Category Archives: Military Industrial Complex
Dancing With The Corpses
The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.
“They make these Marines do what they call ‘bitch’ work,” Goodell said. “They are assigned to be someone else’s ‘bitch’ for the day. We had a guy in our platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sand bags up to the top of a hill and then carry them down again.”The unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.“We had a Marine who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off,” she said. “We had another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the bodies.”—“One of the first convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a bridge and an IED had exploded,” she said. “It had literally shot a seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.”“In the seven-ton truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger seat, was trapped in the vehicle,” she said. “All of his body was in the vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did not resemble a human body.”The members of the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.“Our cammies would be stained with blood or with brains,” she said. “When you scoop up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren’t washing our cammies everyday. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat, which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer beneath and slides around on itself.”
—Her unit once had to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to carry on a litter.“His neck was as wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel,” she writes in the book. “His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal. He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick purple lips. We couldn’t stop looking at these bodies because they were so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked like us.”It was hardest to look into the faces of the dead. She and the other members of the mortuary unit swiftly covered the faces when they worked on the bodies. They avoided looking at the eyes of the corpses.Once, the unit had to process seven Marines killed in an explosion. Seven or eight body bags were delivered to the bunker.“We had clean body bags set up so we could sort the flesh,” she said. “Sometimes things come in with nametags. Or sometimes one is Hispanic and you could tell who was Hispanic and who was the white guy. We tried separating flesh. It was ridiculous. We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We were trying to do the best we could sorting it out. We had the last body bag come in. We opened up the body bag and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us. We got used to a lot of it. But the heads worked the other way. They affected us more strongly as time passed. We saw on the heads the expressions of fright and horror. It made us wonder what we were doing here.”She processed one Marine whose face was twisted at the moment of death by rage. The face of this Marine began to haunt her.“I had this feeling that something awful had occurred,” she said. “The way he had come in and stiffened he had this look to his face that made my stomach curl. It looked angry. Often expressions on bodies would look fearful and hurt. The faces looked as though they had received death. But this face looked like he had given death.”
She and the other members of the unit became convinced they could feel and hear the souls of the dead Marines they had processed and housed in their reefers.
To borrow from the Marine Corps vernacular referenced in the Hedges’ piece one could accurately peg the majority of Americans as “shit bags”, “fat nasties”, “money fuckers” and “slaves” so worthless and pathetic they have been during the rise of the fascist state. More of the lemmings here in God’s chosen land of plenty pour our their emotions in acts of lunacy like mourning the death of multi-millionaire movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who lived the good life and through her the inhabitants of idiot nation lived vicariously, just as they do when it comes to all of the false idols that they sanctimoniously deify while the wallow in the shame, cowardice and willful ignorance that passes for their pitiful little lives. I remember back in the days after the prior vainglorious Emperor George W. Bush unleashed the full fury of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 2003, at that time gas was still cheap, the grand fraud of the Wall Street housing bubble was years from reaching critical mass and piggish and still traumatized by the ‘terrorist’ attacks on 9/11 were braying for blood. The roads were filled with mega-sizes SUV’s and goddammit if there wasn’t one of those idiotic fucking yellow ribbon magnets on the ass end of each one. It was futile trying to convince the average American dumbass that their over-consumption of the precious black gold was what our heroic military ‘heroes’ were being sent into the meat-grinder to kill, be maimed for life or die for. Back in that day those who dared to question were shouted down as “traitors”, “terrorist-appeasers”, “enemies of the state” and the worst of all pejoratives…”unpatriotic” back when it was scary to dissent against Bush’s maniac crusades for neocon doctrine. Those were disturbing times for those of us who were only starting to come to the realization (as with me) that it was all bullshit, before the early internet insurgents….after years of relative ‘peace’ it was a total war of civilizations. Eventually though the truth became to seep out, the internet gave many of us a place to organize and educate ourselves and the always greed-crazed corporate carnivores latched onto the wars as another marketing tool.
The wars have not only not been televised to Americans but are now shamelessly used by corporations who equate patriotic fervor with profits. The participation of national restaurant chains like Outback Steakhouse in Operation Homefront are cynically used to sell steaks and blooming onions to blooming idiots (I wonder how that meat would taste if Chris Hedges’ piece were slipped into the menus), Wal-Marts are festooned in the red-white and blue despite an inventory of poorly constructed garbage made in China and “support the troops” has become a guaranteed money maker to lure consumers. The worst offenders of course is FOX and nothing is more indicative of their cheerleading for murder than the NFL coverage, take for example the use of Veterans Day weekend in 2009 to promote the ‘patriotism’ of the foreign pig Rupert Murdoch. FOX’s pregame show was held on a set in Afghanistan (see Militarist Masturbation) where ex jocks and grinning shit salesmen like Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw immersed the FOX brand in the sort of glorification of the war machine that would do Leni Riefenstahl proud. There is no important football game that doesn’t feature a tax dollar wasting flyover and this year’s Super Bowl in Jerry Jone’s gauche Texas temple of avarice was vomit inducing so soaked in red-meat flag waving and war worshipping hyperbole was it. It goes over real well with those who in the true modern American way love to park their fat asses on their couches in front of their big screen televisions and cheer for others to die just as long as they don’t have to do the fighting.
I will close with this excerpt from the classic antiwar book by Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun:
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Hmmmm..But what do the dead say?Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say that I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die.
Veteran’s Day: The Dishonor of War Worship
Today is Veteran’s Day, a day of war worship in an immoral and rotting empire fueled by more wars. There will be plenty of sanctimonious asses posturing and pontificating patriotism, politics and ‘glory’ on the usual right-wing vomitories like FOX. Hell, FOX even got into it all early this year with Sunday’s travesty NFL pregame show where privileged phonies like Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and the other moron ex-jocks dressed up like toy soldiers to shill for the black ops assassin General Stan McChrystal’s bloodlust in overrunning Afghanistan with more American troops, cannon fodder that will not be treated with the reverence of the green Army cadavers of Ft. Hood. I mean who would have given a tin shit if the hallowed Ft. Hood 13 had been blown to smithereens by a mortar round ten seconds after they stepped off the plane to Afghanistan? It suits the neverending war agenda to paint the poor saps as victims you see, and it fuels the fires of both intellectually and economically impoverished Americans to blame it all on the horrible Muslim man who according to the usual anonymous sources is affiliated with al CIAda and if the terrursts [sic] are already carrying out nefarious plots on our military bases well Sally Soccer Mom, just how long will it be before they are blowing up your children in our shopping malls? All rank horseshit, exploited by traitors and cowards to send others to die in the wars that they are too gutless to serve in. Today a military veteran I want all of the right wing war lovers to line up in a single file line and come and kiss my big fat ass….oh, and don’t forget to salute me first you filthy chickenhawks.
Veteran’s Day Storytime: From Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun
Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can’t rob and you take away some of his liberty. You’ve got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It’s just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it’s a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let’s fight for liberty and he can’t show you liberty. He can’t prove the thing he’s talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?
No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty- what did he mean next time? There wasn’t going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said let’s fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I’m not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I’ve got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we’re talking about and just how much of that liberty we’re going to have. And what’s more mister are you as much interested in liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you’re a goddamn fourflusher talking through your hat and I’ve already decided that I like the liberty I’ve got right here the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girt I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won’t get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don’t care for some.
Hell’s fire guys had always been fighting for liberty. America fought a war for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn’t fight at all? Maybe so I’m not arguing I’m just asking. Can you look at a guy and say he’s an American who fought for his liberty and anybody can see he’s a very different guy from a Canadian who didn’t? No by god you can’t and that’s that. So maybe a lot of guys with wives and kids died in 1776 when they didn’t need to die at all. They’re dead now anyway. Sure but that doesn’t do any good. A guy can think of being dead a hundred years from now and he doesn’t mind it. But to think of being dead tomorrow morning and to be dead forever to be nothing but dust and stink in the earth is that liberty?
They were always fighting for something the bastards and if anyone dared say the hell with fighting it’s all the same each war is like the other and nobody gets any good out of it why they hollered coward. If they weren’t fighting for liberty they were fighting for independence or democracy or freedom or decency or honor or their native land or something else that didn’t mean anything. The war was to make the world safe for democracy for the little countries for everybody. If the war was over now then the world must be all safe for democracy. Was it? And what kind of democracy? And how much? And whose?
Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly so we know in advance what we’re getting killed for and give us also a first mortgage on something as security so we can be sure after we’ve won your war that we’ve got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.
And take decency. Everybody said America was fighting a war for the triumph of decency. But whose idea of decency? And decency for who? Speak up and tell us what decency is. Tell us how much better a decent dead man feels that an indecent live one. Make a comparison there in facts like houses and tables. Make it in words we can understand. And don’t talk about honor. The honor of a Chinese or an Englishman or an African negro or an American or a Mexican? Please all you guys who want to fight to preserve our honor let us know what the hell honor is. Is it American honor for the whole world we’re fighting for? Maybe the world doesn’t like it. Maybe the South Sea Islanders like their honor better.
For Christ sake give us things to fight for we can see and feel and pin down and understand. No more highfalutin words that mean nothing like native land. Motherland fatherland homeland native land. It’s all the same. What the hell good to you is your native land after you’re dead? Whose native land is it after you’re dead? If you get killed fighting for your native land you’ve bought a pig in a poke. You’ve paid for something you’ll never collect.
And when they couldn’t hook the little guys into fighting for liberty or freedom or democracy or independence or decency or honor they tried the women. Look at the dirty Huns they would say look at them how they rape the beautiful French and Belgian girls. Somebody’s got to stop all that raping. So come on little au’ join the army and save the beautiful French and Belgian girls. So the little guy got bewildered and he signed up and in a little while a shell hit him and his life spattered out of him in red meat pulp and ho was dead. Dead for another word and all the fierce old bats of the D.A.R. get out and hurrah themselves hoarse over his grave because he died for womanhood.
Now it might be that a guy would risk getting killed if his women were being raped. But if he did why he was only striking a bargain. He was simply saying that according to the way he felt at the time the safety of his women was worth more than his own life. But there wasn’t anything particularly noble or heroic about it. It was a straight deal his life for something he valued more. It was more or less like any other deal a man might make. But when you change your women to all the women in the world why you begin to defend women in the bulk. To do that you have to fight in the bulk. And by that time you’re fighting for a word again.
When armies begin to move and flags wave and slogans pop up watch out little guy because it’s somebody else’s chestnuts in the fire not yours. It’s words you’re fighting for and you’re not making an honest deal your life for something better. You’re being noble and after you’re killed the thing you traded your life for won’t do you any good and chances are it won’t do anybody else any good either.
Maybe that’s a bad way to think. There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for even dying for. If not then we are worse than the beasts of the field and have sunk into barbarity. Then you say that’s all right let’s be barbarous just so long as we don’t have war. You keep your ideals just as long as they don’t cost me my life. And they say but surely life isn’t as important as principle. Then you say oh no? Maybe not yours but mine is. What the hell is principle? Name it and you can have it.
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously.
They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Hmmmm.
But what do the dead say?
Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy] Did they say I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am and I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth choked with worms?
Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk a;bout are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die. But all the little guys who are too busy to fight should be left alone. And all the guys who say death before dishonor is pure bull the important thing is life before death they should be left alone too. Because the guys who say life isn’t worth living without some principle so important you’re willing to die for it they are all nuts. And the guys who say you’ll see there’ll come a time you can’t escape you’re going to have to fight and die because it’ll mean your very life why they are also nuts. They are talking like fools. They are saying that two and two make nothing. They are saying that a man will have to die in order to protect his life. If you agree to fight you agree to die. Now if you die to protect your life you aren’t alive anyhow so how is there any sense in a thing like that? A man doesn’t say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving. He doesn’t say I will spend all my money in order to save my money. He doesn’t say I will burn my house down in order to keep it from burning. Why then should he be willing to die for the privilege of living There ought to be at least as much common sense about living and dying as there is about going to the grocery store and buying a loaf of bread.
And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come and take them? I! the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever?
You’re goddamn right they didn’t.
They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in the* minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live.
Hey, Didn’t John McCain LOSE the Election?
I am a war criminal; I bombed innocent women and children”
-John McCain
From the treatment by the corporatist whore mainstream media you would think that John McCain was somehow still relevant. In the latest example the old loser and self-admitted war criminal is whoring himself out to the lazy cretins who masquerade as journalists in shilling for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. McCain is ordering President Obama to make the decision on sending more troops into the meatgrinder NOW. I have to say that the ongoing forum for this asshat who has become a fixture on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit and as much a frontman for the Military Industrial Complex as the old phony Ronald Reagan was for the rising fascist tide is rather astonishing but not unpredictable. Anyone with any sense at all learned long ago not to trust a goddamned thing that the pocket media has to say even if they never even heard of Operation Mockingbird.
McCain of course is an amazing charlatan, his allure continues despite the ugly discrepancies in his personal story of the Vietnam war hero who returned home after getting the shit kicked out of him in the Hanoi Hilton. But there are inconsistencies, for example the inconvenient truth that many of his fellow prisoners hated his guts for cooperating with the enemy for some favorable treatment like the Admiral’s son that he was. The Hanoi Hilton songbird was I believe the term that is used in describing the old goat. The right wingers seem to have no problem that he made propaganda videos for the Communists that undermined the war effort but hey, when you have Hanoi Jane to spit on and kick around who needs the Make Believe Maverick? Also why is Mr. McCain never called out in the corporate press for his obstruction of the investigation into the POW’s that were left behind in the Nam? Perhaps they were knowledgable of the Golden Triangle heroin trade, or they were operatives under military cover? Lots of questions but in the fawning corporate clown media they go unasked.
A big question on Afghanistan that goes unasked is just what is the role of the CIA and black ops specialists in the heroin trade there? Puppet President Hamid Karzai’s brother has been linked with the drug trade and the CIA according to recent reports. So what does Mr. Keating Five have to say about that? Interestingly, according to Justin Raimondo’s latest piece over at the excellent Antiwar.com the leak of the sotry may have been deliberately undertaken to discredit the former UNOCAL ‘consultant’ who was sent to Afghanistan post 9/11 as our puppet leader. I excerpt from Raimondo’s Karzai as Diem (subtitled: Afghanistan as Vietnam) –
Whoever leaked this was trying to hurt Karzai. Why would certain US officials and military officers be eager to do that? Well, because Karzai’s corrupt administration is an obstacle to their war plans: with the Fashion Plate in the Afghan equivalent of the White House, and his brother collecting tolls from drug traffickers, selling the war in Washington is becoming increasingly difficult. The only way to win support for Obama’s planned escalation, and tamp down dissent in Congress and the general public, is to clean up the Afghan government’s act – and that means dumping Karzai & Co.
As the internal debate within the Obama administration heats up — with hawks centered in the military and the neo-neocon thinktanks (CNAS, the Center for American Progress, etc.) agitating for a full-scale “counterinsurgency” strategy, and “doves” (i.e. realists) opting for a focus on “counter-terrorism” aimed at al-Qaeda – the gung-ho escalators clearly want to ditch Karzai, while the realists posit he’s the best we can hope for in that environment.
The hawks are committed to a counterinsurgency theory which demands the US get down and dirty with the insurgents, with US troops mingling with “the people” and taking risks in order to “protect” them from the Taliban. But what if the people don’t want to be protected – or, instead, seek protection from the Americans? Such a question is never asked by these pompous “theorists,” who, like their neoconservative predecessors, are in thrall to a theory that cannot work and should never even be attempted.
So perhaps old man McCain will soon have something to say along with his fellow stooges Joe ‘the wandering Jew’ Lieberman and Lindsey Graham (whose Gomer Pyle singsong can’t be taken seriously can it?), the three headed monster that always ends up on the side of the militarist bastards and of course their war criminal proxy state Israel. There seem to be lots of mysterious leaks lately, for example this little breaking story about the Congressional ethics investigations that just happened to have been ‘mistakenly’ placed on a file sharing network by a low level staffer. Note that in this story the names all happen to belong to the jackass party. Not that I think that it’s a bad thing to weed out the filth from the Democrats but with the ongoing battle royale to kill health care reform (aka the lynchpin of dismantling the fascist capitalist slave state) and launch a gigantic regional escalation of military hostilities from Iran to Pakistan one must look at the cynical ulterior motives of every one of these leaks. Notably the name of one AIPAC whore Jane Harman appears in the story which will assuredly mean that there will be no really serious investigation as it involves Israeli espionage, bribery and blackmail that could if exposed take down at least one government. With any investigation of Harman and Israeli trickery sure to be quashed it’s a logical conclusion that one would suspect that the intention of the leak is only to embarass and discredit Democrats.
So of course the old war criminal won’t have a problem with that, it will give him something to talk about while his cock is in David Gregory’s mouth come Sunday morning. The bottom line is that it’s all about escalating the war, pouring in more troops to protect the energy and drug routes and McCain is the preeminent shill for industrialized slaughter and the spoils that it brings to the well connected. The man is so crooked that he has to screw his pants on every morning and only in a militarized lemming colony such as Murka could this Napalm sniffing swine be given the sanctimonious credibility that he is afforded let alone the time of day. The Obama administration’s waffling is starting to put a burr up the asses of the brass and the special operations killers, much in the way that John F. Kennedy once did. McCain will showboat, jump through flaming hoops and ensure that the quisling media is there to cover the whole bizarre flea circus so that Stan McChrystal can get his Operation Phoenix in gear and the decks can begin to be cleared for the imminent ascension of Emperor Petraeus.
Note: What is NOT leaked is the damning testimony of Sibel Edmonds that fingers arch neocons and McCain associates Richard Perle and Douglas Feith in a massive web of corruption, sexual blackmail and Israeli-Turkish espionage that reaches to the highest levels. Other than in some of the better areas of the alternative media and blogosphere this story is taboo for obvious reasons.
The Loudening Drumbeat
Was Hitler in Uniform on Cover of Mein Kampf?
The warning signs are ominous, ammunition shortages are at a record as angry white dumbasses arm themselves to the teeth for the coming race war against ACORN and Obama’s secret army and did you see…..why the nigger bastard was sitting within FEET of Moammar Qadaffi at the UN, you know, the UN, the ones who are going to carry out the implementation of the NWO, the one world government and the eugenics programs that will kill Christian white babies and rip God away from history. With the armed freaks ready to rile, their heads filled with FOX agitprop and dittohead dementia and marshalled by the beloved Glenn Beck (a man whose latest ghost written hunk of asswipe actually has him on the cover in a fucking fascist uniform), the man that a weird movement against Obama has coalesced. There is massive anger and unrest in Murka today and it’s not getting any better, each and every lie by the pundits and their whores in DC to prop up their bailed out stock market casino only exacerbates the fury as the Liliputiuns realize that trickle down economics only means that they are once again being pissed on by Gulliver.
Far more interesting than Beck himself is the increasingly futile effort to classify the protest movement to which he has connected himself. Here, too, confusion reigns. In part, this is due to the fact that these “tea party” and “9/12” protests are composed of factions with wildly divergent views about most everything. From paleoconservatives to Ron-Paul-libertarians to LaRouchians to Confederacy-loving, race-driven Southerners to Christianist social conservatives to single-issue fanatics (abortion, guns, gays) to standard Limbaugh-following, Bush-loving Republicans, these protests are an incoherent mishmash without any cohesive view other than: “Barack Obama is bad.” There are unquestionably some highly noxious elements in these groups, but they are far from homogeneous. Many of these people despised the Bush-led GOP and many of them loved it.
Add to all of that the fact that this anti-Obama sentiment is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power — manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters — and it’s impossible to define what this movement is or what is driving it. In many ways, its leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections — all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years? In one important sense, the “tea party” movement is similar to the Obama campaign for “change”: it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement.
But all that said, there are some identifiable — and plainly valid — underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That’s when conventional political language ceases to be useful.
Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties’ establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom — the Ron Paul faction — objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these “tea party” protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.
Happy 8th Anniversary – Now Investigate 9/11!
Last night when I was watching the NFL grand kickoff festivities it just amazed me on how much more extravagant that the bread and circuses become as the American empire enters the stage of terminal rot. Eaten from within by looters using the full power of the state to confiscate the tax dollars of the American citizens for their financial gambling schemes and to throw anyone into a for profit prison gulag system who dares to complain about it as well as the termites and maggots like Rep. Joe Wilson who proudly serve as the guardians of the fascist oligarchy. Of course there is the menace of rising demagogue Glenn Beck and the full might of the shadow government that is all too happy to have a money loser as an ace propagandist, liberals extol the virtues of the boycotts by Beck advertisers but it doesn’t mean jack fucking shit – the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times has been a huge money loser practically since its inception but it’s true value is as a forum to distort and mold public opiniong, a launching pad for the slime, swill, sleaze and lies that reverberate throughout the right wing echo chamber media. Former Vice President Henry A. Wallace said it best:
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
And today it is the 8th Anniversary of that sanctified day when the reset button was hit on 200+ years of American ‘democracy’ and the justification for the authoritarian surveillance state was set into stone with the obvious false flag attacks that occurred on that Tuesday morning when a special effects/psy ops extravaganza destroyed the World Trade Center, something hit the exact right side of the Pentagon to cause the least death and destruction and the national myth of the heroic Todd Beamer and the fighting passengers of United 93 became legend.
And the media pimped the American Reichstag Fire as though it were holy gospel. Now I can’t even watch a fucking football game without being bludgeoned by the lies.
There will be many, especially the knuckle-dragging, NeoNazi RepublKKKan shitheads out in force today exploiting the deaths of 3,000 American citizens on home soil like the necorphiliac corpse fuckers that they always have been – fucking jackbooted ghouls. The racist pigs will of couse never acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of dead brown people who were later slaughtered with the phony terrorist attacks used as the justification. Same phony attacks were used as justification for every rotten trangression of humanity, every revocation of civil liberties and every imposition by goons at the nation’s airports, football stadiums as well as the invasive Big Brother surveillance machine that has been unleashed upon us all.
The ugly truth is that there has NEVER been a legitimate investigation of what happened on 9/11/2001. There was the Kean Commission which was as laughable as the Warren Commission in it’s conclusions, just more whitewash delivered by a group of cover up artists, political cronies and military industrial complex lackeys. There was at one time a vibrant 9/11 Truth Movement but it has along with the Ron Paul Revolution has been hijacked by the drooling fear pimp and reactionary thug for hire Glenn Beck and there are condemnations and tin foil hats to be handed to all with legitimate questions of that day of national ‘rejuvenation’. The PNAC has never been investigated, the Anthrax attacks were blamed on a conveniently dead patsy, Richard B. Cheney has never been made to testify under oath about what happened on that morning from the PEOC underground command center, there has been so serious attempt to investigate or even acknowledge why the intercept procedures had been changed and why there were multiple war games going on which prevented any military response to hijacked airliners heading towards Washington and New York. And there is the fact about the hijackers themselves, in my opinion the biggest farce of them all:
It should be obvious to anybody with half a brain that the daredevil type of piloting finesse that would be required in order to execute the precision high-speed maneuvers that resulted in devastating direct hits on both towers of the WTC as well as the Pentagon are not exactly what could be reasonably expected from training in small time flight schools for puddle hoppers, especially considering the caliber of the losers who were enrolled to hone their ‘skills’ for the devastating kamikaze strikes. It is inconceivable that the supposed suicide pilots would be able to undertake this mission on the strength of the official story of their amateur flight school training alone. This to me is the critically contradictory piece of called evidence in the official story that should be subjected to the most intense scrutiny possible because let’s face it, this is the real world and Bruce Willis may be able to learn how to become an astronaut in order to save the planet Earth by valiantly flying off to destroy a killer asteroid in about a week’s time but movies are movies and fantasy is not reality.
The alleged hijackers were either complete phonies with well constructed histories that were immediately available for mass distribution through the media much like another patsy named Lee Harvey Oswald after another great national tragedy or their identities had been created as a cover for who they really were. The level of professional military caliber training needed to fly the hijacked airliners with the sophistication, skill and precision that they had to have been flown with in order to accomplish their mission almost certainly had to have been underwritten by a state with a highly advanced air force (of course the neo cons have done their best to inundate the public with the propaganda that it was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) , the question is which state? Considering that over three quarters of the alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia would it be too much of a leap in logic to consider that just perhaps they may have received training and practice either there or elsewhere? This is the one part of the official story that is the most malodorous and yet is easily accepted by Americans accustomed to living in a world of television and movie adventure fantasies.
Oh, and there is the strange contradictions that lead ‘hijacker’ Mo Atta was operating out of a flight school with a history of CIA black ops and had a fetish for cocaine, pork chops and pussy – hardly the behavior of a fanatic Islamist religious fanatic hellbent on self immolation.
The contradictions are endless and lies pile up like cordwood…just like the bodies in the illegal wars that used 9/11 as their justification. They can pile the bodies all the way up to fucking Jesus too for what it’s worth, nothing is going to change (except for the worse) unless there is a real and legitimate investigation by an independent commission of what the hell happened.
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
The Petraeus Dog and Pony Show
With King George’s shameless proclamation last night that things have improved so much in Iraq that he can start bringing some troops back home(just like a pickpocket giving you ten bucks as a gift after lifting your wallet) Petraeus Week is now in the books. The “Surge” has received due credit as a heaven sent panacea for the blood soaked debacle in the desert and the PNAC plans for regional conquest (or as loony Ledeen likes to call it “creative destruction” are back on track. Even Osama bin Laden made yet another of those amazingly serendipitous appearances that always happen to occur just when the Bush-Cheney junta needs to pull a bogeyman out of the hat although skeptics are wondering just how the big spooky was able to get ahold of O.J.’s fake beard. Of course ‘The Juice’ could probably use it himself right about now given the coming 24/7 media feeding frenzy over an alleged hotel room theft that will knock every relevant event out of the next few news cycles. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 came and went and was amazingly subdued compared to the vast orgy of right wing demagoguery and bombast used to exploit the victims in the past and other than the few memorials the day’s biggest event was the congressional testimony of ‘Potemkin’ Petraeus. Now, perhaps I am being overly cynical but there just may be a coincidence in scheduling the sales pitch on that particular day to once more time shore up the big lie that Iraq is somehow related to 9/11. Hell, I know that I’m a cynic but I have nothing on the rotten bastards who actually run the circus.
It has been a thoroughly disgraceful week that exemplifies how America has come to rot, our institutions infected with the terminal disease of systemic corruption, rampant perversion and raw hubris of Republican rule. The bin Laden video was just so over the top that it allowed what alcoholics often refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’ on just how far down the rabbit hole that we have gone since 9/11. The neocon’s on call fiend has actually managed to get younger since his last really big appearance when he endorsed the Bush-Cheney ticket mere days before the 2004 election. Of course much of idiot nation that is already flying low with broken radar in an all encompassing fog of TV torpor buys this bag of horse manure lock, stock and smoking barrel like the good little fearful lemmings that they are supposed to be.
The hew and cry of the Republicans and their fifth columnist media shills screaming like the big authoritarian piss babies that they are over Move On’s General Betray Us ad is par for the course for the red team to whom decorum and rules are of no consequence when they don’t apply to their own tactics. The American Il Duce, Rudy Giuliani even deviated from his pathological ghoulish exploitations of 9/11 long enough to shriek with indignity that Hillary Rodham Clinton had smeared General Petraeus and attempted to tie her to Move On’s blasphemy of America’s newest military hero. The schoolyard bully mentality of a party of punks who go running to tattle to the teacher when they can’t keep the game sufficiently rigged in their favor makes the utter failure of the Democrats to fight back even more infuriating. The irony is that they would enjoy approval ratings much higher than inflamed hemorrhoids if they would embrace their base and Move On whose message is far more in line with the wishes of the American people than the crap shoveled out by the elitist filth and their pocket media. Another of this week’s big lies is that the centrist (aka Reagan Republican) Democrats who are denounced as though they were the second coming of Karl Marx are not nearly as outspoken about illegal wars as paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts and most libertarians. Some of the most withering criticism of Petraeus, a PR flack with political ambitions masquerading as a soldier who was once described by his superior as an “ass kissing little chickenshit” and the off the chain criminal conduct of an administration run amok comes from the principled right who have been marginalized by the neocons. In fact two of the most outspoken blogs/websites against the Bush regime’s reign of terror are libertarian: Lew Rockwell and the outstanding Antiwar.com but they don’t get the establishment’s panties in a wad for the obvious reasons that the entire bogus left-right paradigm that pits us all against each other with sideshow ‘issues’ would be threatened and the sham democracy corporate status quo must be protected at all costs. There is a natural alliance with these people who are equally fed up Americans just waiting to bloom and any seriously minded politicians who sincerely are for reform would be foolish not to reach out.
The Dems are of course posturing and puffing about getting tough on Bush and Iraq and even threatening to block Alberto Gonzales’ likely replacement in rabid Republican ideologue Ted Olson but it’s all just window dressing and only suckers continue to fall for the same con over and over. By now we all know exactly what happens next with these feckless toadies, they just roll over and cave with nary a whimiper. Maybe they should just take Bobby Knight’s infamous advice that “if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it” rather than to continue insult our intelligence with meaningless rhetoric. While the charlatans are seeking capitulation and compromise American troops and dollars will continue to be fed into the meat grinder that is Iraq. Iran will also likely soon be attacked much to the delight of a certain highly influential special interest group that gives marching orders to the Dems (and that for the sake of argument shall remain nameless) and the Bush crime family will be free to continue their disembowelment of the constitution for another year and a half. It says one hell of a lot about the Democratic leadersheep when even the fucking John Birch Society is more of an advocate for the restoration of civil liberties than the Pelosi-Hoyer-Reid triad.
The elitist mentality of our beltway kings and queens was on full display during the Petraeus love fest. Not only did the entrenched establishment Democrat from the Show Me State Ike Skelton neglect to swear in the four star suck-o-matic for his testimony (Ray McGovern was ousted for bringing this up) but he was reportedly overheard referring to protesters as “assholes” This is the prevailing attitude by the Washington elitists to whom the First Amendment is just another annoying inconvenience. The real asshole is the entire stinking toxic waste dump inside the beltway and the rotten to the core gaggle solons who reside there. They are thoroughly vile, cowardly, corrupt and could give a rat’s ass about either the constitution or the people that they are at least in theory supposed to serve. Given the disgraceful conduct of this new Congress who were given a mandate for change it is long past time to stick an enema nozzle into the festering asshole that is the nation’s capitol and give the bulb a good hard squeeze.
The total failure to end this damned war or prevent the next one as well as the reluctance of any of the presidential candidates to take an aggressive antiwar, pro-worker stance shows why there is so much crossover appeal for a guy like Ron Paul who despite his problematic stance on other issues will END THE WAR. Americans are overwhelmingly against this crap, the illegal wars, the widespread looting, the plague of offshoring, the importation of low wage labor to take jobs that can’t be offshored, the subprime fiasco, unaffordable health care, a creeping police state and all the rest of the indignities of the past six and a half years and they want change.Sadly to this point the Democratic leadersheep and their inept strategists have been loathe to offer up anything other than fascism lite and that just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
The Antiwar Movement Needs A New Playbook
If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
-Sun Tzu
To fuck your enemies you’ve first have got seduce your allies
-Saul Alinsky
Tired of having your faces rubbed in shit? The antiwar movement is spinning its wheels while being outflanked by the bipartisan, international war machine – a juggernaut with limitless financial resources, millions of shock troops, a corporate controlled pocket media and generations of successful propaganda already deeply imbedded within the national psyche. Despite repeated poll numbers showing the American public turning against Bush’s wars and the increasing pressure being applied to lawmakers up for reelection the current antiwar surge is doomed to failure because let’s face it, what has really changed? Much lip service is paid but the body count in Iraq mounts, our moral standing continues to deteriorate with the ever more frequently emerging accounts of the brutality of an occupying army, the nation heads towards bankruptcy and the neocons continue their instigation in order to escalate the conflagration by attacking Iran (or Pakistan for that matter if you listen to neocon ideologue and top media shill William Kristol) while the Armageddon choir shrieks in adulation and anticipation of their next mainline hit off of the Rapture crack pipe.
It is time for a reality check and a realization that in order to have any chance at fighting the authoritarianism of the militarist war machine the left-right paradigm and the my team vs. your team politics needs to be discarded for a movement that unites rather than divides, and one that is able to identify the true enemy which is the cancerous system itself – a system that has come to poison our national mind with the big lie that war itself is as American as apple pie. I don’t have the time to go into a rant on the longterm effects of the incessant barage of violent, pro war, nationalist propaganda that Americans are bombarded with from their earliest days of cognition through television, movies, video games and in a less technologically advanced time toy guns and miniature plastic soldiers but it is a good topic that I will address in the future, this post is about the ability of the antiwar movement to adapt to an increasingly hostile battlefield environment.
I recently read former Marine officer, UN weapons inspector and principled conservative Scott Ritter’s new book: Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement and I would strongly recommend that every American who is truly serious about saving this country take a look at what he has to say. I realize that many who read this post will not be down with it as Ritter recommends using military style tactics and the teachings of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz to in effect wage war against the war machine. This may fly in the face of certain aspects of modern liberalism but with the crisis rapidly worsening, our democracy sold to the highest bidder and the constitution in tatters it is now crunch time and dearly held principles need to be chucked in the name of the greater need which is that of survival and the only way that survival is possible is to take the battle right at the motherfuckers but more on the book in a little while.
With the complete betrayal of the Judas Democrats on bringing about an end to Bush’s war or to otherwise throw up adequate roadblocks towards an escalation into Iran that culminated in antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan’s arrest in the office of John Conyers ( a sad betrayal by a longtime fighter, a former lion turned lamb who is now in his old age kept on a short leash by party ‘leadership’) it is well past time for the antiwar movement to look for other alternatives to ending this madness before the entire world is aflame and Der Homeland is turned into a repressive police state due to Richard B. Cheney and his ultra slick legal eagle David Addington’s barrage of Executive Orders, the latest one arming the unitary executive/dictator/fuehrer with the power to seize property and to confiscate the assets of war protestors who dare to question the king’s divine providence to pillage, rape and plunder for the sake of expanding the empire. The complicity of the Democrats in the actions of the Bushreich to dismantle constitutional democracy are louder than bombs and exemplified by their silence and in their failure to halt the junta have ensured that their own fingerprints are on the dagger that has been planted in our backs.
In recently denouncing the Democrats as the collection of war addicts, abject failures, duplicitous backstabbers, bald-faced liars and pathological cheats that they truly are Sheehan has dealt a staggering blow to the DLC wing of the war party’s cloak of legitimacy and it is triggering an exposure and closing of ranks for the establishment with denunciations by fake left poseurs like the bastard snake Zuniga of the internet disinformation clearing house and vacuum cleaner operation Daily Kos (Sheehan was banned from posting there but hey, so were hundreds if not thousands of others who weren’t party hacks including myself twice) and a made into a mockery among the so-called anti-war progressives but it will soon reverberate, spread and with any luck at all go viral so that a chain reaction will be set off where a new awareness of the Democratic party complicity in this fucking bullshit war, the destruction of the middle class and the corruption of the system will deal a hopefully mortal blow to the entire rotten establishment. There is already a growing Hillary resistance movement on the ‘left’ along with a conservative backlash against the neocon invasion of the party snatchers that see the stars aligning for that rarest of things – common ground among Americans who have been pitted against each other over absolute bullshit wedge issues for far too long now and who are only now beginning to realize that they have been played for fools.
When it became obvious that the Democratic party as it exists today is more concerned with aligning itself with a foreign interest (AIPAC) operating within our borders than in doing what is right for America the deal was sealed. When you come right down to it the six-year reign of terror in Bush’s war on America wouldn’t have been possible. First they rolled over on the war by giving the emperor a blank check and they have been rolling over ever since. Nothing more exemplifies the unwillingness of the Judas Democrats than their shameless ability to pander to the lowest common denominators and ensure that they will never have to address any real issues than their appearances in fucking ridiculous farces like the recent faith forum and the upcoming gay rights forum which serve only to further cement and reinforce the right wing frames that have been so damaging to this country since the seizure of power by the Bushreich.
Note that the Pelosi-Reid-Hoyer triad has done absolutely fucking nothing to roll back the USA PATRIOT act, restore habeas corpus, ban torture, close the gulags, stop the illegal spying on American citizens or take a stand against the creeping fascism and are now using the trumped up “war on terror” for their own means. The establishment Dems are thoroughly corrupt, rotten to the core and have already accepted their thirty pieces of silver to shank the American people in the back in the name of perpetual war for perpetual peace. The failure of the Democrats should be a wake up call to any and all who had some faith, however naïve that the existing system can work as intended to maintain a system of checks and balances as envisioned by the founding fathers because it is all just too far gone. The pitter patter of the little cat feet that fascism creeps in on is getting more audible and the transformation of America into the Homeland becomes more obvious by the day. As Milton Meyer famously wrote in his study of Nazi Germany They Thought They Were Free:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
The Democrats have even less interest in bringing about a halt to the wars of empire than they do in impeaching the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon who have done so much damage to America over the past six terrible years. AIPAC tool and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer was the latest to unequivocally state that impeachment was “off the table” during a recent appearance on the syndicated Ed Schultz Show meaning that the jackass party are now co-equals with their more thuggish and overtly fascist counterparts in ensuring that the war machine keeps running at all costs and to hell with Sheehan or the law because they sense that they will inherit the keys to the kingdom along with the dictatorial powers that the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil have imbued the executive branch with very, very soon. Never mind that impeachment and removal is an absolute necessity to allow such a transfer of power to occur despite the false façade of legitimacy in the national dog and pony shows that our elections have become. In their short-sightedness and their lust for power the Democratic establishment perilously and repeatedly fails to understand exactly what they are dealing with.
What if the current junta has no intention of leaving and is only buying the necessary time until the next 9/11 takes place and the full provisions of NSPD-51 are implemented? Bush’s martial law master plan is so secretive, so onerous and so terrifying that Oregon Congressman and Homeland Security Committee member Peter DeFazio was denied the chance to examine it in a secure “bubbleroom” leaving him to say “Maybe the people who think there’s a conspiracy out there are right”. In their raw lust for power, their insatiable greed and their pathological desire to control the money spigots of the spoils system the DLC Democrats are making a grave strategic blunder that could be the final dagger in the back of the American people, the demise of the republic itself and the last nail in the coffin holding the constitution. They are allowing the neocon hydra to fully regenerate and to bring down the entire fucking house to ensure that their crazed global agenda is fulfilled. Israel has the Samson Option and the Bushreich has NSPD-51, the bastard love child of the authoritarian fascist military industrial complex and the next generation of Colonel Oliver North’s REX 84.
Conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts who has become one of the most outspoken critics of the fascist strain of Republicanism nails it dead on in his most recent column entitled My Wake-up Call: Watch For Another 9/11-WMD Experience where which he predicts such an event:
The Bush administration is preparing us for more terrorist attacks. The latest intelligence report says that Al Qaeda has regrouped, rebuilt, and has the ability to come after us again. “Al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here,” says the report.
Security operatives, such as Michael Chertoff, and various instruments of administration propaganda have warned that we will be attacked before next year’s election. Chertoff is not a person who wants to be known as Chicken Little for telling us that the sky is falling.
Bush has the Republican Party in such a mess that it cannot survive without another 9/11. Whether authentic or orchestrated, an attack will activate Bush’s new executive orders, which create a dictatorial police state in event of “national emergency.” [See here. ]
And most chillingly –
The Democrats’ strategy of doing nothing except making sure Bush gets his way will produce the landslide that they expect.
However, this assumes that Cheney, Rove, and their neoconservative allies have lost their cunning and their manipulative skills. It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous assumption for Democrats and the American people to make.
Once the US experiences new attacks, Bush will be vindicated. His voice will be confident as he speaks to the nation:
“My administration knew that there would be more attacks from these terrorists who hate us and our way of life and are determined to destroy every one of us. If only more of you had believed me and supported my war on terror these new attacks would not have happened. Our security efforts were impaired by the Democrats’ determined attempts to surrender to the terrorists by forcing our withdrawal from Iraq and by civil libertarian assaults on our necessary security measures. If only more Americans had trusted their government, this would not have happened.”
There is no such thing as politics as usual in post 9/11 Amerika and time is running out. The longer that the Democrats continue to fuck around and the antiwar movement is stuck in neutral the more emboldened that the cornered animals that are the neocon coup plotters will become and our worst fears will become reality as the final pieces of the fascist master plan lock into place with another attack. With a lawless administration and several influential Republicans now on record as eagerly awaiting the next ‘terrorist’ attack and Israeli mole Joe Lieberman uniting with the equally maniacal Reverend John Hagee to openly lead the cheers at the recent Christians United For Israel freak show for hitting Iran and therefore trigger Bush’s martial law enabling acts it is imperative that Americans begin to unite behind a rallying cause against the empire and it’s wars. This is where Scott Ritter’s little playbook for fighting back comes in and in the author’s own words:
This book is not for everyone. There will be those among the antiwar movement who will, out of misguided sense of principle, be repulsed by the notion of their movement embracing something as noxious as the Art of War.
In short, the antiwar movement has come face-to-face with the reality that in the ongoing war of ideologies that is being waged in America today, their cause is not just losing, but in fact ins on the verge of complete collapse.
It is high time for the antiwar movement to take a collective look in the mirror, and be honest about what they see: a poorly organized, chaotic, and indeed often anarchic conglomeration of egos, pet projects, and idealism that barely constitutes a “movement,” let alone a winning cause. I have yet to observe an antiwar demonstration that has a focus on antiwar. It often seemed that every left-wing cause took advantage of the event to promote it’s own particular agenda, so that “No War In Iraq” shared the stage with the environment, ecology, animal rights, pro-choice and numerous other causes that not only diluted the antiwar message that was supposed to be sent, but also guaranteed that the demonstration itself would be seen as something hijacked by the left, inclusive of only progressive ideologues, and exclusive of the vast majority of moderate (and even conservative) Americans who might have wanted to share the stage with their fellow Americans from the left when it comes to opposing war with Iraq (or even Iran), but do not want to be associated with any other theme.
The antiwar movement, first and foremost, needs to develop a laser-like focus on being nothing more or less than antiwar.
On a common cause – upholding the constitution.
It is now time to begin to look at things from a different perspective, to reach out to those who at one time were on the other side but who now have common cause in defeating a shared enemy. The fact that the one great rallying cause that should unite Americans is purely one of class and economic fairness has been essentially nullified by the concerted effort by the establishment that stretched from what Harry Truman referred to as the “slave labor” bill in the Taft-Hartley Act to the organized pogroms of McCarthyism to the Powell Memorandum to Reagan’s war against the middle class is other than the Israeli issue the one place that Congress will absolutely not go so as to not jeopardize the rigged game is at this point not feasible any efforts to attack the system as it is will have to be on those that utilize the anti-war, reinstate the constitution ideals as those that will be the most effective in halting the looting spree and ending the lopsided class war.
While not explicitly stating it Ritter references elements that the mainstream of America may have problems with when accepting a progressive agenda. He uses what he calls “the firefighter standard” and as he states “if you are trying to market something to mainstream America, if you can sell it to firefighters, whose profession is ranked number one in terms of jobs that garner the respect of the general public, then you can sell it to the majority of Americans as well”. In correctly identifying the major problem that plagues the current antiwar movement “While never shy when it comes to criticizing politicians who fail to do their jobs, firefighters bristle when the criticism crosses the line into what they feel to be an attack on their own values, which tend to revolve around love of country and community.” Ritter also assails the bullshit that is the impenetrable force field of the extreme right “Guns, God, and Gays” and while acknowledging its effectiveness as a rallying cry for the worst and most intolerant elements of society he offers up what is potentially the silver bullet to use against this ungodly monstrosity – the Constitution (which is included in a appendix along with the United Nations Charter) because what could possibly be more patriotic and American than honoring it.
Rtter is absolutely right on this point and my moment of clarity occurred when a local antiwar activism group who I frequently interact with called to recruit me to hold up signs at a gay rights parade where our local version of the reverend Fred Phelps had organized a flock of the usual sort of phony ‘Christian’ haters to harass and harangue the participants. While I personally find the scapegoating of gays to be reprehensible and on a par with the same sort of hate mongering that allowed Adolf Hitler to rise to power, the inconvenient truth is that much of the American mainstream is still at best wary of gay issues and often revolted by such parades. The local news media outlets always pick the most over the top characters to feature on television and in the morning papers in an effort to deliberately offend as many people as possible and one of our Tampa Bay area nespapers, the St. Petersburg Times took the dark art of yellow journalism to a new low with their dispicably biased coverage of transexual Largo City Commissioner Steve Stanton and the ensuing witch hunt that culminated with his firing (the local rag also inflamed readers with their Mother’s Day front page story on Susan Stanton – his new identity. The other problem with such parades is that as they face increasing persecution from the theocratic dead-enders and hateful lemmings is that the participants who are the most exhibitionist justifiably choose to dress to the nines and really put on a show to rub the faces of the haters in it all but this ultimately results in providing fuel for the fire the fascist right, it is like the saying cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. There are still reverberations that Susan Stanton was the Grand Marshall of our local parade and the hateful lemmings are keening at the top of their lungs while ignoring more important issues like the poor local bastards coming back from Iraq with their limbs blown off or in body bags. Such is life in a rotting empire.
The lamentable fact that the antiwar movement has so often chosen to take their focus off of what should be their sole defining reason for existence – halting the forces that have created the empire and will be increasingly upping the repressive tactics necessary to ensure that it continues to exist and to bring death to brown people while turning ‘the homeland’ into a police state confirms Ritter’s ideas on organizing against them and why the progressives have failed. I realize that this is anathema to those liberals who have come to represent the left now that the real left, organized labor has been eradicated but it is what it is and a new game plan is badly needed. And there must be a movement that arises without the insurmountable burdens of the twin millstones: abortion and gay rights and is able to counter the mantra of “Guns, God and Gays”.
And the new left (since labor was shanked in the back and tossed away by the DLC) is too pacifist, let’s face it the majority of the people involved abhor conflict, do not own guns and are so idealistic about ensuring that their own preferences are included in the anti-war movement that they have absolutely no chance whatsoever in fighting the entrenched culture of war, greed and death that have brought this country to the brink of destruction from within. I couldn’t possibly put it more succinctly than Mr. Ritter does:
Bear in mind that in conflict you are in almost all occasions confronting an opponent who is determined to win as you should be. This opponent is looking for any sign of weakness on your part, and will be certain to exploit this weakness with as much decisiveness and ferocity that can be brought to bear. If you are not prepared to confront such an opponent, then don’t enter the field of battle. Conflict is not for the faint of heart. In conflict you must be prepared to knock your opponent down, and then, instead of offering a helping hand, hold your opponent down with the heel of your foot while you plunge a bayonet into his or her heart. You can be assured that your opponent would do the same to you.
This golden advice is absolutely when it comes to first slowing and then with any luck and a lot of hard work, eradicating the warmongering neocon cabal along with anti-American special interest groups that support it and the most extreme elements of the Christian right and without using economic inequality as a base with organized labor as footsoldiers then other methods need to be taken into consideration in forming that broad based coalition against the blood barters, looters, fascists, neocons, theocrats and imperialists. Again I refer to Ritter:
The American progressive movement has not always been this devoid of leadership and structure. One only need to study the life and achievements of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based former criminologist who revolutionized the grassroots movements of the 1950s and 1960s into genuine political movements possessing real political power.
And…
Simply put, if the antiwar/peace and justice movement can attract more people to its cause than their opponents can to theirs, then the antiwar/peace and justice movement will emerge victorious. Therefore, a governing principle when waging peace is to creadt an ideological foundation that is capable of appealing to the broadest possible segment of a given democratic society.
If his advice is taken then what will emerge will be a diverse coalition of interests who now finally understand that the system as it exists is run by global criminals who have no loyalty to America and actively have attacked everything that was great about her while usurping our democracy and undermining our freedoms and economic prowess. Wall Street looters and industrialists have always hated America because there was a system of governance here that afforded rights to all people and not only those with money. It has been a long time coming and the time to act is yesterday.
Essentially I am fucking sick of all of the fake left all-inclusive bullshit, not that these people don’t have valid reasons but they are an impediment to the mass movement that is so sorely needed to drive these rapacious, fascist motherfuckers from power. I challenge anybody who disagrees with this to put aside their ego, swallow their pride – as Bob Dylan once sang “it’s not poison” and grab a ride on the riverboat because it’s time for some fucking unity and these bullshit wedge issues and pet projects have got to go because let’s face it – America has been under assault for far too long and the old girl is ready to buckle without a renewed focus on a unified attack on the bastards who have put us in this position.
Hey, I’m not asking you to love those who you have differences with but this is a far bigger threat and it demands unity – we can bicker about all of the other bullshit after we can unite against the common enemy that is the globalist corporate hostile takeover and the neocon militarist push for world domination. They work hand in hand, a bastard fuck of an unholy alliance and make no mistake, IF we are smart enough to unite it is going to take every goddamned bit of our efforts to beat it back – or at least slow it enough so that saner elements can use the political process to marginalize it until it can be eradicated once and for all. Our very survival depends upon it.
The Blood Barters
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
-Bob Dylan “Masters of War”
Somewhere within that great morass of collective national ignorance are the great stories of our untaught and largely suppressed history and the real heroes who inhabit it. They are the real heroes whose sacrifice and efforts in building a great nation and a truly compassionate and progressive society are in direct conflict that those who have mounted a decades long drive to erase their efforts and to remake America into the cruel fool’s paradise of a militaristic, Social Darwinist, monopoly capitalist spoils system where the less fortunate are subordinated to be lesser humans, servants and cannon fodder for the never ending wars on which the engine of empire is fueled in the early days of this sordid new American century.
In our past lie the keys to our future but in the revisionist reworking perpetrated by the greatest propaganda machine that the world has ever known it will never be understood by the majority who take solace in tough talking cowboys and ‘plain spoken’ men who provide easy answers for an increasingly complex and dangerous world. History is always written by the victors rather than the vanquished and in a country where the victors have been corporatists, reactionary right-wingers and the military industrial complex it is no wonder that we are spoon fed distortions, oversimplifications and outright lies as history. The indoctrination into the warrior world of laissez-faire monopoly capitalism, the worship of the state and the acceptance of the grand destiny of God’s chosen empire begins with the constant onslaught of televised imagery, the war toys and the desensitization of violence and condoning of the exploitation of others from the earliest days of cognitive capability.
Television is the greatest tool for indoctrination and central programming that ever has been invented – bar none and to the corrupt oligarchy it is gospel. The tabula rasas of impressionable children have already been subjected to consumerism, class exploitation and the acceptance of a national mythology and the requisite violence by the time they even get to the classroom where the job will be completed by a system that no longer in any way encourages critical thinking and individualism – only acquiescence, obedience and conformity are desirable…those not adhering are then culled out and will face the lifelong stigmatism that has only two destinations, death or a place in the burgeoning network of privately owned, for profit prisons – another growth industry in America that nearly rivals that of the great war machine itself.
The blame for the dark cloud of willful ignorance upon the land over the true consequences of the waging of war lies not only with the purveyors of the immaculate Hollywood fantasies that transform industrialized slaughter into grand, glamorous adventured dripping with glory and valor but also with the media in its entirety (excluding the alternative media of course which lacks the firepower to compete with the corporate goliaths) that drums out the hypnotic cadence about the glorious potential that lies in the grand adventures that war brings along with that most precious of commodities that is American exceptionalism. Add a punditry composed of psychopathic hired guns who routinely decry pacifists and war critics as traitors while omitting the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of the luminaries of the right-wing attack machine have never worn a uniform in the service to the country.
The ongoing psyops campaign is relentless and has been far too successful in gene splicing Sinclair Lewis’ domestic fascism with a dystopian vision that not even Orwell himself could have imagined. Note this story citing a defense industry think tank that distorts the looting of the treasury and racking up of unpayable war debt like a plague upon the unborn by making the argument that the ongoing occupation of civil war ravaged Iraq as a “relative bargain”. I mean give me a fucking break, this is what happens when highly compensated ‘experts’, bean counters and paid public relations flacks are retained to use a shadowy, state run media apparatus to sow disinformation and outright lies.
The story that did not merit much in the way of real coverage from the media conglomerates, their boards packed with members of interlocking directorates who also serve the energy cabal and defense contractors is the scandalous news that Halliburton will soon be fleeing the USA to relocate it’s corporate headquarters to Dubai. When the potential for something even remotely resembling oversight on Dick Cheney’s former (and some may argue current) employer suddenly becomes possible with a Democratic Congress armed with subpoenas and questions on no-bid contracts, mismanagement, war profiteering and outright looting then HAL is outta here.
That is the way that it always goes with the blood barters in the defense industrial complex to whom the cynical jingoism and invocations of patriotism don’t mean jack shit when it comes to trafficking in human misery, death and pestilence. The blood barters only see the color of money and not red, white and blue like the miserable dupes who they always so easily exploit to send their young off to die in illegal wars fought for greed and the imperialism of a rapacious strain of militarist capitalism run amok. But hey, war is all about glory, John Wayne, apple pie and the shoveling of the big lie of spreading democracy as though it were so much manure.
And leave it to the media to play down or otherwise skew the coverage of anti-war protests and the anti-war movement in general by low balling crowd counts, giving equal time to dead ender, right-wing counter protests by giving representatives (often ditto head dopes whose bellicosity and twisted world views mimic those of Michael Savage and other fascist propagandists) space in stories for their statements even if they happen to be outnumbered 100-1 in the interest of being ‘fair and balanced’ and always finding the one burned out hippie stoner in the crowd who is festooned with peace signs and carrying a guitar.
As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration’s cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, “If you don’t like America, get out!”
Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as “War There Or War Here.” Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.
The vets turned both sides of Constitution into a bitter, charged gantlet for the war protesters. “Jihadists!” some vets screamed. “You’re brain-dead!” Others chanted, “Workers World traitors must hang!” — a reference to the Communist newspaper. Some broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner” as war protesters sought to hand out pamphlets.
“Bunch of hooligans in motorcycle jackets!” one war protester shot back.
The large turnout surprised even some counter-demonstrators. Polls show public opinion turning against the war in Iraq, and the November election was widely seen as a repudiation of the administration’s policy.
So well-coordinated has the pro-war media become in the aftermath of Vietnam and the placement of right-wing operatives in every news outlet in America to parrot think tank created, focus group tested messages that reduce the entire anti-war movement (even though it happens to be a veritable melting pot of every demographic segment of America) into the same cartoon figures and caricatures that have been used to deviously and often subconsciously manipulate mass opinion ever since the military industrial complex and the corrupt system upon which it depends upon was deal that very serious one two punch of the fall of Saigon and the outing of Richard M. Nixon as a malevolent criminal. Nixon alas was only a symptom of a virulent stain of neo-fascism that while having long existed in this country has grown increasingly powerful in an inverse relationship to the decreasing attention spans and chronic intellectual shortcomings of the pubic at large. In reference to the media I love this line from Charley Reese (a small part of a larger overall condemnation of power from his latest column that I am stealing a portion of for my own purposes) that: … just remember that money buys whores, and whores service their customers.
Such is the culture of the Bushreich, where the sanitized, misleading and dishonest portrayal of American virtues and our divine moral superiority are exalted and those heroes from the past who spoke out have been effectively lost in a time warp. There is one great voice that does not turn up in textbooks and his message was a condemnation of the callousness of the blood barters and his voice was one that spoke from experience. He is the highly decorated (two medals of honor) former USMC General Smedley Darlington Butler.
General Butler was one of the earliest critics of American intervention and the plundering of foreign countries for the benefit of Wall Street looters who were all too glad to trade lives for profit. Butler wrote the scathing War Is A Racket that was a no-holds barred indictment of the early military-industrial complex. Butler told it like it was, not a convenient thing for the revisionist historians who write the textbooks to indoctrinate the good little Americans in the religion of the always great, always righteous and blessed land of plenty.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”
“During those years, I had as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best that he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Wall Street has always had a vested interest in dabbling in war and death, despite all of the rah- rah red meat exhortations of patriotism or more appropriately nationalism that serve to keep the masses energized those who operate behind the scenes only real loyalty is to wealth and in maintaining the interests of the elite – those who will never lose sons or daughters in any of the hellish wars that are waged primarily for their benefit. A connection that the overwhelming majority of the rest of the peasants will never be able to make due to an incessant barrage of propaganda and corporate brainwashing via the electronic crackpipe to keep the rabble in line.
I recently had an opportunity to catch Eugene Jarecki’s movie Why We Fight that offers a very serious and dare I say bi-partisan look into the corruption of the military industrial complex and the dangers that it poses to American values. President Eisenhower warned of this in his farewell address over four decades ago but it went unheeded and the ongoing wars, military actions, occupations, weapons sales to other countries that have become a constant of American life ever since are a growing blight on our nation’s soul.
The best thing about Why We Fight is that it is immune to the sort of Rovian swift boating that followed in the aftermath of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 that had the weak kneed sissies on the DLC controlled ‘opposition party’ running for cover. The film features a cross section of neocon ideologues, politos and serious analysts including John McCain, Chalmers Johnson, Gore Vidal, Gwynne Dyer, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Karen Kwiatkowski among others and is inclusive to viewpoints from both sides of the ideological spectrum. This movie is not to be taken lightly and try as they may to discredit it the Republican slime machine will not be able to make hay so easily as it was when turning Moore into a caricature (a puppet terrorist in the ultra-sardonic and overly scatological Team America: World Police) or for the Democrats to find a convenient scapegoat for their fecklessness and inability to win elections. This is a powerful, truthful and enduring film that asks serious questions that the used car salesmen and charlatans that are our ‘elected’ representatives are not going to want to answer.
Why We Fight zeroes in on the bastard relationship between Dick Cheney and Halliburton – we essentially have a government contractor as Vice President, in the movie he is referred to as a “rolodex man” Outsourcing of military duties such as cooking, cleaning etc are outsourced for profit to private contractors like Halliburton. This is one of the fundamental ways in which the military had changed under the leadership of corrupt men like Cheney. When I did my time about a quarter of a century ago we had our own enlisted men performing the often dehumanizing duties like cleaning the ‘shitters’, cooking and working in support positions such as personnel and logistics.
This use of highly paid ‘contractors’ is a criminal scam designed to bilk the taxpayers into funneling more money to the parasitical firms in Cheney’s rolodex. Now all of these functions are spun off to contractors who then bilk the American taxpayers for billions in order to perform the same functions that our servicemen and women used to do. Talk about a royal scam, this is it. The disturbing rise of private mercenaries is also quite troubling, especially at a time when our own military is being destroyed and I’m sure that I’m not the only one in America questioning the true intent of the Cheney-neocons and unaccountable private armies for hire as provided by firms like Blackwater but that is a story for another time.
The movie is even more important today as the neocon madness is about to be escalated with an impending attack on Iran that is inevitable given the goading by Israeli hard-liners meddling with the U.S. political appartus. This great column by Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo along with it’s links is well worth your time in reading if only to see the extent of the danger of having a foreign government (and an extremist one at that) in the driver’s seat of the Rapture bus. Absent some very serious and immediate action by Congress to begin to reign in the monsters that have run amok then we are all in for some seriously troubling times with wars without end, continuing domestic unrest as the population is divided and pitted against one another as a diversion and the dead bodies on America’s tab piling as fast as the blood barter’s ill gotten gains. As Plato once famously stated: “Only the dead have seen the end of the war” and you can bet the house that there will be plenty of them as long as their deaths can be turned into another revenue stream.