Street writes: "In its endless, candidate-obsessed coverage and discussion
of the already seemingly interminable U.S. presidential horse race (the
actual presidential election is still more than ten months away), U.S.
corporate media fact-checkers, reporters, and commentators have had a field
day finding inaccuracies, offensiveness, and absurdities in the statements
of the current Republican pack-leader Donald Trump."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
An Idiot's Guide to Why They Hate Us
By Paul Street, CounterPunch
22 December 15
In its endless, candidate-obsessed coverage and discussion of the already
seemingly interminable U.S. presidential horse race (the actual presidential
election is still more than ten months away), U.S. corporate media
fact-checkers, reporters, and commentators have had a field day finding
inaccuracies, offensiveness, and absurdities in the statements of the
current Republican pack-leader Donald Trump. It's not hard to do. "The
Donald's" rambling orations and constant Tweets are loaded with
transparently false assertions and ridiculous comments, including:
* The claim that Barack Obama lacks a United States Birth Certificate
* The promise to build "a great, great wall on our southern border and.make
Mexico pay for it."
* The claim that Mexico is sending "rapists" to the United States.
* "The concept of global warming was created by the Chinese in order to make
U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
* The claim that former long-term prisoner of war John McCain isn't really a
"war hero" since he'd been captured by the U.S. enemy during the Vietnam War
(Trump made sure to attend college with a student deferment from the Vietnam
War draft).
* "There's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am" (repeat the
same parenthetical comment at the end of the previous bullet point).
* "Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact
on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!" (just a
little racist)
* "Arianna Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully
understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good
decision (one of many examples in which Trump has insulted the looks of a
prominent women).
* The ludicrous claim that Trump saw "thousands of people" in New Jersey
cheering the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The dominant ("mainstream') media has had little difficulty showing and
noting how and why these and numerous other Trump ejaculations are
outrageous. It's no surprise that a recent New York Times assessment of the
presidential candidates' truthfulness found Trump to be grossly deficient
when it comes to veracity. The media's top political fact checker, Angie
Drobac Holan, notes that "Mr. Trump's record on truth and accuracy is
astonishingly poor." His 76% Falsehood rating (three-fourths of the 70 Trump
statements carefully examined by Holan's Politifact Website came up untrue)
is exceeded only by the wacky Republican brain surgeon Ben Carson, who is
batting .840 at the inaccuracy plate (by contrast, Bernie Sanders rates 28%)
"The Hatred is Beyond Comprehension"
It's revealing, however, that the same media has nothing really to offer on
the clueless stupidity of something that Trump said in the wake of the
Islamic State terror attacks in Paris and a mass shooting carried out by a
"radicalized" Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California. I'm referring to
Trump's argument that Muslims should be barred from the United States "until
the country's representatives can figure out what's going on."
"Without looking at the various polling data" Trump later elaborated, "it is
obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred
comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump said in a statement.
"Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the
dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous
attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, that have no sense of reason
or respect for human life" (emphasis added).
The statement is either incredibly disingenuous or astonishingly foolish.
Nobody who is reasonably knowledgeable and honest about the long and ongoing
history of U.S.- and Western-imperial policy in the Middle East, Southwest
Asia, and Africa has any business claiming to find the origins of
anti-American and anti-Western terrorism in the Muslim world mysterious.
An "Aerial Traffic Jam" of "One-Sided Massacre" (1991)
"No sense of reason or respect for human life"? Seriously? Among the
countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the Muslim world, one
that I can never seem to forget occurred a quarter-century ago. I am
referring to the epic carnage wreaked by the U.S. military on Iraq's
notorious "Highway of Death," where U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands
of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27,
1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front,
and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. 'It
was like shooting fish in a barrel,' said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles
of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched
skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun.for 60
miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered,
every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No
survivors are known or likely.. 'Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like
this. It's pathetic,' said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence
officer.U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight
deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs.U.S. forces continued to drop
bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over
the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air
controllers feared midair collisions.. The victims were not offering
resistance.it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people
who had no ability to fight back or defend." (Ramsey Clark et al., War
Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission
of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, testimony of Joyce
Chediac, emphasis added).
Less than a year after his forces conducted this colossal slaughter, U.S.
President George H.W. Bush proclaimed that, "A world once divided into two
armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States
of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with
power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They
trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right"
(emphasis added).
As Noam Chomsky noted in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize
suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the
nation it had devastated after the Vietnam War ended: "No degree of cruelty
is too great for Washington sadists. The educated classes know enough to
look the other way."
"A Prodigious Effort"
Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building its Iraqi and Muslim Body
Counts in early 1991. As Sheldon Richman recently noted on CounterPunch:
"It takes prodigious effort to maintain an air of innocence about San
Bernardino and Paris, because no one who claims to be informed can plead
ignorance of the long history of U.S. and Western imperialism in the Muslim
world. This includes the CIA's subversion of Iranian democracy in 1953, the
U.S. government's systematic support of compliant autocratic and corrupt
Arab monarchies and dictatorships, it's empowering of Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims,
and its unconditional backing of Israel's brutal anti-Palestinian policies.
(The savage 2014 war on Gaza killed many noncombatants.)"
"In the 10 years before the 9/11 attacks the administrations of George H. W.
Bush and Bill Clinton bombed Iraq while maintaining an embargo, most
especially on equipment for the water and sanitation infrastructure the U.S.
Air Force had destroyed during the Gulf War. Half a million children died.
This was also when U.S. officials promised, then reneged on the promise, to
remove U.S. forces from the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia."
"From the air Americans routinely kill noncombatants in Syria and Iraq, most
recently this week, when 'at least 36 civilians, including 20 children, in a
village in eastern Syria' were reportedly killed, according to
McClatchyDC..Things like this happen all the time. The U.S. attack on the
Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was especially
egregious against this background of war crimes..The U.S. government has
conducted war by remote-controlled drones since 2001 in a variety of places,
including Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan."
"A Price Worth Paying"
Five years after "the Highway of Death," Bill Clinton's U.S. Secretary of
State Madeline Albright told CBS News' Leslie Stahl that the death of
500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the
first "Persian Gulf War" (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a
"price.worth paying" for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
"The United States," Secretary Albright explained three years later, "is
good. We try to do our best everywhere."
In the Streets of Fallujah
In a foreign policy speech he gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs
on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall
of 2006, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama had the audacity to say the
following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported "victory" in
Iraq: "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have
seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah."
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city
was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the
indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of
ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by
the U.S. military in April and November. By one account:
"The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and
November of 2004. [using] devastating firepower from a distance which
minimizes U.S. casualties. In April.military commanders claimed to have
precisely targeted.insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that
many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and
the elderly. [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally.. In
November. [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent
territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian
casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it.
Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after
Putin's Russian troops had razed it to the ground" (Michael Mann, Incoherent
Empire, New York, 2005).
U.S. deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah also
helped create a subsequent epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects,
leukemia, and cancer there. But, of course, Fallujah was just one especially
graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the
premature deaths of at least one million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq "a
disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory" (Tom
Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch.com, January 17, 2008).
The Pentagon's near leveling of the city was consistent with its early
computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003
invasion: "bug-splat" As it turned out, Uncle Sam's petro-imperial
occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi "bugs" (human
beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007,
"Iraq has been killed.the American occupation has been more disastrous than
that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century" (Current
History, December 2007).
The Most Extensive Terrorism Campaign of All Time
Chomsky has recently and rightly called Barack Obama's targeted drone
assassination program "the most extensive global terrorism campaign the
world has yet seen." The program "officially is aimed at killing people who
the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S., and
killing anyone else who happens to be nearby." As Chomsky ads, "It is also a
terrorism generating campaign - that is well understood by people in high
places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of
other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others
will want to take revenge."
Given the remarkable geographic scope of the cowardly U.S. drone war,
Obama's terrorism campaign has spread jihadism across vaster terrain than
any tool or tactic to date. George W. Bush may have Obama beat on total body
count in the Muslim world. But Obama takes the prize when it comes to the
geographic scope of jihad-fueling U.S. terrorism - and when it comes to
instilling a ubiquitous sense of fear of instant mass death from the sky
across much of that world.
"Pure Evil": Nightmares That Remind
It isn't just about body counts and science fiction-like technologies of
mass murder. The natural desire for revenge among many in the Muslim world
draws heavily on the hideous and perverse humiliation and torture that
racist U.S. forces have carried out in that world. A remarkable teleSur
English essay by Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine veteran of America's
arch-criminal Iraq invasion and occupation, is titled "I Helped Create
ISIS." By Emanuele's account of his enlistment in an operation that gives
him nightmares more than a decade later:
"I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in
makeshift detention facilities staffed by teenagers from Tennessee, New York
and Oregon. I never had the misfortune of working in the detention facility,
but I remember the stories. I vividly remember the marines telling me about
punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I
remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual
acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles,
sometimes sodomizing them with batons."
"However, before those abominations could take place, those of us in
infantry units had the pleasure of rounding up Iraqis during night raids,
zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the
back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their
knees and wailed. Sometimes, we would pick them up during the day. Most of
the time they wouldn't resist. Some of them would hold hands while marines
would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. Once they arrived at the
detention facility, they would be held for days, weeks, and even months at a
time. Their families were never notified. And when they were released, we
would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the
desert and release them several miles from their homes."
"After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads,
several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s
into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for
laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal at the
detention facility, hoping some level of freedom awaited them on the
outside. Who knows how long they survived. After all, no one cared. We do
know of one former U.S. prisoner who survived: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
leader of ISIS."
"Amazingly, the ability to dehumanize the Iraqi people reached a crescendo
after the bullets and explosions concluded, as many marines spent their
spare time taking pictures of the dead, often mutilating their corpses for
fun or poking their bloated bodies with sticks for some cheap laughs.
Because iPhones weren't available at the time, several marines came to Iraq
with digital cameras. Those cameras contain an untold history of the war in
Iraq, a history the West hopes the world forgets. That history and those
cameras also contain footage of wanton massacres and numerous other war
crimes, realities the Iraqis don't have the pleasure of forgetting."
"Unfortunately, I could recall countless horrific anecdotes from my time in
Iraq. Innocent people were not only routinely rounded-up, tortured and
imprisoned, they were also incinerated by the hundreds of thousands, some
studies suggest by the millions..Only the Iraqis understand the pure evil
that's been waged on their nation."
"..The warm and glassy eyes of young Iraqi children perpetually haunt me, as
they should. .My nightmares and daily reflections remind me of where ISIS
comes from and why, exactly, they hate us. That hate, understandable yet
regrettable, will be directed at the West for years and decades to come. How
could it be otherwise?" (emphasis added)
"You Haven't Begun to see.the Things Done to Children"
The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU last year about the
existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S.
soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of
the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. "You haven't begun to see [all the].evil,
horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as
the cameras run," Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.
The United States tries to do its best everywhere.
"Humility and Restraint"
Why Do They Hate Us?! It's an idiotic and childish question, as moronic as
anything "The Donald" ever says. The media doesn't call Trump him on this
one, however, for a very simple reason. It is itself deeply complicit in
selling the "American exceptionalist" myth of the United States as a noble
and benevolent force in the world and therefore in regularly and
systematically denying the savage and criminal behavior of the American
Empire abroad.
"We lead the world," presidential candidate Obama explained eight seven
years ago, "in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good..
America is the last, best hope of Earth." Obama elaborated in his first
Inaugural Address. "Our security," the president said, "emanates from the
justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of
humility and restraint"-a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the
U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the "Highway of Death" and more.
Within less than half a year of his Inauguration, Obama's rapidly
accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the
bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk Ninety-three of the dead
villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. "In a
phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the
Afghan Parliament," the New York Times reported, "the governor of Farah
Province.said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed." According to
one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, "the villagers bought two tractor
trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the
casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor's cried, watching
that shocking scene." The administration refused to issue an apology or to
acknowledge U.S. responsibility.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was
moved to comment as follows: "Peace prize? He's a killer.Obama," the man
added, "has only brought war to our country." The man spoke from the village
of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one
family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S.
Special Forces during a late night raid.
A "Mainstream" Orwellian Triumph
"We are good.We use our power with decency, humility, fairness, and
restraint." Every modern U.S. President (none perhaps with more audacity
than Barack Obama) and Secretary of State (including Hillary Clinton) has
said and still routinely says things along the same psychotic and nationally
narcissistic lines. They do so without facing any more criticism from U.S.
"mainstream" media than Soviet rulers faced from Pravda, Izvestia, and
Soviet state television when they described their nation and its Eastern
European satellites as "great socialist people's democracies." U.S. media
elites, being members of the properly "educated classes..know enough to look
away" from the reality of what Uncle Sam does in and to the world.
No wonder so many US-of-Americans are befuddled by the anger the U.S. evokes
around the world (particularly in the Muslim world), darkly clueless when it
comes answering the pathetic question "Why Do They Hate Us?" In the US, and
indeed across much of the West, "mainstream" media and in the reigning
intellectual culture the record of ongoing US criminality is airbrushed out
from official history and the mass culture even as it occurs. It is
instantaneously tossed down George Orwell's "memory hole." As Harold Pinter
noted in his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, dominant
Western cultural authorities behave as if US imperial violence does not
exist and never has. "Even while it was happening," Pinter said, it never
happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter was speaking of
the Cold War era. Nothing has changed in this regard since the collapse of
the Soviet Union. It's very much the same today.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something," Upton Sinclair once
noted in an oft-quoted statement, "when his salary depends on his not
understanding it." No doubt, some of the talking and writing media heads
enlisted in the project of airbrushing Uncle Sam out of the global criminal
record (no small act of distortion and deletion) know very well that "good"
Washington's role in the world is very different than what they report. They
also know that telling even small truths about US imperial arrogance and
criminality could cost them their jobs and future employment prospects. It
is difficult to get a reporter to reveal his or her understanding of the
real US role in the world when his or her salary depends on that reporter
not revealing that understanding.
Millions of Americans are consequently left in a dangerously childish state
of abject ignorance about the actions and evil of "their" nation's military
in the Muslim world and elsewhere and thus about the origins of
anti-American Islamic jihad and terror abroad and at home. Whether "the
Donald" himself is one of those millions is an open question, though there
is reason to suspect that he knows better. The bigger issue is that he and
the rest of the presidential candidates of both parties - "two wings of the
same bird of prey" (Upton Sinclair, 1904) - will never be corrected by a
corporate US war media that no more deserves the title "mainstream" than did
Soviet state media in its day.
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Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/22/an-idiots-guide-to-why-they-hate-us/h
ttp://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/22/an-idiots-guide-to-why-they-hate-us/
An Idiot's Guide to Why They Hate Us
By Paul Street, CounterPunch
22 December 15
n its endless, candidate-obsessed coverage and discussion of the already
seemingly interminable U.S. presidential horse race (the actual presidential
election is still more than ten months away), U.S. corporate media
fact-checkers, reporters, and commentators have had a field day finding
inaccuracies, offensiveness, and absurdities in the statements of the
current Republican pack-leader Donald Trump. It's not hard to do. "The
Donald's" rambling orations and constant Tweets are loaded with
transparently false assertions and ridiculous comments, including:
* The claim that Barack Obama lacks a United States Birth Certificate
* The promise to build "a great, great wall on our southern border and.make
Mexico pay for it."
* The claim that Mexico is sending "rapists" to the United States.
* "The concept of global warming was created by the Chinese in order to make
U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
* The claim that former long-term prisoner of war John McCain isn't really a
"war hero" since he'd been captured by the U.S. enemy during the Vietnam War
(Trump made sure to attend college with a student deferment from the Vietnam
War draft).
* "There's nobody bigger or better at the military than I am" (repeat the
same parenthetical comment at the end of the previous bullet point).
* "Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact
on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!" (just a
little racist)
* "Arianna Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully
understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good
decision (one of many examples in which Trump has insulted the looks of a
prominent women).
* The ludicrous claim that Trump saw "thousands of people" in New Jersey
cheering the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The dominant ("mainstream') media has had little difficulty showing and
noting how and why these and numerous other Trump ejaculations are
outrageous. It's no surprise that a recent New York Times assessment of the
presidential candidates' truthfulness found Trump to be grossly deficient
when it comes to veracity. The media's top political fact checker, Angie
Drobac Holan, notes that "Mr. Trump's record on truth and accuracy is
astonishingly poor." His 76% Falsehood rating (three-fourths of the 70 Trump
statements carefully examined by Holan's Politifact Website came up untrue)
is exceeded only by the wacky Republican brain surgeon Ben Carson, who is
batting .840 at the inaccuracy plate (by contrast, Bernie Sanders rates 28%)
"The Hatred is Beyond Comprehension"
It's revealing, however, that the same media has nothing really to offer on
the clueless stupidity of something that Trump said in the wake of the
Islamic State terror attacks in Paris and a mass shooting carried out by a
"radicalized" Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California. I'm referring to
Trump's argument that Muslims should be barred from the United States "until
the country's representatives can figure out what's going on."
"Without looking at the various polling data" Trump later elaborated, "it is
obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred
comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump said in a statement.
"Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the
dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous
attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, that have no sense of reason
or respect for human life" (emphasis added).
The statement is either incredibly disingenuous or astonishingly foolish.
Nobody who is reasonably knowledgeable and honest about the long and ongoing
history of U.S.- and Western-imperial policy in the Middle East, Southwest
Asia, and Africa has any business claiming to find the origins of
anti-American and anti-Western terrorism in the Muslim world mysterious.
An "Aerial Traffic Jam" of "One-Sided Massacre" (1991)
"No sense of reason or respect for human life"? Seriously? Among the
countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the Muslim world, one
that I can never seem to forget occurred a quarter-century ago. I am
referring to the epic carnage wreaked by the U.S. military on Iraq's
notorious "Highway of Death," where U.S. forces massacred tens of thousands
of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27,
1991. The Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
"U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front,
and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. 'It
was like shooting fish in a barrel,' said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles
of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched
skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun.for 60
miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered,
every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No
survivors are known or likely.. 'Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like
this. It's pathetic,' said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence
officer.U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight
deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs.U.S. forces continued to drop
bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over
the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air
controllers feared midair collisions.. The victims were not offering
resistance.it was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people
who had no ability to fight back or defend." (Ramsey Clark et al., War
Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission
of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, testimony of Joyce
Chediac, emphasis added).
Less than a year after his forces conducted this colossal slaughter, U.S.
President George H.W. Bush proclaimed that, "A world once divided into two
armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States
of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with
power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They
trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right"
(emphasis added).
As Noam Chomsky noted in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize
suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the
nation it had devastated after the Vietnam War ended: "No degree of cruelty
is too great for Washington sadists. The educated classes know enough to
look the other way."
"A Prodigious Effort"
Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building its Iraqi and Muslim Body
Counts in early 1991. As Sheldon Richman recently noted on CounterPunch:
"It takes prodigious effort to maintain an air of innocence about San
Bernardino and Paris, because no one who claims to be informed can plead
ignorance of the long history of U.S. and Western imperialism in the Muslim
world. This includes the CIA's subversion of Iranian democracy in 1953, the
U.S. government's systematic support of compliant autocratic and corrupt
Arab monarchies and dictatorships, it's empowering of Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims,
and its unconditional backing of Israel's brutal anti-Palestinian policies.
(The savage 2014 war on Gaza killed many noncombatants.)"
"In the 10 years before the 9/11 attacks the administrations of George H. W.
Bush and Bill Clinton bombed Iraq while maintaining an embargo, most
especially on equipment for the water and sanitation infrastructure the U.S.
Air Force had destroyed during the Gulf War. Half a million children died.
This was also when U.S. officials promised, then reneged on the promise, to
remove U.S. forces from the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia."
"From the air Americans routinely kill noncombatants in Syria and Iraq, most
recently this week, when 'at least 36 civilians, including 20 children, in a
village in eastern Syria' were reportedly killed, according to
McClatchyDC..Things like this happen all the time. The U.S. attack on the
Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was especially
egregious against this background of war crimes..The U.S. government has
conducted war by remote-controlled drones since 2001 in a variety of places,
including Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan."
"A Price Worth Paying"
Five years after "the Highway of Death," Bill Clinton's U.S. Secretary of
State Madeline Albright told CBS News' Leslie Stahl that the death of
500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the
first "Persian Gulf War" (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a
"price.worth paying" for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
"The United States," Secretary Albright explained three years later, "is
good. We try to do our best everywhere."
In the Streets of Fallujah
In a foreign policy speech he gave to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs
on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in the fall
of 2006, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama had the audacity to say the
following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported "victory" in
Iraq: "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have
seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah."
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city
was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the
indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of
ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by
the U.S. military in April and November. By one account:
"The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and
November of 2004. [using] devastating firepower from a distance which
minimizes U.S. casualties. In April.military commanders claimed to have
precisely targeted.insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that
many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and
the elderly. [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally.. In
November. [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent
territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian
casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it.
Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after
Putin's Russian troops had razed it to the ground" (Michael Mann, Incoherent
Empire, New York, 2005).
U.S. deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted uranium) in Fallujah also
helped create a subsequent epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects,
leukemia, and cancer there. But, of course, Fallujah was just one especially
graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal invasion that led to the
premature deaths of at least one million Iraqi civilians and left Iraq "a
disaster zone on a catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory" (Tom
Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch.com, January 17, 2008).
The Pentagon's near leveling of the city was consistent with its early
computer program name for ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003
invasion: "bug-splat" As it turned out, Uncle Sam's petro-imperial
occupation led to the death of at least 1 million Iraqi "bugs" (human
beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007,
"Iraq has been killed.the American occupation has been more disastrous than
that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century" (Current
History, December 2007).
The Most Extensive Terrorism Campaign of All Time
Chomsky has recently and rightly called Barack Obama's targeted drone
assassination program "the most extensive global terrorism campaign the
world has yet seen." The program "officially is aimed at killing people who
the administration believes might someday intend to harm the U.S., and
killing anyone else who happens to be nearby." As Chomsky ads, "It is also a
terrorism generating campaign - that is well understood by people in high
places. When you murder somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of
other people who are standing there, the chances are pretty high that others
will want to take revenge."
Given the remarkable geographic scope of the cowardly U.S. drone war,
Obama's terrorism campaign has spread jihadism across vaster terrain than
any tool or tactic to date. George W. Bush may have Obama beat on total body
count in the Muslim world. But Obama takes the prize when it comes to the
geographic scope of jihad-fueling U.S. terrorism - and when it comes to
instilling a ubiquitous sense of fear of instant mass death from the sky
across much of that world.
"Pure Evil": Nightmares That Remind
It isn't just about body counts and science fiction-like technologies of
mass murder. The natural desire for revenge among many in the Muslim world
draws heavily on the hideous and perverse humiliation and torture that
racist U.S. forces have carried out in that world. A remarkable teleSur
English essay by Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine veteran of America's
arch-criminal Iraq invasion and occupation, is titled "I Helped Create
ISIS." By Emanuele's account of his enlistment in an operation that gives
him nightmares more than a decade later:
"I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in
makeshift detention facilities staffed by teenagers from Tennessee, New York
and Oregon. I never had the misfortune of working in the detention facility,
but I remember the stories. I vividly remember the marines telling me about
punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I
remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual
acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles,
sometimes sodomizing them with batons."
"However, before those abominations could take place, those of us in
infantry units had the pleasure of rounding up Iraqis during night raids,
zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the
back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their
knees and wailed. Sometimes, we would pick them up during the day. Most of
the time they wouldn't resist. Some of them would hold hands while marines
would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. Once they arrived at the
detention facility, they would be held for days, weeks, and even months at a
time. Their families were never notified. And when they were released, we
would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the
desert and release them several miles from their homes."
"After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads,
several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s
into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for
laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal at the
detention facility, hoping some level of freedom awaited them on the
outside. Who knows how long they survived. After all, no one cared. We do
know of one former U.S. prisoner who survived: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
leader of ISIS."
"Amazingly, the ability to dehumanize the Iraqi people reached a crescendo
after the bullets and explosions concluded, as many marines spent their
spare time taking pictures of the dead, often mutilating their corpses for
fun or poking their bloated bodies with sticks for some cheap laughs.
Because iPhones weren't available at the time, several marines came to Iraq
with digital cameras. Those cameras contain an untold history of the war in
Iraq, a history the West hopes the world forgets. That history and those
cameras also contain footage of wanton massacres and numerous other war
crimes, realities the Iraqis don't have the pleasure of forgetting."
"Unfortunately, I could recall countless horrific anecdotes from my time in
Iraq. Innocent people were not only routinely rounded-up, tortured and
imprisoned, they were also incinerated by the hundreds of thousands, some
studies suggest by the millions..Only the Iraqis understand the pure evil
that's been waged on their nation."
"..The warm and glassy eyes of young Iraqi children perpetually haunt me, as
they should. .My nightmares and daily reflections remind me of where ISIS
comes from and why, exactly, they hate us. That hate, understandable yet
regrettable, will be directed at the West for years and decades to come. How
could it be otherwise?" (emphasis added)
"You Haven't Begun to see.the Things Done to Children"
The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU last year about the
existence of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S.
soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind the walls of
the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. "You haven't begun to see [all the].evil,
horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women prisoners, as
the cameras run," Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the summer of 2014.
The United States tries to do its best everywhere.
"Humility and Restraint"
Why Do They Hate Us?! It's an idiotic and childish question, as moronic as
anything "The Donald" ever says. The media doesn't call Trump him on this
one, however, for a very simple reason. It is itself deeply complicit in
selling the "American exceptionalist" myth of the United States as a noble
and benevolent force in the world and therefore in regularly and
systematically denying the savage and criminal behavior of the American
Empire abroad.
"We lead the world," presidential candidate Obama explained eight seven
years ago, "in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good..
America is the last, best hope of Earth." Obama elaborated in his first
Inaugural Address. "Our security," the president said, "emanates from the
justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of
humility and restraint"-a fascinating commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the
U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia, the "Highway of Death" and more.
Within less than half a year of his Inauguration, Obama's rapidly
accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the
bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk Ninety-three of the dead
villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. "In a
phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the
Afghan Parliament," the New York Times reported, "the governor of Farah
Province.said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed." According to
one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, "the villagers bought two tractor
trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the
casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor's cried, watching
that shocking scene." The administration refused to issue an apology or to
acknowledge U.S. responsibility.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was
moved to comment as follows: "Peace prize? He's a killer.Obama," the man
added, "has only brought war to our country." The man spoke from the village
of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one
family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S.
Special Forces during a late night raid.
A "Mainstream" Orwellian Triumph
"We are good.We use our power with decency, humility, fairness, and
restraint." Every modern U.S. President (none perhaps with more audacity
than Barack Obama) and Secretary of State (including Hillary Clinton) has
said and still routinely says things along the same psychotic and nationally
narcissistic lines. They do so without facing any more criticism from U.S.
"mainstream" media than Soviet rulers faced from Pravda, Izvestia, and
Soviet state television when they described their nation and its Eastern
European satellites as "great socialist people's democracies." U.S. media
elites, being members of the properly "educated classes..know enough to look
away" from the reality of what Uncle Sam does in and to the world.
No wonder so many US-of-Americans are befuddled by the anger the U.S. evokes
around the world (particularly in the Muslim world), darkly clueless when it
comes answering the pathetic question "Why Do They Hate Us?" In the US, and
indeed across much of the West, "mainstream" media and in the reigning
intellectual culture the record of ongoing US criminality is airbrushed out
from official history and the mass culture even as it occurs. It is
instantaneously tossed down George Orwell's "memory hole." As Harold Pinter
noted in his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, dominant
Western cultural authorities behave as if US imperial violence does not
exist and never has. "Even while it was happening," Pinter said, it never
happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter was speaking of
the Cold War era. Nothing has changed in this regard since the collapse of
the Soviet Union. It's very much the same today.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something," Upton Sinclair once
noted in an oft-quoted statement, "when his salary depends on his not
understanding it." No doubt, some of the talking and writing media heads
enlisted in the project of airbrushing Uncle Sam out of the global criminal
record (no small act of distortion and deletion) know very well that "good"
Washington's role in the world is very different than what they report. They
also know that telling even small truths about US imperial arrogance and
criminality could cost them their jobs and future employment prospects. It
is difficult to get a reporter to reveal his or her understanding of the
real US role in the world when his or her salary depends on that reporter
not revealing that understanding.
Millions of Americans are consequently left in a dangerously childish state
of abject ignorance about the actions and evil of "their" nation's military
in the Muslim world and elsewhere and thus about the origins of
anti-American Islamic jihad and terror abroad and at home. Whether "the
Donald" himself is one of those millions is an open question, though there
is reason to suspect that he knows better. The bigger issue is that he and
the rest of the presidential candidates of both parties - "two wings of the
same bird of prey" (Upton Sinclair, 1904) - will never be corrected by a
corporate US war media that no more deserves the title "mainstream" than did
Soviet state media in its day.
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http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
