THE CASE FOR DONALD TRUMP

John Chuckman

 

Anyone who knows my writing and background knows I am not a conservative and certainly have little use for the right wing anywhere.

But they will also know that I despise war and that I believe America’s establishment has brought moral degradation to the country’s international affairs. It has also brought degradation to America’s own people, completely ignoring their welfare for decades, regarding them only as a herd from which to solicit votes with television advertising and from whom to collect taxes.

America’s establishment – as, for example, represented by the Senate, its most powerful and anti-democratic tool in government – is almost indistinguishable from members of the old Politburo in the heyday of the USSR. Crinkly faces, heavy-set bodies, more money than they can spend, dripping with special privileges, enjoying limitless terms of office, but enjoying no ability to say anything fresh or interesting or helpful, ever.

So, too, the arrogant, almost unchecked power of America’s massive security and military establishments. Almost the only sounds coming from them, including even retired members looking for fifteen minutes of media fame, are ugly threats about Russia or Syria or Iran or a number of other places in this world. They function like a powerful Mafia with arms and assistance to mercenary trash and fanatics as well as to the privileged trash of absolute monarchies in a dozen different places. And they function as a Murder Incorporated with their organized extrajudicial executions and bombings in many lands.

America’s establishment, either directly using “the boyz” or with proxies, has likely killed two million people in the last fifteen years or so of the Neocon Wars. It has virtually destroyed several states and societies, and it has sent millions running for their lives as refugees, effectively de-stabilizing the foundations of Europe.

There are two major impacts of this dirty work, if you choose to ignore the sheer mass killing and destruction. First, what we call ‘international terror” is in fact the illegitimate child of these efforts. It is a result of many young men with limited means trying to protect, as young men tend to do everywhere and always, their own kind from the horrors being visited upon them. It has nothing to do with the nature of Islam. After all, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all brought up in Christian churches, and millions of Christian young men have gone to fight in bloody, unholy causes in countless places over the centuries.

International terror was also fostered by the government’s own use of such groups in the Neocon Wars. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, some of whose members were every bit as bloody and extreme as the Taleban, was used to fight the Taleban, minimizing American casualties. That success gave a model to repeat. America again used and supplied cutthroats in Libya to get rid of a decent and reasonable ruler it did not like. It did the same in the aftermath of the colossal horror its own troops made in the original invasion of Iraq. And it does so today in the beautiful land of Syria. The arrogance, ruthlessness, and immorality of these acts are breathtaking.

Second, these wars have produced the greatest refugee crisis of our time. Waves and waves of desperate people running for their lives have smashed through organized border control in many places. There have been an estimated six million refugees from Syria alone. About three million sit in camps in Turkey, and they could be released gradually by a Turkish government angry over an American-engineered coup if Europe doesn’t pay for their support as promised by Germany’s Mrs. Merkel.  About a million and a half are in poor little Lebanon. Europe has close to de-stabilized itself politically by accepting a million or more. This is completely the doing of America’s vicious policy in Syria, and no European leaders or others have had the courage to speak up about it. It could all have been prevented, but any European speaking out would only have received serious economic or other threats behind the scenes.

The Neocon Wars have been the greatest moral and ethical disaster of the modern era, and they have achieved nothing worth achieving.

Months ago, when Trump started his run for the nomination, a sudden rumbling noise of opposition became apparent. The most vociferous voices and most extreme words suddenly came from the Neocon crowd. People like William Kristol became extremely active. Some other, lesser known figures, in unprecedented and vitriolic language, actually used the word “assassination.” Now, none of these people are known for deep humanitarianism or concern over social issues, as with migration issues, so their intense opposition became a bit of a mystery. It became clear, in view of Trump statements around war, the mess made of the Middle East, Syria, and relations with Russia, that Trump was hated for his views on war by the nation’s most powerful and entrenched war lobby. That fact made me listen to Trump more carefully.

Meanwhile, the people of the United States have been lied to through the entire Neocon War effort, and they have been subjected to many deliberate scares and non-stop press promotion to keep them on edge for what the establishment has been doing. They also have had their privacy secretly destroyed by an arrogant government which never explains anything.

The government doing these things, at the same time, has completely ignored the economic lives of Americans. Real incomes have dropped for decades, cities have rotted into vast slums in some cases, corporate jobs have been transferred offshore on a massive scale, many schools are in poor shape across the nation, and their own government cannot provide a rational healthcare system for them, Obamacare being a poorly designed creation which is already failing. The middle class is in decline by every measure, median family income has fallen steadily, the hopelessly poor are on the increase with an explosion in food stamps, home ownership levels are in decline, student debt has exploded, and labor force participation has only declined.

Lack of adequate government regulation and oversight literally created the 2008 financial disaster – much in the fashion of the hideous George Bush’s response to hurricane Katrina – and this leaves a gigantic threat overhanging the lives of hundreds of millions. Obama has made no effort at repairing the structural and regulatory mess responsible, and all he has done to keep things somewhat steady is to print money – a la Weimar Germany – for eight years, creating yet another threat overhanging the future.

Obama has not only kept the Neocon Wars going, he has expanded them and introduced an entire new establishment for extrajudicial killing, differing in no way other than in its technology from the filthy work of the Argentine military junta of the 1980s. The Pentagon and CIA today receive and consume unholy amounts of resources so that they can kill, plot coups, and de-stabilize others while millions of Americans are not provided with decent schools or the most basic public services such as clean drinking water.

No one can solve all these problems, and I certainly think it would be foolish to expect that Trump can, but I am confident that he can make an important contribution. America’s priorities need re-ordering, and it needs to extricate itself from the bloody lunatic adventures of the Neocon Wars.

And, while I at first expected nothing special from Trump on the domestic front, his recent speech in Michigan ranks as a great one. As a child of the Midwest, I can tell you everything he said to black people was deadly accurate. And courageous. Professional politicians are afraid to speak the truth. If you want to see what he was talking about, look for images of the South Side of Chicago or Detroit, Michigan, or Gary, Indiana, on the Internet. Many Americans never see such places in their own country. There are sights as appalling as one sees from war zones in the news, and no one in government lifts a finger to help. Any effort here would be a blessing, and if Trump could carry it off to any degree, he might well be proved right in his speech’s claim, that in future, he’ll get 95% of black votes and “What in the hell do you have to lose?”

As an old saying goes, you must pick your battles, and nowhere is this truer than in politics. Candidates, in the language of economics, always represent a bundle of goods, not all of which will be attractive to any voter. When you choose a candidate, you always get goods you don’t want along with those you do. It much resembles what happens when you buy an album of music to get certain songs.

Politics, being quite rightly described by Bismarck as “the art of the possible,” is an institution you must not look to solve or correct everything, but if you can get a few important things right, you are doing well. The politicians, supported by manipulative media flacks, try to endear themselves to many kinds of voters with cheap sound bites or suggestive statements, none of which are in any way specific. They are trying to assemble a virtual bundle of goods that will be bought by a majority. If elected, they go on to do as other powerful forces would have them do, never having to deliver on what were mere, fleeting suggestive statements.

It will take a mighty tough and determined leader to achieve any progress with America’s miserable problems. We all see how the man who looked decent and intelligent and caring eight years ago has been totally flattened by the establishment. He resembles Rachel Corrie after being backed over by an Israeli bulldozer. We may just have been deceived by his manner in 2008, not realizing the smile was the smile of a charming psychopath, but I am inclined to think he was simply overwhelmed by the rooms full of arrogant, be-tinseled generals, intelligence executives, fat with privilege and resources, and extremely powerful and arrogant special interests.

Trump has the merit of being a very tough-minded man who has dealt for decades with powerful people to get what he wants, and he has made billions doing it. He is no mere respecter of title or position, but a man who judges by what you actually can do. By comparison, Obama appears a weak figure next to such people, and so he has proved. He leaves office having achieved the status of a smiling mass killer. He has done not a single worthwhile thing for his own people.

And that is the so-called legacy Hillary Clinton is there to preserve and extend. This is a woman who has done little besides take huge amounts of money from many powerful people for years, special interests and ugly foreign governments. It is all packed into a foundation, treated but not functioning as a charity. It happens to function as a giant political slush fund, a money-laundering scheme for questionable funds, and a source of employment for relatives and friends. She starts on day one, as it were, as a completely bought-and-sold figure many times over.

I think no story better sums up these personal qualities of Hillary’s than one found in her recently released tax records. She apparently made “charitable” donations last year of about $1,0040,000, which at first glance sounds vaguely impressive. Then you read that $1,000,000 of that was in donations to her own the Clinton Foundation. It just doesn’t come more corrupt than that.

This also is the woman who, as Secretary of State, ran America’s filthy operation out of Benghazi that collected weapons from prostrated Libya – prostrated by American bombs and American-paid terrorists – plus boatloads of maniac fanatics to send to Turkey for transshipment into Syria. The American ambassador killed at Benghazi was an instance of “blowback” in a covert operation when some of the maniacs decided he made a better target than anything to be found in Syria.

Our last great investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has just told us for the first time that the sarin nerve gas, actually used in Syria a few years ago a few times, was transshipped from Libya under her auspices. Hundreds of civilians were hideously killed by America’s proxy fanatics in the clearest of war crimes. It was an effort to create a crossing-a-red-line stunt with which to blame Syria’s beleaguered, elected government so that Obama could send in the jets and bomb the crap out of yet another country. Only Putin’s deft statesmanship prevented that disaster.

The moral and ethical characters of the American leaders involved here – Obama and Hillary plus the generation or two before them – surely rank with some of history’s most hateful figures, and it is time to put a stop to their handiwork. As well, it is time for a government that actually works for the interests of its own people, a simple idea but one which is entirely foreign to contemporary Washington.

I think of the great Franklin Roosevelt, and people who have no history do not realize how intensely hated he was by a major part of the establishment. Apart from constant attacks in the press, his life was threatened. I think also of Abraham Lincoln, and again, people with no history do not realize how hated the man was at first. He was called “an obscene ape” in the newspapers, and he felt the need to travel to Washington for his inauguration in disguise.

I am not comparing Trump, but I am reminding readers of some of the unpleasant details that never appear on the plaques of monuments to such great figures. I do very much believe, despite the sometimes loose and careless words of an inexperienced politician, that there is great promise in this man. He is a doer, not a talker, but his Michigan speech especially had intimations of greatness in it. Just as he said, addressing America’s more than thirty-million black population, “What the hell do you have to lose?”

And just look at the alternative. My God, none are so blind as those who will not see, and anyone who can be enthusiastic for a woman of her bloody and corrupt achievements is indeed willfully and dangerously blind.

Many commentators still miss the most essential truth of this election, and I owe the profound observation to Robert Reich. This election is not about Left versus Right. It is not about Democrat versus Republican. It is about pro- versus anti-establishment, a very bloody, corrupt, and dishonest establishment.

 

LATER NOTE: It wasn’t very long after Trump assumed office one regretted ever writing anything like these words. He proved no maverick and, indeed, an abject coward in the face of the big suits around the table. He’s become nothing but a bellowing public bully for their interests in international affairs.

 

HILLARY’S SECRET LETTER AND THE WHOLE MATTER OF ENDLESS WAR AND THE ALMOST COMPLETE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT

John Chuckman

 

NOTE: It comes to my attention that there is reason to suspect the original source of the second letter. It may well have been a hoax. But even if that proves to be the case, I stand by my comments and observations as things which needed saying, having their own validity quite apart from that of the letter.

 

An almost perfect measure of the decay of democratic values in American politics is found in a letter from Hillary Clinton to Haim Saban, a wealthy American-Israeli and a major contributor to the Democrats. It is a letter whose only purpose is to elicit funds, ingratiating its author to the recipient by condemning the perfectly legitimate right of free people to choose boycotting Israel over its appalling behaviors.  The letter is disturbing in some of its views and characterizations, but it has been reviewed and remarked upon by many, as here.

We were not supposed to know this, but there are actually two letters. The first letter was released by its recipient, but the second letter was intended only for its recipient’s eyes. Somehow, it managed to be leaked to The Guardian, although in searching the Internet to discover just what happened it seems Google has done a pretty good job of sweeping over the trail.

It is the second letter, the one we were not supposed to see, which goes beyond being disturbing.

I am not exaggerating when I characterize it as something comparable to words which might have been written by… well, choose the name of any grisly dictator, but Adolph Hitler’s would have to be the one jumping to the minds of most people. This second letter’s words are absolutely chilling. If you think I’m exaggerating, here are Hillary’s words:

“Quite frankly, Israel didn’t teach Hamas a harsh enough lesson last year. True to form, Obama was too hard on our democratic ally, and too soft on our Islamofascist foe.

 “As president, I will give the Jewish state all the necessary military, diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to truly vanquish Hamas – and if that means killing 200,000 Gazans, then so be it.

 “We realist Democrats understand that collateral damage is an unavoidable by-product of the War on Terror, and me being a mother, grandmother and tireless children’s rights advocate does not mean that I will flinch even one iota in allowing Israel to obliterate every last school-cum-rocket launching pad in Gaza. Those who allow their children to be used as human shields for terrorists deserve to see them buried under one-ton bombs.”

 Let’s just analyze a few of the more unacceptable and repugnant statements in this letter.

“Israel didn’t teach Hamas a harsh enough lesson…”

In 2014, Israel killed over 500 children plus another 1,700 adults in Gaza, and that came after another invasion, 2008, and a series of operations beginning in 2006, which saw Israel kill more than another 1,500 Palestinians. It should be noted that the Palestinian population is a young one, so a disproportion of children is always at risk in any attack. We had reliable reports that Israeli soldiers grabbed Palestinian children to hold in front of them in a number of instances. We also had first-hand reports of families being targeted.

Over this period, Israel has maintained a brutal blockade of Gaza, which in its first inception included an actual calorie count for the amount of food which could just keep a person alive, an idea we might want to credit to Himmler. International pressure brought an end to that aspect of the blockade, but even today the Palestinians cannot get cement to repair their sanitation and homes. Israel also launched its infamous Gaza flotilla raid in 2010, seizing half a dozen ships attempting to bring aid to Gaza and killing 10 crew members, all of them unarmed.

I remind readers just what Gaza is. It is essentially a huge refugee camp, a place where Palestinians huddled for protection from Israel’s 1948 terror campaign against residents of ancient villages long since bulldozed out of existence. Today, surrounded by fences and guards and towers with automated, radar-operated machine-guns, Gaza resembles a vast outdoor prison, or, if you will, a Bantustan or concentration camp. Even its fishermen are allowed to go only a short distance into the sea before being attacked by Israeli gun boats. Periodically, Israel does dirty work like cut its power or foul its water. Recently, a huge swath of land around its perimeter was sprayed with herbicides, cutting food supplies and insuring future malformation of children, just as we see in Vietnam as a result of America’s use of Agent Orange.

“…our democratic ally…”

 Israel is certainly one of the world’s strangest “democracies.” About half the people living under its rule do not want to live under its rule, have no votes, have absolutely no rights, and are treated in the most abusive manner. Even their homes are not their own with Israel periodically seizing them for its own purposes.

Then we have the fact that only Jews are supposed to live in “the Jewish state.” Only Jews are welcomed. Indeed only Jews are accepted. Other kinds of refugees are turned away. There is a government program underway right now to clean out the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, of its few Arab members. These are the representatives of Arabs trapped in what became Israel in 1948 and reluctantly granted citizenship, although in daily practice and in many laws, Arab citizens are not deemed as full citizens, identity papers are stamped and they are subjected to hearing regular demagogic demands that they all be pushed across the Jordan River and out of the country.

If you consider Israel a genuine democracy, then you must also view the American Confederacy or South Africa under the National Party as democracies. They both held elections and had legislatures and the dress-up appearances of democracy. It was just that huge numbers of those countries’ people could not vote and could not own certain property and had no rights.

Israel’s so-called democracy has other serious impairments, including a structure for the role of money in politics that much resembles America’s. It is at best a plutocracy. Millions pour in to favored candidates like Netanyahu from sources like American billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Israel has another highly undemocratic characteristic, and that is its aversion to democracy in countries or groups anywhere near it. It always has supported happily tyrants like Mubarak in Egypt and has worked assiduously to get what was a democratic organization like Hamas declared and treated as some kind of terrorists.

If Israel is, as Israelis like to say, the Middle East’s only democracy, I think we can be glad there are not more such democracies.

“…our Islamofascist foe…”

 Since when are the Palestinians – who, as is often ignored, include both Islamic and Christian people – “our foe”? I don’t recall them threatening or attacking anyone? Women and children and hard-working men on farms and in shops are our foe? People without even the semblance of a military?

Since when are they “Islamofascists”? They are just people driven out of their own ancient homes and farms by groups of well-armed newcomers from Europe and America. And what is an “Islamofascist,” beyond a slur term coined in Israel for people who are resented, hated, and abused merely for the fact of their very existence? We did briefly see in the last assault on Gaza how ugly things get in Israel, something generally kept from our eyes, with video of Israelis in lawn chairs on the heights watching homes being bombed and cheering as though it were the home team scoring a goal at a football match.

“I will give the Jewish state all the necessary military, diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to truly vanquish Hamas…”

 What in God’s name does that mean? America literally pours military, security, and technical assistance into Israel. There is continuous typhoon of it hitting Israel’s shores. And how would more help “truly vanquish Hamas”? What would be the shape of that? A couple of thermonuclear weapons lobbed into Gaza? But Israel already has its own thermonuclear weapons, albeit through lying and deceit and even theft and against the intent of all international law and organization, although with the secret contrivance and acceptance of a couple of generations of politicians like Hillary.

Why should Hamas be vanquished? It was elected to office in a clean election, likely cleaner than most American and Israeli elections. But I forget, Israel hates having democracies anywhere near its borders. It prefers dealing with – when it deigns even to speak to its neighbors – men like Mahmoud Abbas, who last legally held office in 2009 and has unilaterally extended his own term as President ever since, and who is completely ineffectual in his relations with Israel.

We shouldn’t forget that after Hamas’s internationally-supervised election, Israeli troops raced into Gaza and illegally arrested many of its elected officials. It also publicly threatened the leader’s assassination. Funny, but I don’t recall things going the other way from this supposedly terrorist organization. After all, it earned the “official” designation as terrorist from politicians like Hillary Clinton or Newt Gingrich or Dick Armey working to keep those pro-Israeli campaign funds flowing in.

All of the horrors of invasions, bombardments, and blockades came after that simple election. Israel hates Hamas because it does not do exactly as it is ordered to do. Always the excuse is used that Hamas won’t recognize Israel as “the Jewish state,” but that view deliberately hides many legitimate issues. In conflict or disagreement, countries typically do not extend formal recognition. The United States has done this countless times, including for the last half century with Cuba. It did it for years with the Soviet Union.

But Israel’s case is not just a matter of formal recognition. There is a subtle but immensely important difference. It wants recognition as “the Jewish state.” What would happen to those million or so Palestinians who hold Israeli passports and are now at least nominally Israelis? Forced marches across the Jordan River? What happens to the many important Palestinian claims on Israel? What claims do you think a non-Jew can have in “a Jewish state” under purely Jewish courts and laws? What happens to the entire West Bank, which exists under Israeli occupation and is regularly predated by sudden demands for non-Jewish properties? This is no simple issue as Israel repeatedly and tiresomely insists that it is.

You are not a terrorist because you refuse to accept Israel’s terms: you are a people looking out for your own interests, something all people have the right and need to do. Israel always insists that this acceptance come before any other matters can be dealt with, and it then turns to the press and says, “See, I told you, they are terrorists.”  Simply absurd, expecting people to just lie down and let you do whatever you want to them!

“…and if that means killing 200,000 Gazans, then so be it…”

 Only a person so exceedingly biased towards Israel as to be effectively blind would fail to recognize the tone of those words. They could easily have been written by Adolph Hitler or one his charming goons such as Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels.

In the churches and schools where I was brought up, such speech could never be countenanced, yet here it is, written by a woman who was Secretary of State now wants to be President. She obviously knows enough to keep this morally-filthy language secret, hence her method of the second letter. So, even in her, maybe there is some little remaining sense of shame? But I doubt it because she is writing these ghastly words for what purpose? To ask for a large amount of money.

Now, if you wrote words like that in Israel or in a number of countries, only changing the name of who are to be killed in mass, you would most certainly go to prison, besides being labelled a terrorist for life. Apparently, when Hillary learned that this letter leaked, she made the excuse that there had been a typo, that it should have read “20,000.” Her moral and ethical organs are so charred and twisted that she actually thinks 20,00 people killed sounds okay, just fine, maybe ten times as good as killing 200,000?

But of course, Hillary is grotesquely lying even in this excuse, as she has lied innumerable times over her adult life, an ongoing stage play we have all enjoyed in the news: watching her defend her predatory husband for the sake of future political success, watching her politically-motivated statement of being shot at in Bosnia in 1996, a claim almost instantly proved fraudulent by the press, watching her squirm and lie about what really happened during the murderous events at Benghazi, and watching her lie as she is investigated about using her private server for top secret material as Secretary of State.

“Those who allow their children to be used as human shields for terrorists deserve to see them buried under one-ton bombs”

 This statement is so sick and twisted, it is frightening. It begs the whole genuine issue of whether any Palestinian ever did this, while we know from witnesses that Israeli soldiers did. Just what is it here that we are talking about where children are said to have been used as shields? A full-fledged invasion by heavily-armed troops, supported with tanks and artillery and fighter planes into a densely-crowded civilian area, often aptly described as an open-air prison for a million and a half souls. How could children avoid becoming targets? In the poor places of the Middle East with their high birth rates, children are a greater portion of the population than in advanced countries. Only a genuine monster would launch such an invasion, and only an equal monster would defend it.

To my mind, this damnable behavior of Israel’s could be compared to, say, the Detroit Police Department, supported by the Michigan National Guard, invading the ghettos of Detroit to capture a few criminals and killing literally thousands of innocent people in the process and leaving the place a pile of rubble. The whole world would be appalled. But even that comparison is inadequate. Israel was not chasing criminals. What Israel was really hoping to do was murder the leaders of Hamas, a legitimate political party. But even if Hamas were not a legitimate party, Israel’s act is comparable to Detroit’s police and National Guard killing thousands to try getting a few members of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s.

We’ve surmised that things like this letter go on in private because we see our politicians countenancing mass murder and we see the entire Middle East in flames owing to the same cause. But having the paper in hand is another matter. For instance, we know Newt Gingrich received the best part of $20 million for his last nomination campaign from billionaire Sheldon Adelson and proceeded to make campaign speeches about there being “no such thing as a Palestinian.”

We know former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a man whose career was well financed by special interests, actually said in the late part of his career that Israel should just sweep all the Palestinians out of the country.

We know that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in response to a question about 500,000 deaths of children in Iraq, “We think the price is worth it,” and does anyone wonder why Albright not only strongly supports Hillary but recently spoke of “a special place in hell for women” who didn’t support Hillary?

It tells us a great deal of the lengths to which an American politician will go to secure large sources of funds. It tells us too something about her relationship with the recipient that Hillary believed she could freely address him in such an appalling fashion. Finally, it confirms everyone’s worst fears about the Israel Lobby and the extremes to which its supporters are prepared to go.

We all know there is a huge amount of behind-the-scenes, dirty dealing in American politics, but not just in politics, in foreign affairs. There is no other explanation for the murky, bloody swamp into which America’s government has towed the country. America has been continuously at war for a quarter century. It has killed great numbers of people and destroyed whole societies. And none of those people threatened the United States, not even the Taleban who were arbitrarily and without proof held responsible for the events of 9/11.

Virtually all of it relates directly or indirectly to Israel and making the Middle East comfortable for a state which itself never hesitates to threaten, attack, kill, imprison, torture to gain its objectives, its objectives being to enlarge itself far beyond its original accepted boundaries, to reduce the native Palestinian population of millions to such miserable discomfort that they flee their homes, and to assure itself of hegemony throughout the region, seeing independent-minded leaders like Assad or Gadhafi literally murdered and their countries torn apart.

It is a program which parallels closely historical examples which none of us has been taught to admire or approve, historical examples which have caused great wars and massive human misery. We have established some of our greatest international institutions precisely out of the wreckage of history with the aim of not letting it happen again, but today every one of these institutions is compromised by American pressure on Israel’s behalf, the work of corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton.

So it is happening again, although on a smaller scale – though I wouldn’t want the job of explaining to the people of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and a number of other places that their desolation and misery are on a smaller scale.

The present Secretary General doesn’t even peep at America’s many appalling acts. Past Secretaries General who managed to get elected despite their opposition to American imperialism – an example was Boutros Boutros-Ghali – were removed in behind-the-scenes plots. Madeleine Albright for example won her State Department spurs arranging just that kind of thing. Combinations of threats and bribes do the job nicely, and, of course, the UN hasn’t forgotten the long period of time the United States simply refused to pay its treaty-required dues, a quarter of the institution’s budget.

But ordinary Americans and others rarely get even a peek at any of the details going into the shaping of their world. Here is one small instance where they do, and it is a telling one.

 

FOOTNOTE: It comes to my attention that there is reason to suspect the original source of the second letter. It may well have been a hoax. But even if that proves to be the case, I stand by my comments and observations as things which needed saying, having their own validity quite apart from that of the letter.

 

AMERICA STUMBLES THROUGH ANOTHER YEAR, SPREADING CHAOS AND TRIVIA EVERYWHERE IN ITS PATH

John Chuckman

The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the United Nations’ Security Council on a resolution favoring their statehood, unquestionably a reasonable proposal in the minds of most of the world’s people. Of course, the United States, a permanent member of the Security Council, would automatically veto such a resolution, as it vetoes all efforts to restore order to the chaos of the Middle East. And of course, were such a resolution somehow miraculously to pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as it has ignored a long list of binding UN resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt are not enough for an upright, God-fearing Southern gentleman like US Senator Lindsey Graham. He busied himself recently with threatening America’s withholding funds from a United Nations that gets involved in the “peace process.” Imagine, the United Nations getting involved in peace? That is a chilling thought. Since the United States has a history of withholding its UN dues against its solemn treaty obligations to bully its way to certain changes, such threats do carry weight.

Senator Graham, regarded neither as an idealist nor a  voice for peace, is only doing what so many American politicians do under the unbelievably corrupt, money-drenched American election system, and that is to make ridiculous public statements about the Middle East in return for generous dollops of campaign funds from the world’s most tireless political lobby, that for Israel. You might think that the lobby itself would tire of funding backwater blowhards demanding the other ninety-five percent of humanity play the game by America’s rules or America is picking up its marbles or chips or whatever and going home, but clearly it does not.

“The peace process” is the longest running farce on the planet, continuing for nearly fifty years. It might have been funny in the vein of The Mouse That Roared, but there is nothing remotely funny in the killing of thousands of people and the extreme abuse and hopelessness of millions. You just could not make a worse hash of a diplomatic and human welfare situation than America has made in the Middle East. And the situation has only intensified in its cruelty and injustice. Today, Israel openly and regularly steals homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It threatens ancient Muslim shrines and desecrates some of them. It has savaged Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison camp, twice, killing close to four thousand including nearly a thousand children. It has attempted to starve Gaza’s people out with a years-long embargo, and is making ugly noises about still another invasion. It is about to steal Syrian oil on the occupied Golan Heights, drilling there illegally, and it is busy arranging the theft of offshore natural gas that belongs to Gaza and Lebanon. It does all of this with complete impunity and not even a cross word from the likes of Senator Graham. I do think the Middle East provides the strongest possible evidence of the complete unsuitability of the United States to play a dominant role in international affairs. It is genuinely a case of the inmates running the asylum.

In another example of chaos mixed with farce, the United States pretends to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and while that charade continues, planes loaded with American weapons keep flying out of Turkey to make the seeming lunatics even stronger. Indeed, the various ragtag factions trying to overthrow the Syrian government, cutthroats assembled by the US and its friends from all corners of the globe in a kind of hellish foreign legion, announced a new alliance, so telling Washington’s approved terrorists in the conflict from those who haven’t made the cut is more difficult than ever. Recently, one or another of the lunatic mobs shot down two fighter jets, and how do you think they managed that without American anti-aircraft missiles? Turkey’s certifiably unbalanced president, Tayyip Erdoğan, one day makes fiery speeches threatening Israel (to please the poor fools voting for him) and the next makes new secret deals with Israel. Remember, this is a man who just built a one-thousand room palace for himself – yes, that’s right, exactly one thousand rooms – and it is the ugliest, most pointless large structure built since the early Soviet era, a kind of gigantic sprawling warehouse incrusted with jewels and filled with porcelain.

Well, dippiness is no barrier to membership in a secret club in the region which includes the UAE, Saudia Arabia, and Israel, all lovingly assisted by the US. They are all governments who regard change as desirable only when it results in an even more rigid status quo, as in Egypt.  Never mind the welfare of the region’s people or democracy or human rights or national boundaries. These guys resemble twelfth century lords seeing paupers cross their paths: they run them down and proceed to a rollicking good dinner in the great hall. The club is all about security for hereditary monarchs, security for America’s crusader fortress colony in the Middle East, and security for helper states in the American agenda. We’ve had many reports recently of secret air-freight flights between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. We also have reports of flights out of Turkey into Syria. The never explained events at Benghazi were undoubtedly blowback from an operation collecting unemployed thugs and arms for secret shipment to Turkey and then into Syria. Saudi Arabia is voluntarily taking a bath by pushing oil prices down, a favor to the US and Israel and Turkey and a way of hurting Russia, Iran, Syria, and even Venezuela – all current members in good standing of Captain America’s ever-changing galaxy of villains – aka, the Axis of Evil. The US is willing to sacrifice for the time being its booming shale oil industry, whose more costly production requires higher prices than Saudi conventional crude, in return for the Saudi sacrifice.

Since both countries are desperate to hurt Russia, Iran, and Syria, the deal is a marriage made in Realpolitik heaven. Russia has helped Syria and does business with Iran, and Saudi Arabia and Israel hate Iran and Syria. The US has made a large investment in toppling Syria for Israel’s benefit, but the plan has been thwarted by Syrian endurance and Russian help. The plan also overlooked the loyalty of important Syrian societal groups to President Assad, but America often overlooks details as it attempts to reshape the world to its liking with bombs. Of course, there was also the precedent of Iraq, a bloody fiasco that achieved nothing but a million deaths and splintering a country into pieces. That splintering, by the way, continues with the ISIS fiasco: Iraq’s Kurds are being used against ISIS to strengthen their own region’s quasi-independence from Iraq.

The chaos the secret club-member countries have created in Syria – perhaps 200,000 killed and a couple of million refugees – appears not to bother them in the least, just so many paupers in the roadway when galloping home to dinner at the great hall. The victims do provide useful free material for the propaganda war being waged, the understanding implicit in America’s and Canada’s and Europe’s press being always that President Assad is responsible for the catastrophe. The US, and cheerleaders on the sidelines like Canada’s current dismal right-wing government, are doing virtually nothing for the refugees, or for the many civilians crippled or wounded. Ironically, Israel actually accepts for treatment in its northern medical facilities some of the very fanatics wounded in the dirty work. After all, it is ultimately Israel’s dirty work they do, regardless of their fanaticism. It’s a phenomenon we might call selective terrorism: fanatical killers who do America’s work, or Israel’s, are not treated as terrorists at all. No matter how many women and children you kill, no matter how many places you bomb, you only become a terrorist if you oppose the interests of America or Israel.

The toll in killed and wounded and homeless in Eastern Ukraine continues to mount. New punitive measures come regularly from Kiev, undoubtedly with American advice about possible vulnerabilities – after all, a top cabinet minister in the coup-created government is American. Only the other day we read reports of Ukrainian militia-types, the kind of right-wing thugs who helped the US overthrow an elected government in Kiev, blocking food traffic into the East. Attempting to starve people into submission is defined in international law as a war crime, but we hear no word of concern from America, just as we heard no word of concern for Israel’s original blockade of Gaza which actually included a calculated level of calories intended to just keep the population alive (since modified under intense secret international pressure).

In all these induced chaotic situations, we hear little or nothing from the UN, an institution which should be among the first condemning aggressive behavior. But the UN, despite the many differing private views of its members, is now in all official capacities under the thumb of the US. Its current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, a candidate favored by America, is ineffectual and behaves at times almost as though he headed an organization having nothing to do with peace or human rights.

Well, there is some intimidating history. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was the only UN secretary-general not to be elected to a second term in office, and the reason was an American plan to be rid of him, one of Madeleine Albright’s glorious career achievements. America vetoed his second term because it was most unhappy when he did not embrace the bombing of Bosnia, and they disliked other of his views which tended to be thoughtful and compassionate. Earlier, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a much admired man, was assassinated in an engineered plane crash, said to have been the work of Belgian mining companies unhappy with the UN’s policies in Congo, a place the mining companies had drained of wealth for decades of brutal exploitation, but I think it unlikely anything of that nature happened without at least a nod of approval from Washington, which after all was a major customer for the products of Congo.

The evidence is piling up, despite delays and many irregularities in the official investigation into the crash of airline Flight MH-17 in Ukraine, that a Ukrainian pilot deliberately shot the plane down. His fighter is said to have been armed with air-to-air missiles on take-off, something completely out-of-the-ordinary in the conflict since Eastern Ukrainians have no air force. It returned, according to an eye-witness, with no missiles and the pilot’s muttering cryptic phrases. Of course, this would be the kind of act you might expect from people who used sniper rifles earlier this year to kill many hundreds of civilians in Maidan, the central square of Kiev, in order to terrorize the population and start the coup. But where is America’s voice in these grotesque doings? As Russia has patiently pointed out, an American spy satellite was virtually overhead at the time of the crash, so definitive evidence exists without a doubt but is not produced. But then neither is it produced for the destruction of Flight MH-370 in the Indian Ocean, an event it is virtually certain was the work of American forces at the secret Diego Garcia base as the plane came their way for whatever unknown reason.

The irregularities around Flight MH-17’s investigation include Malaysia, owners of the airline, being excluded from the group conducting the investigation and include the fact that segments of the wreckage were left behind at the crash site, and that after taking a very long time to get there in the first place, making manipulation of forensic evidence possible and even likely. We also have the absence of any American satellite or radar records, and we have not a word about the autopsy on the pilot, something which might solve the entire mystery, as from the discovery of Ukrainian missile fragments in his body.

What kind of world do we want to live in? One where coups and civil wars are engineered for the pleasure of others? One where airliners full of people are shot down deliberately? This is the chaos, and just part of it, America has bestowed upon us in the twenty-first century. I won’t even go into the financial tsunami it created in 2008 with the same lack of caution for others and concern about doing things correctly. The full impact of that has yet to strike us all.

But America brings laughable trivia, too. The President of the United States spending time and breath on the hacking of a private company’s web site? A Japanese company, no less? And turning the relatively trivial business of hacking, which happens every day now somewhere, into an international incident by blaming, almost certainly incorrectly, North Korea?

The President said the FBI had investigated and assured him that North Korea was responsible. What he didn’t tell us was that the FBI has a decades-long record of being wrong, seriously wrong, a great deal of the time. Given the FBI’s history, it certainly is in the running for the title of Most Incompetent Security Organization in the Western World, although, like other national security institutions in the United States, it is grossly over-funded with money gushing out like water from broken plumbing. Americans pay more per unit of misinformation than likely any other people on the planet.

Anyone familiar with the record of the FBI listens to assurances like the President’s with a sarcastic smile at best (see FOOTNOTE for a partial list of the FBI’s viciousness and incompetence over the years). Shortly after the president’s silly words, we had several world-class tech experts tell us why it could not have been North Korea, and I’ll take bets against the FBI on this one from anyone.

It likely was someone at Sony doing a publicity stunt to promote what by all reports is a dud of a film, but why should the man with the biggest job in the world join in? Consider also the fact that if you make what can be viewed as a threatening comment or presentation of any kind against the President of the United States, you will be visited and interviewed by the Secret Service, who will then keep you on file permanently. Why is it okay to make a movie about the assassination of North Korea’s president then, the subject of The Interview? Sony certainly has right to do stupidly foolish things, but it is more than a little muddled for the President eagerly to support it. Will he now address the rights of porn actors in California to work without condoms?

As I write this, a British newspaper reports that some Sony employees have been quietly dismissed. Reported also is the discovery of a web site strongly suggesting disgruntled employees. See what I mean about America overlooking the facts before it acts?

 

FOOTNOTE ON HOW WRONG AND DISHONEST THE FBI HAS BEEN:

The FBI was wrong in claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia, something J. Edgar Hoover insisted for many years while he gambled at their racetracks and stayed at their resorts for free, some biographers believing Hoover had been compromised by the Mafia with photos of his secret gay, cross-dressing life. The FBI was wrong in focusing huge resources for many years on the pathetic American Communist Party, half of whose small membership is said to have consisted of FBI agents. The FBI was wrong about the threat of Albert Einstein, seeking his extradition for a time and checking the contents of his garbage to his dying day. The FBI was wrong about the danger of Dr. Martin Luther King, and it played judge and jury with his personal life. The FBI was wrong about Dr. Wen Ho Lee of Los Alamos being a spy, although it ruined his career. The FBI was wrong about the crash of TWA Flight 800, taking an inordinate amount of time trying to let public interest cool and avoid the obvious fact that the crash was an accidental shoot-down by the American military, there being a radar track showing something like a missile rising towards the plane. Despite its vast resources, the FBI never saw 9/11 coming. One of its own senior agents, Robert Hanssen, was one of the more damaging spies of modern times, a man whose carelessness in many details, classic indicators of a paid spy, went unnoticed for years. The FBI was wrong in the Atlanta Olympic bombing, ruining the life of another innocent man. It couldn’t have been more wrong in its handling of the sad kooks at Waco, effectively murdering them all. So, too, at the Ruby Ridge standoff where an FBI sniper killed a woman and her child needlessly. The FBI Crime Labs were cited in the 1990s by the Inspector General for misconduct and manipulating evidence, something many had suspected for years. The FBI specialized for years in hurting the reputations of those it didn’t like or those it merely suspected, as by asking questions at their place of work and neighborhood, not have any proof of wrong-doing. The FBI, at least under J. Edgar Hoover, held career-threatening information obtained by spying over the heads of many prominent congressmen and government leaders, effectively blackmailing them to do its bidding. It did the same with non-government officials where it felt so inclined. The FBI was wrong about the assassination of President Kennedy, it being the only investigative agency for the lamentable, embarrassing Warren Commission, thereby assuming at least equal responsibility for its inaccurate, dishonest report. Indeed, the FBI did not reveal at the time that Oswald secretly worked for them as a paid informant (since documented). It also lied about evidence a senior FBI agent destroyed after the assassination, a note Oswald had written.

 

FOREIGN AFFAIRS AS OPERA BUFFA: THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST ISIS

John Chuckman

 

There is a forgotten 1933 movie serial called The Three Musketeers in which three members of the French Foreign Legion are rescued by an American, a young John Wayne, using the machine gun on his biplane to mow down Arab bad guys threatening the Legionnaires in the Sahara. What was John Wayne doing flying around the French Sahara? He had flown over from France to visit his girlfriend. Why did he have a machine gun mounted on his plane? There wouldn’t be a story otherwise. Like all such series, it is silly, but it is notable for a plot which includes a secret organization called the Devil’s Circle led by a mysterious and evil figure called El Shaitan, someone who wants to destroy the Legion and, after many false leads, turns out in the last reel to be a western merchant rather than an Arab.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Substitute al-Qaeda for the Devil’s Circle, substitute Osama bin Laden for El Shaitan, and substitute the Mideast for North Africa. John Wayne remains John Wayne, symbol as they used to say on the voiceover for the 1950s Superman television show, “for the American way of life.” It does sound as though the script for al-Qaeda was lifted from the old serial. I’m sure someone at Langley would be able to confirm that. With all its twists and turns around the identity of El Shaitan, the story would make a great libretto for an extravagant opera buffa, or a Broadway comedy musical.

Of course, we had indisputable proof years ago, in the testimony of a former British Foreign Minister and several other significant world figures, that there was indeed no such organization as al-Qaeda, the Arab word commonly meaning “hole” or “toilet,” hardly the choice of cutthroats. The term was a convenient Washington insider shorthand to designate scattered, unrelated populations of Islamic bad guys, as Washington saw them, lurking in deserts and on mountain redoubts or maybe even hiding in Western cities, ready to spring into action at a signal from El Shaitan, I mean, Osama bin Laden. But the fact that al-Qaeda does not exist, as is the case so many times with facts, made no impression on Americans, and especially not on their ever-vigilant press, and certainly had no influence on a lunatic policy called the War on Terror.

Of course, the root cause of 9/11 and so many other acts of angry, frustrated, and powerless people is America’s embrace of the seemingly never-ending injustice and brutality of Israel towards millions of Arabs. But Washington doesn’t deal with hard realities; it is too busy always dealing with self-created fantasies like al-Qaeda. After all, it is the same in its own society. Police brutality, corrupt elections, massive abuses of lobbyists, crying need for reform of a truly sick democracy, massive urban poverty, poor public education, and a dark and overwhelming military-intelligence influence are not topics of discussion in America’s government. No, American politicians’ ideas of domestic issues are proposed flag-desecration amendments, The Star Spangled Banner being sung in Spanish, the role of drones in cities, supplying the nation’s police forces with surplus armored vehicles and gear from all the nation’s wars, stopping the flow of poor refuges, especially children, from all the horrors America has helped create in Central America and Mexico, maintaining the world’s largest prison population at minimum cost, and paying less taxes.

Well, as al-Qaeda fades into the sunset, we are suddenly flooded with media noise about an even more bizarre organization called ISIS (or ISIL) which honorable and honest Western leaders – try not laugh: Obama, Cameron, and Hollande – insist is ready to attack us in city streets, sabotage power grids, and poison water supplies if we don’t start bombing the crap out of them in Iraq and Syria. Some of America’s more bizarre congressmen are also blubbering about an ISIS invasion from Mexico, calculatingly dragging in paranoid fears over the widely disliked situation on America’s southern border concerning refugees. What’s that about Syria? Don’t all the chilling tales of ISIS come from Iraq? Well, pretty much so, but ISIS is said to be very ambitious. Tales of its growth and spread resemble lines from the script of a cheap 1950s science fiction film called The Blob. And besides, Syria is what the United States really cares about, now that Iraq drags itself around almost like a veteran with three limbs nearly severed.

We have indisputable proof in the testimony from a certain former NSA employee, that ISIS is the creation of Mossad and American intelligence. As with so many of America’s recent ghastly projects in the Middle East, financing comes from Saudi Arabia, the Saudis having spent the last 13 years desperately repenting their (still undefined) role in events around 9/11, even to the point of secretly embracing Israel in their regional plans and plots. The Saudis remain under great pressure to cough up wads of cash whenever America now beckons with a new bone-headed project. All the creeps – various collections of mindless fundamentalists, soldiers of fortune, just plain opportunists, and CIA thugs – working to overthrow Assad’s government in Syria also receive their bounty, just as they receive weapons and refuge in Turkey. ISIS first worked in Syria as just one of several rag-tag armies assembled by the United States and its helpers to destroy a peaceful nation which has had the temerity to oppose some of American policy, especially with regard to Israel. Again, to remind readers, the incident at Benghazi, Libya, involving the killing of an American ambassador and a great deal of embarrassment for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was precisely about gathering up violent people and arms in the wasteland created there and shipping them off to Turkey in order to create hell in Syria.

But ISIS is just too over-the-top even for opera buffa. Its creation served several dark aims. First, it serves as a lure for malcontents from many places, many of its recruits being American or English, drawing them together at one location. The leadership of ISIS, associated to a certainty with Israel and the United States, can gather information from these recruits about their associates or organizations in various countries. Effectively, after doing any dirty work assigned to them, the recruits are being set up to be killed, either by American air strikes or by the opponents they face in their work. Few in ISIS would know who the “undercover cops” are and who the bad guys are to be used and disposed of like so much toilet paper. The method reflects Israel’s secret services’ long, ugly use of Palestinians to undermine Palestinians.

Second, ISIS served as a mechanism to topple Nouri al-Maliki, recently prime minister of Iraq, a figure with whom Washington had become very unhappy, chiefly owing to his friendliness with Iran, yet another target of the American/Israeli Axis. Maliki proved lucky compared to most leaders Washington sets up and with whom it becomes disenchanted: they generally end up as the proverbial Mafia figures fitted with cement overshoes at the bottom of a river. Maliki was given a good scare with the advancing blood-curdling hordes of ISIS and wisely understood it as his cue to exit.

Third, ISIS has served as an excuse to work with the Kurdish population in Iraq, more or less separately from the national government. This involves giving weapons and intelligence to Kurds and furthering their de facto separation from Iraq, thus greatly weakening any future Iraq since the Kurdish areas have a great portion of the country’s crude oil. After all, the most basic reason for America’s invasion of Iraq was to eliminate it as even a potential enemy of Israel. There also have been some mysterious disappearances of Iraqi crude shipments, which may well have ended up in Israel.

Fourth, the ISIS move back into Syria provides the perfect excuse for American bombing there, something President Putin of Russia managed to prevent earlier with some deft statesmanship. America has already warned President Assad, busy fighting an engineered civil war created by the same folks who created ISIS, that they will attack his defences if he interferes with their bombing his country. Incidentally, no one consulted the Syrian government on any of this, America having already recognized the collection of rabble and criminals called the Free Syrian Army as legitimate.

American air power and perhaps ground troops, while using the excuse of fighting ISIS, will attempt to swing the engineered civil war back in favor of the “rebels,” Assad’s national forces having had considerable success in defeating them recently. The failure to achieve Assad’s overthrow is one of the more worrying developments in America’s bloody scheme for a re-birth of the Middle East, a plan which seeks to surround Israel with a giant cordon sanitaire, albeit at the cost of more than a million innocent lives. Never mind death or homelessness, such matters never are never concerns of American policy except where there is an advantage to be gained. Look at their filthy work in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Egypt.

It is of course remotely possible that ISIS, in attempting to set up “an Islamic state” comprising parts of both Iraq and Syria, has gone rogue, out of the control of its handlers – that kind of event being called blowback in the dirty intelligence business – but I think likely it was always in the script. Most ISIS recruits are destined to die after doing what their handlers told them to do, and along the way President Assad’s country is to be further destroyed and if possible reduced to the kind of paraplegic-like nation Iraq has become.

ISIS started as no more than a couple of thousand guys in pick-up trucks with rifles and grenade launchers. It grew, drawing bizarre recruits from many countries, as its reputation for ferocity was artificially played up by the western press. There are after all always and everywhere a fair number of individuals drawn to violence and dangerous adventure. You might call its wonderings in Iraq a gestation period for bigger things, the ultimate goal being an acceptable way to help topple Assad while disposing of a collection of unwanted people. This all amounts to a giant-scale police entrapment scheme, something our courts consistently strike down, but this is entrapment played for keeps on a scale of thousands of lives.

The pick-up truck brigade proved enough to scare off group after group of well-armed units of the Iraqi army – especially with bags of loot from the Saudis tossed into tents at night. Of course, gradually, ISIS did manage to collect some vehicles and tanks left behind by Iraqi forces and present something more threatening. If you just think about it, how would unprofessional recruits have the least idea of how to operate sophisticated weapons? Imagine operating modern tanks or artillery without expert training?  But ISIS has plenty of undercover experts to train them and make them seem more formidable. The head of ISIS is a man, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was an American prisoner for a time. He seems to know America’s greatest plug-ugly senator and roaming unofficial ambassador for killing, John McCain (judging from a number of photos on the Internet showing them together), and he is, according to a number of sources, actually a former Jewish actor named Elliot Shimon, trained by Mossad for a different kind of theater.

Now we’ve had a crescendo of beheadings supposedly captured live on video, only each of these is a patent fraud. Even the mainstream press, the last to discover almost anything worth knowing these days, have now admitted the first one was a fraud, although not before many columnists and commentators spewed great quantities of self-righteous outrage on the subject. Not that the victims probably haven’t died somehow or other, but they were not beheaded by a mysterious eight-foot British giant dressed in black and armed with a paring knife. Staged beheadings of course are intended to revolt people and rouse support for Western governments to act. The real beheadings which occur regularly in Saudi Arabia – there was a batch of 19 only recently – are never shown on American news, nor are they even discussed. But a single video of a fake terrorist beheading is played and replayed and commented on endlessly with indignation over such horror. And the hundreds of Palestinians, including children, whom Israel has beheaded with bombs and artillery never make an appearance on television or rate any commentary.

 

 

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE WHERE ALMOST EVERY WORD OF NEWS ISN’T WHAT IT SEEMS

 

John Chuckman

 

I think a description of the political space in which we live as a kind of twilight reality is not an exaggeration. Not only is a great deal of the news about the world we read and hear manipulated and even manufactured, but a great deal of genuine news is simply missing. People often do not know what is happening in the world, although they generally believe they do know after reading their newspapers or listening to news broadcasts. People receive the lulling sounds or words of most of this kind of news almost unconsciously just as they do to the strains of piped-in “elevator music” in stores and offices.

There are several reasons why this is so. The consolidation of news media creates huge corporate industries whose interests are no different to those of other huge corporate industries. The ownership and control of these industries is not in the hands of people interested in finding out about things and helping others to understand: they are in the hands of people with political connections and goals. At the government level, those in power over the great agencies of the military and security also are not motivated by helping others to understand; indeed, they often are very much interested in hiding what they do.

With a large, complex, and powerful state like the United States these motivations become overwhelming in importance. The more the establishment’s national ambitions become interference in, and manipulation of, the world’s affairs – in effect, controlling the global environment in which it lives – the more it finds itself mired in acts and policies which cannot stand the light of day. Secrecy becomes a paramount goal of government, and all corporate news organizations – understanding their dependency upon government agencies for leaks and information to make them look good, for permissions and licences which allow them to survive and grow, and for advertising revenue from other great corporations involved with government – understand implicitly the permissible limits of investigation and news. And when they do forget, they are promptly reminded. Some of these giants – CNN and Fox News come to mind – make little pretence of genuine news or investigation, existing almost entirely as outlets for points of view, attitudes, and the odd tantalizing morsel of disinformation. They keep an audience because they offer what is best understood as either infotainment or soft propaganda which is expertly tuned to listeners’ and readers’ assumptions and preconceived ideas.

Size matters in all enterprises, economies of scale contributing to build powerful corporations with global influence. Size also matters to create what economists call “barriers to entry” in any industry, something which plays a major role in the evolution of many industries over time from fairly competitive ones to quasi-monopolistic ones. It is virtually impossible for a newcomer to enter an industry evolved to this latter state, including the news industry. It would be about as difficult to enter the American news industry as it would be to enter its soda pop, car manufacturing, household products, or hamburger restaurant industries. It is always possible to start a small niche, or boutique, operation, but it literally is not possible to compete with oligopolistic giants. So, necessarily, American news is under the control of a very few people, extremely wealthy people, who attend the same cocktail parties as senior people in government agencies and other great corporations.

The more powerful the great military-security-policing agencies in a society become, the more independent of public approval and scrutiny they grow. This is unavoidable without a sustained popular demand for public accountability and reasonable transparency, but such popular movements are difficult to start and even harder to maintain, and they are pretty much absent in America. Every once in a while we do get a movement in America popping up like spring dandelions on the lawn, almost always of the “back to basics” type, the Tea Party being the most recent manifestation, financed by some wealthy persons with their own goals and serving to titillate people for a short while that the dark monstrosity in Washington can be made to go away, but, as with the Tea Party, they always dry up and blow away.

The politicians who ostensibly oversee dark matters in special committees do not want public credit for what they approve. And I believe a point is reached, as it has been reached in the United States, where a great deal of the planning and decision-making in dirty affairs is left entirely in the hands of the great security agencies themselves, politicians not being in a position to interfere even if they wanted to do so. The sheer volume and complexity of such operations argues for this view, and the truth is most people and most politicians are comfortable with inertia.

If we go back about fifty years we have a complex and fascinating example of these forces and tendencies at work, and we can only be sure that matters have gone a great deal further since that time with the immense swelling of security budgets, open contempt for privacy and rights, and the dramatic advance of technological capabilities. On the matter of technology from the citizens’ point of view, the blithe pop notion of “social media,” so often talked up in the press as now working against concentrated power, ignores that “social media” too are just great corporations intimately linked to government. They not only send the security agencies a detailed flow of information about their subscribers, but they are all engineered to be switched off when government desires it. The Internet in general has provided an outlet for critical views, but the total exposure to the public is small in the scheme of things – a few channels, as it were, in a multi-trillion channel universe – and can mostly be ignored by authorities, and, in any event, the Internet is evolving quickly into something else far more dominated by commercial interests. The Golden Age of the Internet, so far as ideas are concerned, may well soon be over.  To return to our example, if we go back to America’s many attempts to topple or assassinate the leader of Cuba in the early 1960s, we have perhaps our best understood example of elaborate dark operations, unaccountable officials, murder, mayhem, and an utterly compliant press – all freely continuing for years. Although histories of the Kennedy presidency contain more than one version of some details of America’s vast, long-lasting terrorist plot, still, much of it is understood, at least better than is the case for many such matters.

John Kennedy may not have been quite the idealist some sentimentally view him today, but he was more thoughtful, independent, and tough-minded than many American Presidents of the 20^th century. He learned nearly immediately after becoming President that the previous Eisenhower government had established a vast operation to eliminate Castro and his government. It was a terror operation whose size and complexity and resources made the later mountain redoubt of Osama bin Laden resemble a Boy Scout camp. Despite its size, this was an operation unknown to the press and public at the time, although there is an anecdote that The New York Times tripped over the plot and, in traditional Times’ fashion, suppressed it at the CIA’s request. The plans took many routes, including, as we learned later from the Church Committee in 1975 (an examination of some intelligence practices in the wake of the Watergate scandal), CIA representatives going to the bizarre lengths of approaching senior Mafia figures to discuss commissioning them for Castro’s assassination.

Kennedy came under great pressure from the CIA to approve the project for invading Cuba, a difficult position in which to put a young, inexperienced President. He decided to support the plan with important provisos. The Bay of Pigs invasion, by a CIA-trained, supplied, and paid private army of Cuban refugees, was directed by CIA personnel and supported by a huge propaganda apparatus, including a radio station, in Florida. There were also CIA assassination teams prepared to enter Cuba and kill certain people once the refugees were established. Many elements of the plan and the people running it had been involved in 1954 with the successful overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. But Cuba was not Guatemala, and their plans proved a colossal and embarrassing failure which served only to increase Castro’s heroic, legendary stature in Cuba, a classic result of poorly-conceived black operations called “blowback” in the security establishment, and the reverberations of these events continued for more than a decade, claiming many lives and careers.

Following the failed invasion, CIA leaders, much resembling some “old boys” at an expensive men’s club where outsiders are resented, blamed the President for his scepticism and failure to extend what they regarded as adequate support, especially in the form of disguised American air support for the invading forces. The new President himself was furious at having been pressured into the fiasco at the start of his term. The truth is that the CIA’s plan was almost laughable, including the key assumption that great numbers of ordinary Cubans would rise against Castro, an extremely popular leader, once the invasion force appeared. It was a delusional sand castle built on a foundation of blind hatred for anything to do with communism, especially for a man as charismatic as Castro. The blindness extended to the CIA’s having selected a poor geographical location for forces to land.

It was all a tremendous example of the arrogance of power, secret men with unlimited resources making secret plans that reflected little reality. Kennedy fired some top CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, and is said to have privately sworn to tear the CIA apart. We can only imagine the self-righteous fury of the CIA’s Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the time, their words, when recorded here or there, resembling tent preachers speaking about casting out devils. Kennedy, however, did not tear the CIA apart. Realistically, that would have been impossible with the men at the CIA knowing better than anyone how to capitalize on an attempt – blackmail, threats, ugly frat-boy jokes, and criminal activity being everyday tools they used. To be labelled “soft on communism” in the early 1960s was the political Mark of Beast, Richard Nixon having built an entire political career on it, and Kennedy’s personal life was subject to then-unpalatable revelations of extensive marital infidelity. So Kennedy continued to work with the CIA on a series of sabotage operations against Cuba and attempts on Castro’s life. Indeed, it is said that Kennedy put his brother, Robert, a sufficiently tough and ruthless man by all accounts, in charge of the plans, making senior CIA personnel answerable to the young Attorney General, itself the kind of act which would not endear him to the CIA’s old boys.

The secret matters around Cuba dominated events for years, again almost without any hard public information, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis which President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev peacefully settled, a settlement importantly including an American pledge not to invade Cuba again. Ultimately this writer is convinced that it was events around Cuba that led directly to the assassination of John Kennedy, much evidence suggesting a false trail to Cuba being planted before the fateful day in Dallas, the very kind of trail that could be used by the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen to justify an invasion after all. With everything from a faked visit to Mexico City by someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald (the poor man working in New Orleans as a paid FBI informer at the time – likely a low level part of a Kennedy-initiated FBI program to track and suppress the worst anti-Cuba excesses of the refugees and their handlers in keeping with the spirit of the Missile Crisis settlement – totally unaware he was being set up by those he fell in with), the one-man creation of a Fair Play to Cuba chapter in New Orleans, handing out Fair Play pamphlets (some of which were stamped with the address of an ex-senior FBI anti-communist fanatic, Guy Bannister, who ran a mysterious front operation in New Orleans with some very unsavory associates) at places including near a naval facility, the night visit to Sylvia Odio, daughter of a noted Cuban political figure, by a group of unidentified men who referred to a Leon Oswald, and many other such carefully placed little piles of breadcrumbs.

Kennedy offended his Pentagon Joint Chiefs by not letting them immediately bomb and invade Cuba when offensive missiles were discovered there by U-2 photography, and of course anything of that nature offending the Pentagon offended also the CIA and those dependent upon it.  With his pledge not to invade Cuba again, Kennedy offended the violent Cuban refugee community, people who were armed to the teeth by the CIA and had killed and crippled opponents in Florida as well as in Cuba. And through the entire sequence of events from the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis, Kennedy consistently offended the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the CIA. He added to that offence with acts like establishing secret backchannel communications with Khrushchev and preliminary efforts to establish the same communications with Castro. Such efforts were most unlikely to remain secret from the CIA when they involved such a high level and weighty matters. Remember, hatreds in the United States around Cuba remained so intense in the intelligence and refugee communities that as late as 1976, a CIA operative named Luis Posada Carriles planted two bombs on Cubana Airlines Flight 455, killing all 78 people aboard, and he was protected by the American government.

The effect on the general public of accurate knowledge about dark matters in the rare instances when they become known can be glimpsed here or there. One of the best examples is the disappearance from politics, including credible presidential ambitions, of a seemingly attractive Vietnam veteran holding the Medal of Honor, former-Senator Bob Kerrey. When the public learned of a secret operation called Project Phoenix and later learned that Kerrey earned his medal through such work, his political career simply dissolved. Project Phoenix was a dark operation in Vietnam in which American Special Forces crept out, night after night, to assassinate villagers the CIA identified as targets. It is estimated that twenty thousand innocent villagers had their throats slashed in the night by Americans creeping into their homes. It would be hard to conceive of a more cowardly and grisly form of war, but it went on for a long time in complete secrecy. The operation burst upon public awareness only after a titanic internal struggle at the CIA over the authenticity of a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko ended with the dismissal of James Angleton in 1974, the paranoid Chief of CIA Counterintelligence (a man, incidentally, who unquestionably had special knowledge of the Kennedy assassination) by new CIA Director William Colby. Colby also revealed the Phoenix program for reasons not well understood and stated he had run it. (A retired Colby later had a mysterious fatal boating accident near his home.)

People who want to discredit critics and sceptics of government today often use the term “conspiracy theorist,” almost as though there were ipso facto no such things as conspiracy or dishonesty in government. It is of course intended as a pejorative description. But the entire history of affairs around Cuba puts the lie to those using the term, and we know from many bits of information that Cuba is only one example of scores of genuine conspiracies.

Those with some history will know that secrecy and dishonesty have long served the interests of power. Why doesn’t the United States claim credit for overthrowing the democratic government of Guatemala, the democratic government of Iran which unleashed the filthy work of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, afterward, or the democratic government of Chile and the fifteen thousand or so state murders that followed? Why doesn’t it claim credit for the State Department’s teletyping lists of desired victims to a new government of Indonesia, after the fall of Sukarno in 1965, as its savage followers conducted a genocidal slaughter of suspected communists which saw half a million people thrown into rivers with their throats slashed? Why did it hide acts like the machine-gunning of hundreds of fleeing Korean civilians, including women and children, at the early stages of the Korean War? Or the hideous murder by suffocation in sealed trucks of about three thousand Taleban prisoners in the early stages of the Afghanistan War undertaken by one of America’s key Afghan allies shortly after Donald Rumsfeld publicly said they should be killed or walled away forever? Why doesn’t Israel just tell people it terrorized Palestinians, killing and raping, in 1948 to make as many as possible flee their homes? Or that it machine-gunned masses of Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai in a war that it engineered only for conquering more of Palestine?

Could it be that there are acts of which governments are ashamed? That there is reason to be ashamed of acts which they nevertheless continue to repeat? It does seem that government values its reputation enough to avoid taking credit for its ugliest acts. The terrible dilemma is that in a supposedly democratic state, these horrible acts are committed without either the knowledge or consent of the people and despite the fact that the results affect the public’s welfare and often international reputation. Now at just what point could the consent of the people in a democratic state be more important than committing organized murder on their behalf? I cannot imagine any. Yet that is a point at which states like America feel free to act, covering up what they do with masses of secrecy and lies.

Why would anyone deny the existence of conspiracies by America’s government? Regrettably, the only reason that some government behavior becomes known is the existence of whistleblowers. But how does government treat whistleblowers? Just ask Mordechai Vanunu or Daniel Ellsberg or Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning or Edward Snowden – truly brave and ethically-motivated individuals, treated like criminals by their governments.

Pervasive secrecy and truly democratic government are simply incompatible, and I think it fair to say that where we see monumental levels of secrecy, as we do in the United States with billions of classified documents and hundreds of past controversies dimly understood, it provides prima facie proof of a society tarted-up to resemble democracy but having few if any of the required internal organs functioning. A culture of secrecy and violence is the culture of a police state, full stop.

Right now we have partial information about some recent American, or American-sponsored, terrorist programs. One such is the induced “civil war” in Syria which receives arms and assistance via Turkey, the same route used to inject a rag-tag army of extremists into Syria and to allow them to retreat periodically in escaping Syria’s army. The extremists even used some of the deadly nerve gas, Sarin, to kill masses of civilians in hopes of pushing the United States openly into the conflict, making the rebels surely the kind of people no sane person wants running a country. And who supplied them with Sarin, a manufactured substance available from only a few sources?  A related dark program occurred in Benghazi, Libya, where an American ambassador was killed in another instance of blowback: he had been running an operation to collect from Libya and export to Syria weapons and thugs when some the thugs turned and attacked him instead. Yet another dark operation has been the destabilization of Ukraine through a huge secret flow of money to right wing forces who shot hundreds of innocent people down on the streets of Kiev to instill general fear and terror to support a coup.

Now, you will not read one word from an American official acknowledging any of this grotesque behavior. Indeed, John Kerry has the unenviable job of publically lying about it, puffing and pontificating and self-righteously proclaiming America’s revulsion over others behaving like that. And in all this storm of murder and dishonesty, you will only find American journalism, that noble guardian of the public’s right to know, keeping its readers and listeners in complete ignorance.

This is how it is possible in what is often regarded a free and democratic state, the national government commits itself to murder and mayhem, using its people’s resources without informing them and without their consent, all the while vigorously lying to them. Can you really have democracy that way? I don’t think so. The power and resources that are in the hands of America’s great secret agencies are greater than those enjoyed by many of the world’s dictators. And the distortions of the American press surely are in keeping with the practices of places where the press is never regarded as free. Many Americans know that at the local town or city level, they do have democratic institutions and attitudes, a fact which reassures them against criticisms of their national system, but then so does China today, and no one calls China a democracy.