our daily activities,’ providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.”

Other abuses of civil liberties are taking place with increasing frequency, but the public outcry has mainly been muted, an enticement for the authorities to go even further.  On March 23, the American Civil Liberties Union reported:

The Obama administration has extended the time the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) can collect and hold on to records on U.S. citizens and residents from 180 days to five years, even where those people have no suspected ties to terrorism. The new NCTC guidelines, which were approved by Attorney General Eric Holder, will give the intelligence community much broader access to information about Americans retained in various government databases….

Authorizing the ‘temporary’ retention of non-terrorism-related citizens and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny. Such unfettered collection risks reviving the Bush administration’s Total Information Awareness program, which Congress killed in 2003.

The news, evidently, was underwhelming. Tom Engelhardt wrote April 4:

For most Americans, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years — or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence thinks it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part — and it hardly made a ripple.

A week earlier, new information was uncovered about Washington’s clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act. Most Americans are only aware of the public version of the Bush Administration’s perfidious law passed by Congress in a virtual panic soon after 9/11. But the White House and leaders of Congress and the Justice department have a secret understanding of the Patriot Act’s wider purposes and uses.

Alex Abdo of the ACLU’s National Security Project revealed March 16:

The government has just officially confirmed what we’ve long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over ‘any tangible things.’ Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.

Late last night we received the first batch of documents from the government in response to our Freedom of Information Act request for any files on its legal interpretation of Section 215. The release coincided with the latest in a string of strong warnings from two senators about how the government has secretly interpreted the law. According to them both, the interpretation would shock not just ordinary Americans, but even their fellow lawmakers not on the intelligence committees.

Although we’re still reviewing the documents, we’re not holding our breath for any meaningful explanation from the government about its secret take on the Patriot Act.

The Senators involved were not identified, but they were Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both of whom went public about the secret Patriot Act last May. Wyden declared at the time: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Udall echoed, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”

The Obama Administration has not sought to mitigate much less abandon the Patriot Act. Indeed, in the 10 ½ years since the act was passed the law has only become stronger, paving the way for other laws assaulting civil liberties and increasing government surveillance.

Three months ago, for example, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) containing a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention law allowing the U.S. military to jail foreigners and U.S. citizens without charge or trial.

Just last month, Wired magazine revealed details about how the National Security Agency “is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah.”

Investigative reporter James Bamford  wrote that the NSA established listening posts throughout the U.S. to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within America or overseas.  The Utah surveillance center will contain enormous databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. The NSA previously denied domestic spying was taking place.

In his article Bamford quoted a former NSA official who “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and said: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

The Associated Press has been dogging the New York City police department for several months to uncover its domestic spying activities. On March 23 it reported that “Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations [for years] and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.” Some of these snooping activities took place far from New York — in New Orleans in one case.

Commenting on the new guidelines allowing Washington “to retain your private information for 5 years,” the satirical ironic Times commented March 26:

If you’re guilty of no crimes, never owed money, don’t have a name similar to that of someone who has been in trouble or owed money and there are absolutely no computer glitches in the government’s ancient computer system during the next five years, then you have nothing to worry about.

The American people, of course, have a lot to worry about since both ruling political parties are united in favor of deeper penetration into the private lives and political interests of U.S. citizens.  The only recourse for the people is much intensified activism on behalf of civil liberties.

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.

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Outraged Biden Joins Tea Party, Threatens To Sue

Obama Lauds Bush Vow To “Follow the Cheney Tradition” as VP

Washington, January 27 — Barack Obama today named George W. Bush of Crawford, Texas as his running mate, the first ex-president selected to run for Vice President on a major party ticket. The president announced his historic step before an ebullient crowd of Blackwater mercenaries on the White House lawn. ”There’s an electricity in the air, an excitement, a sense of new possibilities and of pride,” Obama told a section of cheering snipers moments after disclosing the stunning development.

Calling for an end to partisan bitterness, Obama introduced Bush as “an exciting choice” and “clearly the best” for healing a divided nation. Bush thanked the president for continuing the family dynasty, and offered to formally adopt him into the Bush clan if he thought it would “help carry the South.”

Obama said the decision to choose the former president was a ”difficult” one, but explained: ”GW has excelled in being bailed out, and this country certainly needs more of that!” He added that GW’s political return was ”really the fulfillment of a classic American tradition: to fail continually at everything and emerge triumphant anyway.”

Harvard Lawyer Obama Cites Constitution

”History speaks to us today,” Obama told the Blackwater throng. ”Our founders said in the Constitution, ‘We the people’ – not just the identity politics focus groups, but all of us.”

”Our message,” the president went on, ”is that America is a country of diversity where the spirit of conciliation overcomes all philosophical differences. As President Bush has said many times: ‘ politics stops at the water’s edge.’”

Bush, who was anointed president in 2000, has received the endorsements for the Vice Presidency of numerous Democratic Party organizations, including, On Our Knees, Inertia Unlimited, and Strength Through Servility.

Increase in Pragmatic Energy Seen

”He loves Israel, he’s charismatic, he believes in God,” enthused one adviser to Obama. ”We have broken the barrier. He will energize, not just southerners, but a lot of Republicans, which will make the Democratic Party more inclusive.”

Another adviser to Obama said that although Bush had engendered “unfortunate” bad publicity around foreign policy issues, he nevertheless would bring “new chemistry, new passion, and new understanding” to the ticket, especially of an often overlooked minority group: the rich. “People never seem to realize that as wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy become a smaller and smaller minority group,” said Obama campaign manager Marshall Cash.

In the last three weeks Obama interviewed seven prospective candidates and made it plain that he was seriously considering a break in precedent and selecting a candidate who “reflects our values,” rather than just another identity politics token.

Ranking aides to Obama indicated last week that Bush had outdistanced Biden in his personal interview with Obama, as well as in his press comments afterward. Some aides said Biden had proved somewhat disappointing, a comment that angered the outgoing vice-president, who is threatening to sue.

Factors in Choice Listed

What apparently swayed Obama, Democratic officials said, was Bush’s experience in ramming through deeply unpopular policies, his considerable support among Blue Dog Democrats, and perhaps most important, his appeal to blue-collar superpatriots, coupled with his traditional “tough love” views, which seem to coincide with the president’s.

Bush had emerged in recent weeks as the strong favorite among pragmatic liberals, typified by the vastly influential NAACR, the National Association for the Advancement of Crackpot Realism. But Democratic advisers to Obama said the decision in favor of Bush was based heavily on the notion that his political strength would enhance Obama’s support among the super-rich and religious fanatics. “They vote,” explained Obama at the announcement ceremony.

At the conclusion of the day’s historic event, Obama and Bush clasped hands high overhead in the classic victory stance and called for world peace through the obliteration of Iran.

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. 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….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

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.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

The problem is that decisions about these vital American policies are not for mere presidents or presidential hopefuls to mull over. The one principled decision that US President Barack Obama made, his first upon coming to office, was to announce that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. After all, he had voted against his predecessor’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and it was on this basis that he was able to energise an otherwise disillusioned Democratic base and surge past the more acceptable white alternatives Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Obama’s record on foreign policy has been shocking in retrospect. His call from Cairo for a new dispensation in the Middle East soon after his vow to close Guantanamo, along with this vow, are now in history’s dustbin. His enthusiastic embrace of the worst of Bush’s policies, from drones, assassinations and mercenaries to Orwellian police-state security are frightening proof of the helplessness of US politicians these days.

No better evidence that this paralysis will make the next four years the most perilous in US history is found in the bloody news dripping out of Afghanistan. NATO soldiers, Afghan soldiers and police, resistance fighters, and, of course, women and children continue to be killed at alarming rates, even as the Taliban open an office in Qatar (originally denied by all parties). Peace negotiations came to a standstill last year after the assassination of High Peace Council chief Burhanudin Rabbani (Afghan president 1992-96) by a visitor posing as a peace messenger from the Taliban.

A total of 560 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans, were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, the second highest number in the 10-year war, down from a high of 711 in 2010 after the start of Obama’s surge, still higher than the 521 in 2009.

But according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “security-related events” were up by 21 per cent in 2011 compared to 2010. By this he meant attacks such as the car bombing of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy in Kabul last October which killed 17, the shooting down of a helicopter in Wardak south of the capital last August in which 30 US troops perished, and the explosion that killed at least 80 people in a shrine in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashura in early December. Many ISAF deaths are at the hands of Afghan soldiers. The recent Abu Ghraib-type scandal of US soldiers defiling Afghan dead merely ups this perverse ante.

Gung-ho military types like John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering guerrilla warfare, push counterinsurgency, where the occupiers “protect” the civilians against violence from the rebels. This was the logic of the surge which Obama grudgingly (who cares what he thinks anymore?) approved last year.

The counterinsurgency hurt the Taliban if only because the occupiers killed thousands of them. It no doubt caused splintering of Taliban forces, and contributed to the seemingly random violence. But it did little to endear the occupiers to the native population, and, according to a WikiLeak from former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council Peter Lavoy, seems to have prompted a new, less benign strategy. “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he argues, the logic being to prevent Afghans from giving up entirely on their occupiers.

Nagl and the boys are not pleased by such candor. Aghast, he told the Guardian: “It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military not to take more risks in order to protect civilians. I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”

But he does admit the Taliban are effectively being forced by the occupiers to engage mostly in crude terrorism, stage one of Mao Zedong’s famous three phases of revolutionary warfare (phase two is larger teams of rebels taking on government forces, leading to full-blown conventional war in phase three). Still, he sees no nefarious intrigue on the occupiers’ part. “The Taliban have been knocked down to phase one and you see what you would expect to see, with the resulting risk of alienating the civilian population. If we can get the civilian population on our side in the south, in their heartlands, we can knock them back to phase zero,” enthuses Eagle Scout Nagl.

Such clever reading of Maoist tactics cannot hide the fact that US plans for Central Asia continue to stumble, stuck in the imperial groove. Looming large is Pakistan’s remarkable closure of the US drone base and its refusal to reopen supply routes after NATO killed 28 Pakistani soldiers last month. But equally foreboding is tiny Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev’s quiet insistence that 2014 is the final final final date for US control of the Manas airbase, a key transfer point for Western troops and supplies to Afghanistan.

Just as Bush was boasting in 2008 of permanent US bases in Iraq, the recent Strategic Partnership agreement with the Afghan government to place permanent joint military bases in Afghanistan beyond 2024 is not a serious proposition.

Nor is the latest magic bullet — the Iron Man — being forged in NATO headquarters. The idea is to whip into shape an Afghan security force/ army and hand over nominal power by the end of 2014. But this force will be predominantly northern Tajik-speaking Afghans who make up only 28 per cent of the population and form the backbone of the current government. Less than 10 per cent of officers are Pashtun (vs 42 per cent of Afghans), and in any case the army attrition rate is 30 per cent, not to mention the infiltration rate of Taliban suicide martyrs.

Just as in 2012 in Iraq, we can expect some kind of handover in 2014 — the US people and economy simply cannot bear much more, but it will be to a chaotic police state, headed by the weak, discredited Hamid Karzai, with a confusing mix of army, police and mercenaries, much like the situation Afghanistan faced in 1993, at the end of the last US-Afghan love-in, in the 1980s. By 1996 a violent civil war had brought the country to a stand-still and the Taliban was the only way out. This scenario is about to repeat itself.

The Taliban are not the Vietnamese, with a clear, proven economic system and a powerful socialist sponsor able to help them heal. What post-2014 Afghanistan faces is less-than-friendly neighbours, including a very troubled Pakistan, with little to contribute to a post-occupation reconstruction. Perhaps the new Muslim Brotherhood governments in the Arab world will extend a more sympathetic hand, paid for by Gulf oil sheikhs. The Afghans have had quite enough of the kufars over the past three decades.

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

— Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

On 5 December, the first day of the solemn, predominantly Shi’a Muslim marking of Ashura, the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson in 680 AD, in a statement few of the mainstream media thought worthy of mention, Saad Al Muttalibi, a Minister, ironically, at the Iraqi Ministry of National Dialogue and Reconciliation, announced another impending murder. Tareq Aziz, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under Saddam Hussein, would be executed as soon as the Americans left.

The US troops were due to leave by 31 December, but remaining troops slunk out under cover of darkness – as did the British four years earlier – on 18 December. Another barbaric act representing the “New Iraq” may well be imminent.

At a ceremony marking the US military retreat at Baghdad Airport on 15 December, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that: “We spilled a lot of blood here … to achieve … making the country sovereign and independent and able to secure itself.”

The independence of this now US client state is as much a myth as the security, since the occasion took place with America’s home-bound heroes cowering behind vast blast walls. Chairs reserved for the Prime Minister, President and others in Iraq’s quisling government were empty. Perhaps they were too busy planning more celebratory post-departure blood spilling.

Tareq Aziz has to be top of the list. The fiercely patriotic, nationalistic reminder of an illegally overthrown government, which, whatever else, had put Iraq first and poured the country’s oil revenues into health care, education, clean water, modern infrastructure, turning a beautiful, but run down “third world” country into a “near first world” one, to use the West’s patronizing patois.

Last year, Tareq Aziz gave his first interview in his then over seven years incarceration by the Americans. His insight was as astute as ever as was his love and despair for his country.

There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before, more hungry. The people don’t have services. People are being killed every day in the tens, if not hundreds. We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country.

He talked of the Iraq prior to the invasion, feeling vulnerable to Iran, the US and Britain. It was this feeling of vulnerability which led, for a long time, to Iraq not saying categorically it had no weapons of mass destruction. Instead of those that threatened being uncertain if Iraq could retaliate, the country would be seen as the sitting duck they proved to be.

Further:  “We are Arabs, we are Arab nationalists. We must be proud.”

Aziz knows the full extent of both Western and Iranian duplicity toward his country.

Prior to the invasion, this canny politician and diplomat opined that: “What the United States wanted, was not ‘regime change’ in Iraq, but rather ‘region change.’“ Recent years prove him chillingly correct.

He summed up the Bush Administration’s reason for war against Iraq tersely as “Oil and Israel.”

With a Prime Minister and others having deep ties to Israel, Iran, and the largest US Embassy on earth representing many still seeking to cover the tracks of illegalities, lies and duplicity, no wonder whilst the West counted down to Christmas, this indomitable, frail, ill, incarcerated seventy-four year old was alone, trying to count how many days he has left on earth.

The terrible shadow of Saddam Hussein’s sickening death in the Christmas season just before the the West’s New Year dawned, also on the eve of the great Muslim Feast of Eid al Awda, must lie as terror across the hours.

A Christian, he is also reminder of the secular nature of the previous regime, in a country now riven with sectarian divides. “divide and rule” played to murderous perfection. By 2006 half of Iraq’s Christians had fled the country fearing for their lives.   Thousands more have fled since.

Last year, Aziz reached such a low ebb he expressed to his lawyer simply a wish that the nightmare of incarceration, isolation, injustice, and untreated illness was over with. Even his hope, indeed courage – as all the former regime, he swore he would never abandon Iraq and did not – faltered.  Now he wants to spend his remaining time with the wife and family he has been parted from for nearly eight years. Ominously, this year he was denied a Christmas phone call with them for the first time.

In April 2003, he negotiated safe passage for his family with the invading US: “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman (in neighbouring Jordan) they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.” The weight of pain and guilt on the family can only be imagined.

“My father served his country for more than twenty two years. He delivered himself to the US Army (after the fall of Hussein) because he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t do anything wrong. He served his country,” Aziz’s daughter, Zainab Aziz, has said. “He has been wronged.”

Forgotten or conveniently buried is that Tareq Aziz’s trials were entirely American affairs. The Judge who tried him and Saddam Hussein was “trained” by a legal team from Notre Dame University at South Bend, Indiana — ironically, a Catholic University.

Unsurprisingly there were also highly political overtones. The law professor, who led the training, Jimmy Gurule, has served, among other public law enforcement positions, as “point person in the hunt for financiers of terrorism in the wake of September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on America” to which the US was so keen to attempt to link Iraq.

On September11th, 2008, Nashville,Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University announced that the Iraqi Judge who convicted Saddam Hussein, Ra’id Juhi ,  was to join the US lawyers who created the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the kangaroo court responsible for his lynching.) “Vanderbilt law Professor Mike Newton played a pivotal role in the creation of the (Tribunal) that tried Saddam. He led the training for its judges and continues to advise the Tribunal today.”

Chicago’s De Paul University: “ … has designed and managed human rights and rule of law projects in Iraq”, since 2003.(vi) Saddam Hussein’s hideous treatment, or Tareq Aziz’s alleged forced appearance in Court in his pyjamas, both heckled by the Judge, are hardly De Paul’s finest legal zenith either.

St Paul also devised a “Comprehensive Strategic Plan for the Iraq Judiciary”, assisted with drafting the new Iraqi Constitution and the trials of former Ba’ath party members and affiliates. So much for Iraq sovereignty and George W.Bush’s:”Let freedom reign.”

Sabah Al Mukhtar, President of the UK-based Arab Lawyers Association, takes a dim view of this Colonial approach:

Under the Geneva and Vienna Conventions, the occupying force has both responsibility and limitations. There is a duty of protection for citizens, children and the environment. The law  of the occupied territories cannot be changed.

Holding the British equally responsible, he argues that the occupiers were part of a leadership with: “Huge responsibility, who set up a system of trials that do not meet the basic international standards”, in accordance with the Vienna and Geneva Conventions.

Further: “Execution is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”

He points out that in the pre-invasion, formerly secular Iraq, where those of all faiths and none, previously shared feasts and celebrations, and where all religious institutions were annually provided maintenance grants by the government equally,Tareq Aziz, a Christian, was, in fact, charged with undermining Islamic movements.

Referring to a “Kangaroo Court”, Al Mukhtar is emphatic that it is incumbent on the Vatican and the Churches also to demand clemency for the seventy-four year old.

Aziz, of course, visited the Pope in 2003 to plead for the Vatican to intervene to avert invasion and save his country and people, who had suffered so terribly from 1991 onwards.

Further, says Al Mukhtar: “The US and the UK still have the duty, and indeed the power, to protect Tareq Aziz. This proposed execution is simply vengeance in its lowest form.”

Tareq Aziz is the man who, above all, stands between the lies, the duplicity, and who knows the wickedness of the spin, illegalities, duplicity, subterfuge, betrayal, bribery, theft, traitors and big business – prepared to cull every last Iraqi, so long as they could get their hands on the oil – and establish a base in this strategically vital country. The biggest US Embassy in the world looks pretty much like “mission accomplished” – for the moment.

Badi Arif, an attorney who used to represent Mr Aziz, said there is a political motive behind the death sentence: “Mr. Aziz used to always tell me, ‘They’ll find a way to kill me and there is no way for me to escape this’“, Arif commented.

Nuri Al Maliki made his groveling subservience to Washington clear when, on 12 December, he requested to go to the city’s Arlington Military Cemetery and jointly lay a wreath with President Obama at the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier, to pay his respects to US service personnel who lost their lives decimating the country of which he is – for now – Prime Minister.

Thanking the murderous, marauding, illegal, infanticide-addicted, raping and pillaging invader must be a historic first.

An extensive search has found no record of  Maliki visiting Iraq’s lost and bereaved – from Falluja to Basra, Mosul to Mahmudiyah – the latter where fourteen year old Abeer al Janabi was multiply raped by US troops, then murdered and set fire to, with all her family. Presumably, they were also Obama’s “unbroken line of heroes”, to which he referred in another defeat ceremony at Fort Bragg.

If legality does not prevail in the case of not alone Tareq Azis and his colleagues, but of all those unaccountably detained simply for differing political or religious beliefs, facing a terrible  demise in the name of Western “liberation”, all we collectively profess to hold dear, with legality’s Treaties and Conventions, stand condemned.

They include the relevant silent United Nations Organisations, cocooned in their great New York and Geneva Ivory Towers; their apparently speech deprived Secretary General; the great religious bastions, the Vatican; Archbishop Rowan Williams, Lambeth Palace; Vincent Nicholls, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and staff in his great building; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; The State Department; the UK Foreign Office; the European Union’s relevant, increasingly life threatened Organs; and the worlds great bastions of international law. They have been repeatedly approached and remained silent to the point of complicity.

Speaking at the 400th Anniversary of the printing of the King James Bible, on 16th December 2011, Prime Minister Cameron stated of the UK:

We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so . The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend. The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option.

A start would be displaying Britain’s “morals and values … standing up and defending” a brave, frail, Christian man from a barbarity imposed by an illegal invasion – a “Crusade” that Cameron voted for – and demanding of the US, who call Britain the “indispensable ally”, that they ensure Aziz is returned to his family and that 2012 starts with a prisoner amnesty in Iraq.

It shouldn’t be a problem. The US still has 8,000 troops, 14 war planes, 125 helicopters and 28 drones, largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Their “total withdrawal” apparently nearly as phony as George W. Bush’s photo shoot,  presenting the troops with a Thanksgiving turkey, which turned out to be plastic. )

“Moral neutrality” is indeed not an option for one who enjoined in killing this former Foreign Minister’s country.

Speaking January 5 alongside his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the president announced a shift in strategy for the American military, one that emphasizes aerial campaigns and proxy wars as opposed to “long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” This, to some pundits and politicians, is considered a tectonic shift.

Indeed, the way some on the left tell it, the strategy marks a radical departure from the imperial status quo. “Obama just repudiated the past decade of forever war policy,” gushed Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, calling the new strategy a “[s]lap in the face to the generals.”

Conservative hawks, meanwhile, predictably declared that the sky is falling. “This is a lead from behind strategy for a left-behind America,” cried hyperventilating California Republican Buck McKeon, chairman the House Armed Services Committee. “This strategy ensures American decline in exchange for more failed domestic programs.” In McKeon’s world, feeding the war machine is preferable to feeding poor people.

Unfortunately, though, rather than renouncing empire and endless war, Obama’s stated strategy for the military going forward just reaffirms the U.S. commitment to both. Rather than renouncing the last decade of war, it states that the bloody and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – gently termed “extended operations” – were pursued “to bring stability to those countries.”

And Leon Panetta assured the American public that even with the changes, the U.S. would still be able to fight two major wars at the same time—and win. And Obama assured America’s military contractors and coffin makers that their lifeline – U.S. taxpayers’ money – would still be funneled their way in obscene bucket loads.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” the president told reporters, “but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow.” In fact, he added with a touch of pride, it “will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration,” totaling more than $700 billion a year and accounting for about half of the average American’s income tax. So much for the Pentagon’s budget being slashed – like we were promised – the way lawmakers are trying to cut those “failed domestic programs.”

The U.S. could cut its military spending in half tomorrow and still spend more than three times as much as its next nearest rival, China. That’s because China, instead of waging wars of choice around the world, prefers projecting its might by investing in its own country. On the other hand, the U.S. under the leadership of Obama is beefing up its military presence in China’s backyard, more interested in projecting its dwindling power than rebuilding its economy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted that every dollar going to the military is a dollar that can’t be used to provide food and shelter for those in need. Today’s obscene amount of military spending isn’t necessary if the administration wished to pursue the quaint goal of simply defending the country from invasion. Maintaining “the best-trained, best-equipped military in history,” as Obama says is his goal? That’s a different story – for a different purpose. Indeed, as Madeline Albright observed, possessing that kind of military might is no fun if you don’t get to use it, as Obama has with gusto in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Uganda.

The truth is that the Obama administration’s “new” strategy is more of the same—a reaffirmation of the U.S. government’s commitment to militarism for the all the usual reasons: to promote American hegemony and, by extension, the interests of politically connected capital. And U.S. officials aren’t shy about that.

Indeed, throughout the strategy document the ostensible purpose for having a military — to provide national security — repeatedly takes a backseat to promoting the economic interests of the U.S. elite that profits from empire. Repositioning U.S. forces “toward the Asia-Pacific region,” for instance – including the stationing of American soldiers in that hotbed of violent extremism, Australia – is cast not just as a means of ensuring peace and stability, but guaranteeing “the free flow of commerce.” Maintaining a global empire of bases from Europe to Okinawa isn’t necessary for self-defense, but according to Obama, ensuring – with guns – “the prosperity that flows from an open and free international economic system.”

Of course, that economic considerations shape U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. More than 25 years ago, President Jimmy Carter – that Jimmy Carter – declared in a State of the Union address that U.S. military force would be employed in the Persian Gulf, not for the cause of peace, freedom and apple pie, but to ensure “the free movement of Middle East oil.” And so it goes.

Far from affecting change, Obama is ensuring continuity. “U.S. policy will emphasize Gulf security,” states his new military strategy, in order to “prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies” — as if it’s Iran that has been destabilizing the region. And as Obama publicly proclaims his support for “political and economic reform” in the Middle East, just like every other U.S. president he not-so-privately backs their oppressors from Bahrain to Yemen and signs off on the biggest weapons deal in history to that bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia.

Obama can talk all he wants about turning the page on a decade of war and occupation, but so long as he continues to fight wars and military occupy countries on the other side of the globe, talk is all it is. The facts, sadly, are this: since taking office Obama doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan; he fought to extend the U.S. occupation in Iraq – and partially succeeded; he dramatically expanded the use of killer drones from Pakistan to Somalia; and he requested military budgets that would make George W. Bush blush. If you want to see what his military strategy really is, forget what’s said at press conferences and in turgidly written Pentagon press releases. Just look at the record.

At the same time, the report quoted participating analysts who believed that bullet points provided by Rumsfeld’s staff advanced a “political agenda,” that the program’s intent “…was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet” and that the program was “…a white-level psyop [psychological operations] program to the American people.” It also found a “preponderance of evidence” that one analyst was dismissed from the program for being critical of former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, while another analysts said a CNN official told him he was being dropped at the request of the White House.

Nevertheless, the inspector general exonerated the Pentagon, stating that it complied with Department of Defense (DoD) policies and regulations, including not using propaganda on the US public, while also claiming that retired military analysts, many of whom were affiliated with defense contractors, gained nothing financially or personally for the businesses they were affiliated with.

The investigation was requested by Congress after the New York Times published a story revealing the Pentagon’s public relations program, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” (04/20/2008), which was subsequently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting . The article showed how these analysts, many of whom had ties to military contractors, were used to help sell the war in Iraq, to push other Bush Administration foreign policy “themes and messages” and to act as a rapid response team to counter criticisms in the media. One official Department of Defense talking points document released while the Bush Administration was still trying to sell the need for a war with Iraq to the public states, “We know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.”

According to the media watchdog Media Matters, between January 1, 2002 and May 2008 the analysts exposed in the Times article “collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR,” revealing the success and scope of Rumsfeld’s program. However, as Glen Greenwald pointed out, that figure is actually low because there were many more analysts that the Pentagon was using who weren’t mentioned in the article.

The inspector general issued an initial report in January 2009 which drew the same conclusions, but which was later recanted because “it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon.” This calls into question how forthright, accurate and independent an internal Pentagon audit can be, especially in light of the fact that even Republican Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) recently “blasted” the inspector general’s work—giving the office a grade of D-minus in a June 1 report.

This updated report on the use of retired military analysts relied heavily on interviews with Rumsfeld subordinates to ascertain guidelines, procedures and intent because of a lack of written policies. The report also stated that the Pentagon contracted with a private company to provide media reports – 48 in total – that tracked the commentary of military analysts receiving Pentagon assistance. Other significant findings included 147 organized events provided for the military analysts, sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantanamo and the likely receipt of classified information.

Keith Urbahn, spokesman for former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, told the Washington Times that “the New York Times should give back its Pulitzer” and the Wall Street Journal declared that the report was evidence that “the Pentagon wasn’t running a secret propaganda shop, and scores of decorated military officers weren’t rapacious pawns.” However, Scott Horton, contributing editor at Harper’s, has a different take:

The Department of Defense is permitted to run recruitment campaigns and give press briefings to keep Americans informed about its operations, but it is not permitted to engage in “publicity or propaganda” at home. The internal DoD review exonerating the practice of mobilizing and directing theoretically independent analysts apparently focuses on the fact that the program conforms with existing department rules, but it overlooks the high-level prohibition on “publicity or propaganda,” which was plainly violated.

And we already know that the Bush administration made a habit, if not a policy, out of lying to the American public. The Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, pointed out in January 2008:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq…[as] part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

And the military is no different. One example, reported by the The Washington Post in June 2006, noted that military “briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war.”

One issue that the Inspector General report did not deal with is the media’s role of enthusiastically turning to these military “experts” without disclosing their obvious conflicts of interest, as well as the mainstream media’s incestuous relationship with the Pentagon. For example, former CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan proudly stated back in 2003 that:

I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance –’At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’ — and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.

Immediately after the New York Times Pulitzer-winning story was published the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which weekly monitors roughly 1,300 stories from 48 different media outlets, reported that there were only two related pieces of coverage that came out after the New York Times broke the story, and both of them were on the April 24th broadcast of PBS NewsHour. The Pew Research Center reported, “In the cable news universe, where many of these analysts worked, silence greeted the story.”

Yet the “ military-industrial-media complex” is not only a threat domestically, it is a threat abroad—as the Iraq war illustrates with the more than 1 million Iraqis killed, scores of people tortured and the country’s social service infrastructure in ruins.

This case of the U.S. government propagandizing its own people, and the media’s failure to serve as an independent watchdog, further undermines America’s democratic ideals. The world can’t afford to wait any longer for rigorous investigations, debates and reforms surrounding these matters.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmanoeuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

A central element of the Maliki-Iran strategy was the common interest that Maliki, Iran and anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shared in ending the U.S. occupation, despite their differences over other issues.

Maliki needed Sadr’s support, which was initially based on Maliki’s commitment to obtain a time schedule for U.S. troops’ withdrawal from Iraq.

In early June 2006, a draft national reconciliation plan that circulated among Iraqi political groups included agreement on “a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq” along with the build-up of Iraqi military forces. But after a quick trip to Baghdad, Bush rejected the idea of a withdrawal timetable.

Maliki’s national security adviser Mowaffak Al-Rubaei revealed in a Washington Post op-ed that Maliki wanted foreign troops reduced by more than 30,000 to under 100,000 by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of “most of the remaining troops” by end of the 2007.

When the full text of the reconciliation plan was published June 25, 2006, however, the commitment to a withdrawal timetable was missing.

In June 2007, senior Bush administration officials began leaking to reporters plans for maintaining what The New York Times described as “a near-permanent presence” in Iraq, which would involve control of four major bases.

Maliki immediately sent Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to Washington to dangle the bait of an agreement on troops before then Vice President Dick Cheney.

As recounted in Linda Robinson’s “Tell Me How This Ends”, Zebari urged Cheney to begin negotiating the U.S. military presence in order to reduce the odds of an abrupt withdrawal that would play into the hands of the Iranians.

In a meeting with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in September 2007, National Security Adviser Rubaie said Maliki wanted a “Status of Forces Agreement” (SOFA) that would allow U.S. forces to remain but would “eliminate the irritants that are apparent violations of Iraqi sovereignty”, according to Bob Woodward’s “The War Within”.

Maliki’s national security adviser was also seeking to protect the Mahdi Army from U.S. military plans to target it for major attacks. Meeting Bush’s coordinator for the Iraq War, Douglas Lute, Rubaie said it was better for Iraqi security forces to take on Sadr’s militias than for U.S. Special Forces to do so.

He explained to the Baker-Hamilton Commission that Sadr’s use of military force was not a problem for Maliki, because Sadr was still part of the government.

Publicly, the Maliki government continued to assure the Bush administration it could count on a long-term military presence. Asked by NBC’s Richard Engel on January 24, 2008 if the agreement would provide long-term U.S. bases in Iraq, Zebari said, “This is an agreement of enduring military support. The soldiers are going to have to stay someplace. They can’t stay in the air.”

Confident that it was going to get a South Korea-style SOFA, the Bush administration gave the Iraqi government a draft on March 7, 2008 that provided for no limit on the number of U.S. troops or the duration of their presence. Nor did it give Iraq any control over U.S. military operations.

But Maliki had a surprise in store for Washington.

A series of dramatic moves by Maliki and Iran over the next few months showed that there had been an explicit understanding between the two governments to prevent the U.S. military from launching major operations against the Mahdi Army and to reach an agreement with Sadr on ending the Mahdi Army’s role in return for assurances that Maliki would demand the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

In mid-March 2007, Maliki ignored pressure from a personal visit by Cheney to cooperate in taking down the Mahdi Army and instead abruptly vetoed U.S. military plans for a major operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Maliki ordered an Iraqi army assault on the dug-in Sadrist forces.

Predictably, the operation ran into trouble, and within days, Iraqi officials had asked General Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to intervene and negotiate a ceasefire with Sadr, who agreed, although his troops were far from defeated.

A few weeks later, Maliki again prevented the United States from launching its biggest campaign yet against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. And again, Suleimani was brought in to work out a deal with Sadr allowing government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.

There was subtext to Suleimani’s interventions. Just as Suleimani was negotiating the Basra ceasefire with Sadr, a website associated with former IRGC Commander Mohsen Rezai said Iran opposed actions by “hard-line clans” that “only weaken the government and people of Iraq and give a pretext to its occupiers”.

In the days that followed that agreement, Iranian state news media portrayed the Iraqi crackdown in Basra as being against illegal and “criminal” forces.

The timing of each political diplomatic move by Maliki appears to have been determined in discussions between Maliki and top Iranian officials.

Just two days after returning from a visit to Tehran in June 2008, Maliki complained publicly about U.S. demands for indefinite access to military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private contractors.

In July, he revealed that his government was demanding the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops on a timetable.

The Bush administration was in a state of shock. From July to October, it pretended that it could simply refuse to accept the withdrawal demand, while trying vainly to pressure Maliki to back down.

In the end, however, Bush administration officials realised that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who was then far ahead of Republican John McCain in polls, would accept the same or an even faster timetable for withdrawal. In October, Bush decided to sign the draft agreement pledging withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2011.

The ambitious plans of the U.S. military to use Iraq to dominate the Middle East militarily and politically had been foiled by the very regime the United States had installed, and the officials behind the U.S. scheme had been clueless about what was happening until it was too late.

The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you’re concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?

President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we’re locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!

For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it’s not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?

Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.

How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have, in fact, been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we’re supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who’s been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?

It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It’s an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.

We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space. We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?

This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don’t want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street’s opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.

Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they’re on the teevee screen.

Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.

And to commemorate the nation’s history of colonial conquest, Americans will gather together to gorge themselves on a meal averaging a staggering 2,000 – 3,000 calories.  Another sign of America’s exceptionalism, I suppose.

Naturally after the food bender, the masses, donning their sweat suits to accommodate bulging stomachs, will waddle over to the nearest mall to take part in the weekend’s next national holiday: Black Friday.  In all, this latter holiday will see 152 million Americans visit stores or websites, according to the National Retail Federation, to stock up on all the season’s corporate hocked kitsch.

The collective hysteria over a day of discounted junk, though, is perhaps not all that mystifying.  As John Bellamy Foster writes, “The United States in 2005 spent over $1 trillion, or around 9 percent of GDP, on various forms of marketing.”  A weekend of consumer orgy, then, becomes a rather natural byproduct.  As a matter of fact, in order to accommodate such a massively orchestrated revelry of consumption, Black Friday has necessarily had to break free from the limits of a 24-day.

Though traditionally starting in the wee hours of the morning on Friday, Black Friday now, in fact, begins on Thursday, with many stores opening their doors well before the stroke of midnight. (For those yet to have finalized a plan, Toy ‘R’ Us opens at 9 p.m., with Wal-Mart following just one hour later.)  But any fool knows that one can’t just saunter up on Black Friday and expect to walk away triumphantly with one’s coveted product.  Effective shopping on this day of collective consumption takes devout dedication.  It requires one to physically pack up and move temporarily to the store (time with family over a holiday be damned).  In other words, it requires occupying the space in front of the store.

In fact, capitalizing on the current media attention granted to all those homeless degenerates booted from their unsanitary encampments across the country, a group deemed “Occupy Best Buy” has a newly minted website and Twitter feed up and running.  The website even comes complete with a 94-word manifesto, ending with a final call to arms: “The only way to truly get the best deals on Black Friday is to camp out.”  Luckily, the brevity of the manifesto allows Occupy Best Buy to spread their entire program in only three tweets!

For any cynically minded readers, the website reassures that the group has no formal affiliation with Best Buy.  Oh, but, of course.  Who could possibly think otherwise?

Yet despite such seemingly benign intentions, one has to wonder what the police response will be to these occupiers of Best Buy.  What measure of force and chemical agents should we expect the police to deploy in their “crowd control” of the swarming Occupy Best Buy participants?  After all, Black Friday indeed has a history of violence (stampedes are a yearly occurrence, with a 2008 stampede outside a Valley Stream, New York Wal-Mart resulting in the death of a 34-year old employee).

But let’s not kid ourselves; despite the past violence of these stupefied masses, riot police will remain resting comfortably in their barracks, far from the shopping herds.  For the Black Friday occupiers clamoring for the year’s hyped holiday trinkets are foundational pillars of the capitalist order.  As President George W. Bush was always quick to declare in time of national crisis, shopping is our patriotic duty.

Therefore, nothing is quite as threatening to national stability and order than a refusal to consume, consume, consume.  Hence, those abstaining from gluttonous consumption to occupy public spaces in an attempt to transform an economy in systemic crisis can expect to continue being beaten and pepper sprayed by police goons.  Sure, 30 million may be unemployed or underemployed, and the top 1-percent may indeed control 40-percent of the nation’s wealth, but holiday shopping must not be hindered.  After all, the American way of life is not negotiable.