Original version published in The Moscow Times, July 30, 2004
America calls its soldiers who fought in World War II "the greatest generation." They are hymned by Hollywood, celebrated by publishers and politicians, hailed at every turn. And for their troubled descendants, whose military misadventures stretch from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, the clean-limbed victors of the "last good war" do indeed shine out like heroes from a lost golden age.
Yet despite the vast tonnage of celluloid and printer's ink devoted to their praise, what is perhaps the truest, highest measure of their worth has been almost universally neglected. And what is this hidden glory, which does more honor to the people of the United States than every single military action ordered by their corruption-riddled leaders during the past fifty years? It's the fact that in the midst of history's most vicious, all-devouring, inhuman war, only about 15 percent of American soldiers on the battlefield actually tried to kill anyone.
In-depth studies by the U.S. Army after WWII showed that between 80 to 85 percent of the greatest generation never fired their weapons at an exposed enemy in combat, as military psychologist Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman reports. Many times they had the chance, but could not bring themselves to do it. They either withheld their fire altogether or else shot into the air, to the side, anywhere but at the fellow human beings – their blood kin in biology, mind and mortality – facing them across the line. This reticence is even more remarkable given the incessant demonization of the enemy by the top brass, especially in the Pacific, where the Japanese – soldiers and civilians – were routinely portrayed by military propaganda as simian, sub-human creatures fit only for extermination.
Yet even with official license given to the most virulent prejudice, even with the sanction of a just cause (self-defense against aggression), even with the incitements of mortal fear, of grief and anger over slain comrades, even with all the moral chaos endemic to warfare, American soldiers, as a whole, killed only with the greatest reluctance, in the direst extremity. These were not "warriors," bloodthirsty automatons with stripped-down brains and cauterized souls, slavering in Pavlovian fury at the bell-clap of command. No, they were real men, willing, as Grossman notes, to stand up for a cause, even die for it, but not willing, in the end, to transgress the natural law (implanted by God or evolution, take your pick) that says: Do not kill your own kind – and every person of every race and nation is your own kind.
You would think that this apotheosis of human transcendence, this Emersonian ideal achieved, in the best democratic fashion, by ordinary conscripts – farmboys and dock workers, factory hands, bank clerks, guitar players, teachers, cab drivers, hobos, card sharks, college men – would have been inscribed on plates of gold and fixed to the walls of the Capitol for all time, a blazon of national greatness. Just think of it: soldiers who hated to kill, who went out of their way to avoid killing or even firing their weapons, who held on to their essential humanity in the face of the severest provocations – and yet still won battle after battle in history's greatest war.
But far from celebrating this example of genuine glory, the military brass were horrified at the low "firing rates" and anemic "kill ratios" of American soldiery. They immediately set about trying to break the next generation of recruits of their natural resistance to slaughtering their own kind. Incorporating the latest techniques for psychological manipulation, new training programs were designed to brutalize the mind and habituate soldiers to the idea of killing automatically, by reflex, "at the bell-clap of command," without the intervention of any of those inefficient scruples displayed by their illustrious predecessors.
And it worked. The dehumanization process led to a steady rise in firing rates for U.S. soldiers during subsequent conflicts. In the Korean War, 55 percent were ready to pump hot lead into enemy flesh. And by the time the greatest generation's own children took the field, in Vietnam, the willingness to slaughter was almost total: 95 percent of combat troops there fired with the intent to kill.
And today in occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on. "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it's like it pounds in my brain," a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly slaughtered bodies. "It doesn't bother me at all," he said. "I'm a warrior. My soldiers, they are all warriors. They have no problems. There's no place in this Army for men who aren't warriors." Said a third: "We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way…but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I'll be like when I get home." A few military officials are beginning to worry too, noting the high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat veterans.
But the warlords of the White House – notorious battlefield shirkers who prefer to do their killing by remote control – have little regard for the cannon fodder they churn through in their quest for dominance and loot. "Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers," says Colonel Thomas Burke, Pentagon director of – what else? – mental health policy. Any efforts to mitigate the moral schizophrenia induced by this training would undermine "effectiveness in battle," he adds.
Yet strangely enough, this new model army, imbued with eager "warrior spirit," has not produced the kind of lasting victories won by the reluctant fifteen-percenters of yore. It was stalemated in Korea, defeated in Vietnam, chased out of Lebanon and Somalia, balked in Afghanistan (where 40,000 Taliban troops slipped away to fight again and drug-dealing warlords rule the countryside), while its two excursions into Iraq have ended first in irresolution (with "worse-than-Hitler" Saddam still on his throne) and now in bloody quagmire.
Could it be that the systematic degradation of natural morality and common human feeling – especially in the service of dubious ends – is not actually the best way to achieve national greatness?
Chris Floyd
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Original version published Aug. 27, 2004, in The Moscow Times.
If you would know the hell that awaits us – and not far off – there's no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain – clearly, openly, with confidence and pride – their plans to foment terror, rape, war and repression across the face of the earth.
Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in seed money to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" – i.e., bands of lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington's proxy killers in the so-called "arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.
Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big bucks to run "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing "sanctuary" for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy" of unprovoked aggressive war against "potential" enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour.
Any rogue state that countenances such freedom of speech within its borders will become a prime target for "the path of action," said Wolf, quoting Bush's most ringing Hitlerian phrase from the 2002 manifesto. To relieve the overstretched U.S. military, the "action" will be carried out largely by Bush's new hired guns: religious and ethnic militias, tribal forces, mercenaries, cultists, insurrectionists, druglords, pirates – basically anyone willing to slit throats and terrorize populations at the order of the Oval One.
A more sinister – not to mention stupid – policy can scarcely be imagined. One of the most spectacular miscalculations in modern history was the American decision to create an international army of Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Together with the repressive militarists of Pakistan and the head-chopping religious tyrants of Saudi Arabia, American leaders armed, funded, supplied and shaped the global jihad – beginning before the Soviet intervention, which the bloody religious insurgency successfully provoked, as Washington intended. The CIA ended up fighting cheek-by-jowl with the likes of Osama bin Laden, helpfully providing the holy warriors with extensive training in "asymmetrical warfare" – i.e., terrorism. These rabid chickens came home to roost with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001, and are now running wild all over the world.
Meanwhile, the Afghan warlords thus empowered by Washington proceeded to tear the country to shreds, killing more than 50,000 people in Kabul alone during their post-Soviet factional frenzy, creating a hell so dire that even the Taliban's vicious moralism seemed a welcome relief for a time. These same warlords are back in the saddle again, paid by Bush as they re-establish their petty fiefdoms of repression, religious obscurantism, rampant crime, factional violence – and dope-dealing on a record-breaking scale, the Independent reports.
The "victory" in Afghanistan has deteriorated so badly that last month the UN's own staff workers called on the organization to leave the country because it is too dangerous, the BBC reports. This follows the July pull-out of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Nobel-winning medical aid group that managed to survive in Afghanistan for 24 years, through the anti-Soviet jihad, the murderous civil war and the depredations of the Taliban. But with Bush's paid proxies now in control, even the redoubtable doctors have had to quit the field.
There's nothing really new in Bush's murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do Washington's bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed "paramilitaries" who helped Ronald Reagan's favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren't given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.
But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush's plan: targeting the Homeland itself as a "terrorist sanctuary." In addition to loosing his own personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to prevent anyone he designates a "terrorist" from "abusing the freedom of democratic societies" or "exploiting the technologies of communication" – i.e., defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that "difficult decisions" would be required. (Perhaps a stateside version of those rigged "military tribunals" now serving up prime kangaroo meat down in Guantanamo Bay?)
No doubt the arrogant Bushists believe they can control the mercenary dogs of war they're now unleashing. But history shows that armed bands driven by religious, ideological or ethnic fervor – or just the ordinary lust for loot and power – rarely follow the script set for them by their elitist paymasters. Bush's morally depraved "path of action" is in fact a highway to hell.
Chris Floyd
If you would know the hell that awaits us – and not far off – there's no need to consult ancient prophecies, or the intricate coils of hidden conspiracies, or the tortured arcana of high-credentialed experts. You need only read the public words, sworn before God, of top public officials, the great lords of state, the defenders of civilization, as they explain – clearly, openly, with confidence and pride – their plans to foment terror, rape, war and repression across the face of the earth.
Last month, in little-noticed testimony before Congress, the Bush Regime unveiled its plans to raise a host of warlord armies in the most volatile areas in the world, Agence France-Presse reports. Bush wants $500 million in seed money to arm and train non-governmental "local militias" – i.e., bands of lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington's proxy killers in the so-called "arc of crisis" that just happens to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America.
Flanked by a gaggle of military brass, Pentagon deputy honcho Paul Wolfowitz told a rapt panel of Congressional rubber-stamps that Bush wants big bucks to run "counter-insurgency" and "counter-terrorist" operations in "ungoverned areas" of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing "sanctuary" for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 "National Security Strategy" of unprovoked aggressive war against "potential" enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour.
Any rogue state that countenances such freedom of speech within its borders will become a prime target for "the path of action," said Wolf, quoting Bush's most ringing Hitlerian phrase from the 2002 manifesto. To relieve the overstretched U.S. military, the "action" will be carried out largely by Bush's new hired guns: religious and ethnic militias, tribal forces, mercenaries, cultists, insurrectionists, druglords, pirates – basically anyone willing to slit throats and terrorize populations at the order of the Oval One.
A more sinister – not to mention stupid – policy can scarcely be imagined. One of the most spectacular miscalculations in modern history was the American decision to create an international army of Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Together with the repressive militarists of Pakistan and the head-chopping religious tyrants of Saudi Arabia, American leaders armed, funded, supplied and shaped the global jihad – beginning before the Soviet intervention, which the bloody religious insurgency successfully provoked, as Washington intended. The CIA ended up fighting cheek-by-jowl with the likes of Osama bin Laden, helpfully providing the holy warriors with extensive training in "asymmetrical warfare" – i.e., terrorism. These rabid chickens came home to roost with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001, and are now running wild all over the world.
Meanwhile, the Afghan warlords thus empowered by Washington proceeded to tear the country to shreds, killing more than 50,000 people in Kabul alone during their post-Soviet factional frenzy, creating a hell so dire that even the Taliban's vicious moralism seemed a welcome relief for a time. These same warlords are back in the saddle again, paid by Bush as they re-establish their petty fiefdoms of repression, religious obscurantism, rampant crime, factional violence – and dope-dealing on a record-breaking scale, the Independent reports.
The "victory" in Afghanistan has deteriorated so badly that last month the UN's own staff workers called on the organization to leave the country because it is too dangerous, the BBC reports. This follows the July pull-out of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Nobel-winning medical aid group that managed to survive in Afghanistan for 24 years, through the anti-Soviet jihad, the murderous civil war and the depredations of the Taliban. But with Bush's paid proxies now in control, even the redoubtable doctors have had to quit the field.
There's nothing really new in Bush's murder-by-proxy scheme, of course; America has a long, bipartisan tradition of paying local thugs to do Washington's bloodwork. For example, late last month, Guatemala was forced to pay $420 million in extortion to veterans of the U.S.-backed "paramilitaries" who helped Ronald Reagan's favorite dictator, right-wing Christian coupster Efrain Rios Montt, kill 100,000 innocent people during his reign, the BBC reports. The paramilitaries, whose well-documented war crimes include rape, murder and torture, had threatened to shut down the country if they weren't given some belated booty for their yeoman service in the Reagan-Bush cause.
But Wolfowitz did reveal one original twist in Bush's plan: targeting the Homeland itself as a "terrorist sanctuary." In addition to loosing his own personal Janjaweed on global hotspots, Bush is also seeking new powers to prevent anyone he designates a "terrorist" from "abusing the freedom of democratic societies" or "exploiting the technologies of communication" – i.e., defending themselves in court or logging on to the Internet. As AFP notes, Wolfowitz tactfully refrained from detailing just how the Regime intends to curb the dangerous use of American freedom, but he did allow that "difficult decisions" would be required. (Perhaps a stateside version of those rigged "military tribunals" now serving up prime kangaroo meat down in Guantanamo Bay?)
No doubt the arrogant Bushists believe they can control the mercenary dogs of war they're now unleashing. But history shows that armed bands driven by religious, ideological or ethnic fervor – or just the ordinary lust for loot and power – rarely follow the script set for them by their elitist paymasters. Bush's morally depraved "path of action" is in fact a highway to hell.
Chris Floyd
"That Which Happened" (September 11)
Written Sept. 12, 2001; published in The Moscow Times, Sept. 14, 2001
Perhaps their knives were made of stone – chipped flints, sharpened to a deadly point: the earliest human technology. Stone knives would have baffled the sleek security machines, scanning for metal, for iron and steel. Perhaps that's how the guardians of the world's greatest power were defeated by a handful of men.
A handful of men, dedicated to God, willing to die for their cause – virtues celebrated throughout the civilized world. Old-fashioned men, too: this was not push-button war, there were no guided missiles streaking across vast oceans, no bomb bays opening somewhere above the clouds. This was the real thing, the raw thing, fierce and elemental. They came to kill and they came to die. They killed; they died.
And so the unimaginable has come, at last, to America. Unimaginable, that the innocent could lie dead in their thousands, buried beneath the ruins of ordinary life. Unimaginable, that the destruction that has swept back and forth across the world in great waves, leaving the innocent lying dead in their millions, should have at last spilled over the strong sea-walls that preserved the nation's wealth and tranquility. Unimaginable, that Americans should know what so many, too many, have known before: the sudden, gutting horror of mass-murdering injustice.
How did it happen? America spends $30 billion a year, year after year after year, on "intelligence." Untold trillions have been spent on "defense." The nation bristles with powerful ordnance, it "projects dominance" (as the strategists like to say) all over the globe. And yet its leaders are like blind men, raging like Oedipus, unable to see their attackers or defend their people or understand what is happening to them.
Struck and wounded, they fall back on empty rhetoric: "an attack on democracy" – as if the suspected plotters, who spent years in a war to the death with the Soviet Union, give a damn what America's political system might be. Then come the metaphysical explanations: "A new evil has come upon us." "This is a war between good and evil."
Well yes, it's evil – as the killing of every innocent person is – but it isn't new. It's as old as the hills, as old as any chipped flint dug up from the ground. It's religious arrogance, tribalism, lust for power and – let's be honest about it – a falling-out among former allies, old comrades in undercover war. Each one of these is a powerful engine of hatred – churning in the dirt of the real world, in the mixed matter of the human brain, in the murk and folly of human history.
Religious arrogance: the implacable, impenetrable conviction that absolute truth is in your sole possession. You are good, favored by God; your enemies are evil, demonic. Tribalism (or in "civilized" terms, nationalism, patriotism): the belief that your country, your people, your grievances, your interests are above all others, that your values are so important that innocent people must sometimes be sacrificed to them. Lust for power: the burning desire to impose your will on the whole world – or failing that, to bring the whole world crumbling down around you.
And a falling-out. The White House points the finger of blame at Osama Bin Laden – a demon made to order, right out of central casting, remorseless, demented, crafty, rich. Like Saddam Hussein – another sinister figure suspected of collusion in the attack – Bin Laden was once empowered by America itself. The same intelligence services that now stand blind, struck and wounded, cynically embraced these brutal renegades as pawns in the Great Game of geopolitics; embraced them, armed them, paid them, built them up into autonomous powers – then, like Dr. Frankenstein, lost control of their creatures. The used became the users, and in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan – and now, New York and Washington – they have killed their thousands, and their tens of thousands.
In the name of religion. In the service of patriotism. In the lust for power – to project their dominance.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and is with us always.
But atrocity tends to raze the ground of history. In the aftermath, with the cries of lamentation rising over fresh graves, it is always Zero Hour. "That which happened" – to borrow the poet Paul Celan's phrase for the Nazis' unspeakable crimes – buries what came before, effaces the paths that led us to this place, strips away the cloak of reason (a thin rag in the best of times), and leaves nothing but the bare, anguished call for revenge.
So the leaders, the blind men, assemble. They call urgently for war – against someone, somewhere; they cannot say who, because they cannot see. The intelligence services are put to work – perhaps they will find a new pawn, someone to turn against the one who has turned against them; someone new to embrace, arm, pay, empower. Perhaps the missiles will streak and the bomb bays will open indiscriminately, as before. Or perhaps it will be left to assassins, surgeons of death who will use the terrorist's own weapons of treachery and surprise to destroy the culprits – and the inevitable "collaterals."
Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs. And who now can break this cycle, which has been going on for generations? Past folly undoes us, but who, in the Zero Hour, can ignore the lamentations? Who can deny the ghosts, these loved ones gone, the red food demanded by the dead?
There is no answer. It will not stop. They say the world has now changed irreversibly, that nothing will ever be the same. But it will be the same. The same engines of hatred, the same murk, the same dirt, the same mixed matter in human brains.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and it is with us always.
"Even unto the end of the world."
Chris Floyd
Perhaps their knives were made of stone – chipped flints, sharpened to a deadly point: the earliest human technology. Stone knives would have baffled the sleek security machines, scanning for metal, for iron and steel. Perhaps that's how the guardians of the world's greatest power were defeated by a handful of men.
A handful of men, dedicated to God, willing to die for their cause – virtues celebrated throughout the civilized world. Old-fashioned men, too: this was not push-button war, there were no guided missiles streaking across vast oceans, no bomb bays opening somewhere above the clouds. This was the real thing, the raw thing, fierce and elemental. They came to kill and they came to die. They killed; they died.
And so the unimaginable has come, at last, to America. Unimaginable, that the innocent could lie dead in their thousands, buried beneath the ruins of ordinary life. Unimaginable, that the destruction that has swept back and forth across the world in great waves, leaving the innocent lying dead in their millions, should have at last spilled over the strong sea-walls that preserved the nation's wealth and tranquility. Unimaginable, that Americans should know what so many, too many, have known before: the sudden, gutting horror of mass-murdering injustice.
How did it happen? America spends $30 billion a year, year after year after year, on "intelligence." Untold trillions have been spent on "defense." The nation bristles with powerful ordnance, it "projects dominance" (as the strategists like to say) all over the globe. And yet its leaders are like blind men, raging like Oedipus, unable to see their attackers or defend their people or understand what is happening to them.
Struck and wounded, they fall back on empty rhetoric: "an attack on democracy" – as if the suspected plotters, who spent years in a war to the death with the Soviet Union, give a damn what America's political system might be. Then come the metaphysical explanations: "A new evil has come upon us." "This is a war between good and evil."
Well yes, it's evil – as the killing of every innocent person is – but it isn't new. It's as old as the hills, as old as any chipped flint dug up from the ground. It's religious arrogance, tribalism, lust for power and – let's be honest about it – a falling-out among former allies, old comrades in undercover war. Each one of these is a powerful engine of hatred – churning in the dirt of the real world, in the mixed matter of the human brain, in the murk and folly of human history.
Religious arrogance: the implacable, impenetrable conviction that absolute truth is in your sole possession. You are good, favored by God; your enemies are evil, demonic. Tribalism (or in "civilized" terms, nationalism, patriotism): the belief that your country, your people, your grievances, your interests are above all others, that your values are so important that innocent people must sometimes be sacrificed to them. Lust for power: the burning desire to impose your will on the whole world – or failing that, to bring the whole world crumbling down around you.
And a falling-out. The White House points the finger of blame at Osama Bin Laden – a demon made to order, right out of central casting, remorseless, demented, crafty, rich. Like Saddam Hussein – another sinister figure suspected of collusion in the attack – Bin Laden was once empowered by America itself. The same intelligence services that now stand blind, struck and wounded, cynically embraced these brutal renegades as pawns in the Great Game of geopolitics; embraced them, armed them, paid them, built them up into autonomous powers – then, like Dr. Frankenstein, lost control of their creatures. The used became the users, and in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan – and now, New York and Washington – they have killed their thousands, and their tens of thousands.
In the name of religion. In the service of patriotism. In the lust for power – to project their dominance.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and is with us always.
But atrocity tends to raze the ground of history. In the aftermath, with the cries of lamentation rising over fresh graves, it is always Zero Hour. "That which happened" – to borrow the poet Paul Celan's phrase for the Nazis' unspeakable crimes – buries what came before, effaces the paths that led us to this place, strips away the cloak of reason (a thin rag in the best of times), and leaves nothing but the bare, anguished call for revenge.
So the leaders, the blind men, assemble. They call urgently for war – against someone, somewhere; they cannot say who, because they cannot see. The intelligence services are put to work – perhaps they will find a new pawn, someone to turn against the one who has turned against them; someone new to embrace, arm, pay, empower. Perhaps the missiles will streak and the bomb bays will open indiscriminately, as before. Or perhaps it will be left to assassins, surgeons of death who will use the terrorist's own weapons of treachery and surprise to destroy the culprits – and the inevitable "collaterals."
Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs. And who now can break this cycle, which has been going on for generations? Past folly undoes us, but who, in the Zero Hour, can ignore the lamentations? Who can deny the ghosts, these loved ones gone, the red food demanded by the dead?
There is no answer. It will not stop. They say the world has now changed irreversibly, that nothing will ever be the same. But it will be the same. The same engines of hatred, the same murk, the same dirt, the same mixed matter in human brains.
This is not a new evil. It's as old as the hills, and it is with us always.
"Even unto the end of the world."
Chris Floyd
Some Direction Home: Following Bob Dylan Down the Old Plank Road
There's a legend in my family that we are kin to Uncle Dave Macon. We are for certain distant cousins to the Macons of Wilson County – and Uncle Dave lived in the next county over. My parents met him once, driving to his farm one afternoon when they were teenagers, not yet married. This was not too long before his death.
They found him sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. He greeted the young strangers like the kinfolk one of them might well have been, invited them into the house, showed them his memorabilia, and gave my mother – one of "them pretty girls from Tennessee" he sang about so often – a small, delicate glass deer as a memento of the visit. Back out on the porch, he picked up his banjo and did a couple of comic numbers from the rocking chair, feet keeping time on the wooden boards. There looked to be some whisky in his friendly manner, they said; perhaps a noonday dram before they had arrived.
It was all over soon enough, but a photograph survives to record the event, a black-and-white print taken with my mother's camera. Uncle Dave is in the rocking chair, legs crossed, battered hat perched on his head, banjo in his lap. His face is puffy, pitted, cadaverous; the fire that had stoked him since his hot young days – in the still-churning wake of the Civil War – is finally going out. A dying man, from a dying world.
But he played for the young folks anyway, out of courtesy, for the hell of it, conjuring up another reality out of rhythm, strings and joyful noise, then letting it dissolve into the air. "Won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, way down the old plank road…"
***
Despite the reputed kinship and this ancestral encounter, the first Uncle Dave Macon song I ever actually heard was one recorded by Bob Dylan: "Sarah Jane." This was on the "revenge" album of out-takes and studio warm-ups that Columbia Records put out after Dylan temporarily left the fold in the early Seventies. When I first heard the song, I thought Dylan had written it himself; certainly the line, "I got a wife and five little children," sung with such full-throated exuberance, seemed like straight autobiography. I didn't realize then the kind of alchemy Dylan could work on other people's songs, how he could make them his own, right down to the marrow.
Like most people who get into Dylan, at first I was dazzled by the originality of his vision, his words, the brilliant fragments of his own kaleidoscopic personality as they were lit up in turn by each new style, each different take or tonal mood. His work seemed a perfect embodiment of the Romantic ideal: art as the vibrant expression of the self – defiant, heroic, fiercely personal. But while that stance is as valid as most of the other illusions that sustain us, it only takes you so far. What I've come to realize over the years is that Dylan's music is not primarily about expressing yourself – it's about losing yourself, escaping the self and all its confusions, corruptions, pettiness and decay. It's about getting to some place far beyond the self, "where nature neither honors nor forgives." Dylan gives himself up to the song, and to the deeper reality it creates in the few charged moments of its existence. We can step through the door he opens to that far place and see what happens.
Dylan's words – original, striking, piercing, apt – are marvelous, of course. Like Shakespeare's, they knit themselves into your consciousness, become part of the way you see and speak the world. But the true alchemy lies in the performance. The phrasing is more important than the phrases, no matter who happened to write them. The grain in his voice – the jagged edge that catches and tears at the weave of life as it flies past – is what moves us through that open door. Along with the music, obviously: the mathematical and emotional interplay among the musicians, shaped by Dylan's guiding will. When it all works, and it usually does, it's artistry of the highest order. As they say back home, you can't beat it with a stick.
***
You can follow Dylan through many doors, into many realms: the disordered sensuality of Symbolist poetry, the high bohemia and low comedy of the Beats and Brecht, the guilt-ridden, God-yearning psalms of King David, the Gospel road of Jesus Christ, the shiv-sharp romance of Bogart and Bacall. There's Emerson in there, too, Keats, Whitman, even Rilke if you look hard enough: fodder for a thousand footnotes, signposts to a hundred sources of further enlightenment.
But if you go far enough with Dylan, he'll always lead you back to the old music. This is the foundation, the deepest roots of his art, of his power. For me, as for so many people, he was the spirit guide to this other world, this vanished heritage. He has somehow – well, not just "somehow," but through hard work and endless absorption – managed to keep the tradition alive. Not as a museum piece, not like a zoo animal, but as a free, thriving, unpredictable beast, still on the prowl, still extending its range.
Early on, Dylan realized that the essence of the old music was not to be found in the particular styles of picking and singing rigorously classified by the ethnographers and carefully preserved by purists. Traditional music was idiosyncratic, created by thousands of unique individuals working their personal artistry on whatever musical materials came to hand, in cotton fields, coal mines, granges, churches, factories, ports, city streets and country roads. Who else in the world ever sounded like Roscoe Holcomb or Charley Patton? Their art was as distinctive as that of Beethoven and Chopin, who also drew on traditional elements to make their music.
No, what the old music held in common, what made it penetrating and great, was not some mythological collective origin or expression of sociocultural mores; it was a shared DNA of fundamental themes, fundamental truths – the double helix of joy and mortality, threaded like twine, tangled like snakes, inextricable, irresolvable. It was this genetic code that Dylan used to grow his own art, in its own unique forms.
Joy and mortality: the psychic pain of being alive, your mind and senses flooded with exquisite wonders, miraculous comprehensions – and the simultaneous knowledge of death, the relentless push of time, the fleeting nature of every single experience, every situation, every moment, dying even as it rises. There's pain waiting somewhere – from within or without – in every joy, a canker in every rose we pluck from the ground of being.
This awareness shadows the old music – deepens it, gives it the bite of eternal truth. It's there even in the joyful noise of Uncle Dave Macon, so happy that he whoops out "Kill yourself!" in manic glee as he gallops down the old plank road. Yet in the songs that deal directly with this shadow, such as the blues, full of hard knowledge, hard pain, the very act of singing that pain gives rise to a subtle joy, and a kind of solace. The old songs, and the ones Dylan has built upon them, create another reality, an impossible reconciliation, where time stands still, life and death embrace, decay is banished, and all our pettiness, our evil urges, our confusions are arrested and transcended. Until, of course, the song itself, being mortal, fades away as the music ends.
***
Dylan's music can provide a doorway out of yourself – "a pathway that leads up to the stars" – but it can also help bring you back to yourself, to what you should be doing with your life: attending to these eternal truths, trying to take that code and carry it forward, pass it along, using whatever materials – musical or otherwise – that your life and history and inclinations have given you. In this case, Dylan brought me back to my own heritage; it was decades after hearing his "Sarah Jane" that I first mentioned Uncle Dave Macon to my father and heard the story of that long-ago visit, and was given the photograph to keep, and pass on.
Perhaps the kind of transcendence I've talked about here only works if you're a certain kind of person, with your nerves aligned in a certain way, attuned to a certain signal. Perhaps it's all a happenstance of biochemistry. I don't know. In a world where every understanding, no matter how profound, is provisional, temporary, clouded and corrupted, I wouldn't make universal claims for any particular path. I do think that the experience of the heightened reality offered by Dylan's music – and by all the places he leads us to – holds out the promise of a rough-hewn wisdom, something that can make us feel more alive while we're living, while our brief moment is passing.
Anyway, it works for me.
Chris Floyd
This is an extended version of a column originally published in The Moscow Times, Dec. 24, 2004. It is excerpted from the upcoming book, Encounters With Bob Dylan, Vol. II, edited by Tracy Johnson. .
They found him sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. He greeted the young strangers like the kinfolk one of them might well have been, invited them into the house, showed them his memorabilia, and gave my mother – one of "them pretty girls from Tennessee" he sang about so often – a small, delicate glass deer as a memento of the visit. Back out on the porch, he picked up his banjo and did a couple of comic numbers from the rocking chair, feet keeping time on the wooden boards. There looked to be some whisky in his friendly manner, they said; perhaps a noonday dram before they had arrived.
It was all over soon enough, but a photograph survives to record the event, a black-and-white print taken with my mother's camera. Uncle Dave is in the rocking chair, legs crossed, battered hat perched on his head, banjo in his lap. His face is puffy, pitted, cadaverous; the fire that had stoked him since his hot young days – in the still-churning wake of the Civil War – is finally going out. A dying man, from a dying world.
But he played for the young folks anyway, out of courtesy, for the hell of it, conjuring up another reality out of rhythm, strings and joyful noise, then letting it dissolve into the air. "Won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, won't get drunk no more, way down the old plank road…"
***
Despite the reputed kinship and this ancestral encounter, the first Uncle Dave Macon song I ever actually heard was one recorded by Bob Dylan: "Sarah Jane." This was on the "revenge" album of out-takes and studio warm-ups that Columbia Records put out after Dylan temporarily left the fold in the early Seventies. When I first heard the song, I thought Dylan had written it himself; certainly the line, "I got a wife and five little children," sung with such full-throated exuberance, seemed like straight autobiography. I didn't realize then the kind of alchemy Dylan could work on other people's songs, how he could make them his own, right down to the marrow.
Like most people who get into Dylan, at first I was dazzled by the originality of his vision, his words, the brilliant fragments of his own kaleidoscopic personality as they were lit up in turn by each new style, each different take or tonal mood. His work seemed a perfect embodiment of the Romantic ideal: art as the vibrant expression of the self – defiant, heroic, fiercely personal. But while that stance is as valid as most of the other illusions that sustain us, it only takes you so far. What I've come to realize over the years is that Dylan's music is not primarily about expressing yourself – it's about losing yourself, escaping the self and all its confusions, corruptions, pettiness and decay. It's about getting to some place far beyond the self, "where nature neither honors nor forgives." Dylan gives himself up to the song, and to the deeper reality it creates in the few charged moments of its existence. We can step through the door he opens to that far place and see what happens.
Dylan's words – original, striking, piercing, apt – are marvelous, of course. Like Shakespeare's, they knit themselves into your consciousness, become part of the way you see and speak the world. But the true alchemy lies in the performance. The phrasing is more important than the phrases, no matter who happened to write them. The grain in his voice – the jagged edge that catches and tears at the weave of life as it flies past – is what moves us through that open door. Along with the music, obviously: the mathematical and emotional interplay among the musicians, shaped by Dylan's guiding will. When it all works, and it usually does, it's artistry of the highest order. As they say back home, you can't beat it with a stick.
***
You can follow Dylan through many doors, into many realms: the disordered sensuality of Symbolist poetry, the high bohemia and low comedy of the Beats and Brecht, the guilt-ridden, God-yearning psalms of King David, the Gospel road of Jesus Christ, the shiv-sharp romance of Bogart and Bacall. There's Emerson in there, too, Keats, Whitman, even Rilke if you look hard enough: fodder for a thousand footnotes, signposts to a hundred sources of further enlightenment.
But if you go far enough with Dylan, he'll always lead you back to the old music. This is the foundation, the deepest roots of his art, of his power. For me, as for so many people, he was the spirit guide to this other world, this vanished heritage. He has somehow – well, not just "somehow," but through hard work and endless absorption – managed to keep the tradition alive. Not as a museum piece, not like a zoo animal, but as a free, thriving, unpredictable beast, still on the prowl, still extending its range.
Early on, Dylan realized that the essence of the old music was not to be found in the particular styles of picking and singing rigorously classified by the ethnographers and carefully preserved by purists. Traditional music was idiosyncratic, created by thousands of unique individuals working their personal artistry on whatever musical materials came to hand, in cotton fields, coal mines, granges, churches, factories, ports, city streets and country roads. Who else in the world ever sounded like Roscoe Holcomb or Charley Patton? Their art was as distinctive as that of Beethoven and Chopin, who also drew on traditional elements to make their music.
No, what the old music held in common, what made it penetrating and great, was not some mythological collective origin or expression of sociocultural mores; it was a shared DNA of fundamental themes, fundamental truths – the double helix of joy and mortality, threaded like twine, tangled like snakes, inextricable, irresolvable. It was this genetic code that Dylan used to grow his own art, in its own unique forms.
Joy and mortality: the psychic pain of being alive, your mind and senses flooded with exquisite wonders, miraculous comprehensions – and the simultaneous knowledge of death, the relentless push of time, the fleeting nature of every single experience, every situation, every moment, dying even as it rises. There's pain waiting somewhere – from within or without – in every joy, a canker in every rose we pluck from the ground of being.
This awareness shadows the old music – deepens it, gives it the bite of eternal truth. It's there even in the joyful noise of Uncle Dave Macon, so happy that he whoops out "Kill yourself!" in manic glee as he gallops down the old plank road. Yet in the songs that deal directly with this shadow, such as the blues, full of hard knowledge, hard pain, the very act of singing that pain gives rise to a subtle joy, and a kind of solace. The old songs, and the ones Dylan has built upon them, create another reality, an impossible reconciliation, where time stands still, life and death embrace, decay is banished, and all our pettiness, our evil urges, our confusions are arrested and transcended. Until, of course, the song itself, being mortal, fades away as the music ends.
***
Dylan's music can provide a doorway out of yourself – "a pathway that leads up to the stars" – but it can also help bring you back to yourself, to what you should be doing with your life: attending to these eternal truths, trying to take that code and carry it forward, pass it along, using whatever materials – musical or otherwise – that your life and history and inclinations have given you. In this case, Dylan brought me back to my own heritage; it was decades after hearing his "Sarah Jane" that I first mentioned Uncle Dave Macon to my father and heard the story of that long-ago visit, and was given the photograph to keep, and pass on.
Perhaps the kind of transcendence I've talked about here only works if you're a certain kind of person, with your nerves aligned in a certain way, attuned to a certain signal. Perhaps it's all a happenstance of biochemistry. I don't know. In a world where every understanding, no matter how profound, is provisional, temporary, clouded and corrupted, I wouldn't make universal claims for any particular path. I do think that the experience of the heightened reality offered by Dylan's music – and by all the places he leads us to – holds out the promise of a rough-hewn wisdom, something that can make us feel more alive while we're living, while our brief moment is passing.
Anyway, it works for me.
Chris Floyd
This is an extended version of a column originally published in The Moscow Times, Dec. 24, 2004. It is excerpted from the upcoming book, Encounters With Bob Dylan, Vol. II, edited by Tracy Johnson. .
Tattoo Nation: America Pays the Cover Charge for Bush's War Crimes
Longer version of a Moscow Times column for the May 27, 2005 edition. Published on CounterPunch.org, May 25.
Seymour Hersh, chronicler of American madness from the My Lai Massacre to Abu Ghraib, tells a chilling story of the lingering aftermath of atrocity.
As the revelations of brutal torture by the victors were first spilling from conquered Iraq, Hersh was contacted by a family member of a young American woman who had served in a unit policing Abu Ghraib, the Guardian reports. The young soldier had "come back a different person," the relative said: distraught and angry, turning her back on her family.
The relative retrieved a computer she'd lent the soldier to use in Iraq and found there a file crammed with torture porn: photo after photo of a naked Iraqi prisoner writhing before the onslaught of fierce police dogs. One of the pictures was later published worldwide and became an emblem of the dehumanizing brutality of the American occupation.
The young soldier thought she'd been sent to fight for democracy and freedom, the relative told Hersh, but it was a lie. Instead she found herself in Hell, committing crimes, violating her own nature, her sense of duty perverted by leaders who twisted it into a weapon to serve aggressive war. Since her return, said the relative, the young soldier keeps getting black tattoos, more and more of them, slowly covering her entire body -- trying literally to change her skin.
The fate of this soul-broken, tormented daughter of America embodies the nation itself under the malevolent reign of George W. Bush. The whole country is changing its skin, trying to cloak its shame and complicity by a wilful disfigurement. Who could look on the hideous form of Bush's America -- the snarling faces belching rancor on Fox News; the rabid partisans oozing bile through the halls of Congress; the money-glutting religious extremists relentlessly pushing ignorance, intolerance and theocratic dominion; the corporate beasts devouring the landscape, destroying communities, writing their own laws, gorging on unprecedented profits wrung from global sweatshops, corruption and war; the somnolent, silent, acquiescent public, blankly countenancing torture, deceit, elitist rule, military aggression and the open destruction of their Constitutional order -- and not see in all this a body politic in profound psychological crisis: traumatized, guilt-ridden, turning itself inside out in a frantic attempt to escape the truth?
And this desperation only grows as the truth piles up, fragment by fragment, dug out from Bush's slagheap of lies. In the past month, there have been a barrage of "smoking guns" outlining the Regime's criminality in such stark and blatant terms that even the American corporate media -- those cringing enablers of atrocity -- have been forced to take some notice.
First came the final report of Bush's own inspection team, confirming, yet again, that there were no weapons of mass destruction or even any WMD programs in Iraq: they had all been destroyed 12 years before Bush's invasion. Then there was the leak of the 2002 "Downing Street Memo," where the UK's war council confirmed, once again, that Bush was determined to conquer Iraq no matter what, and was "fixing the facts and intelligence around the policy."
Of course, this was old news to anyone outside the American media's echo chamber. For example, we reported here in September 2002 that top Bushists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had signed off on a plan in September 2000 calling for the military occupation of Iraq -- even if Saddam Hussein's regime had already been overthrown. Thus the "liberation" of the Iraqi was just as much a phony casus belli as the non-existent WMD.
Even more fresh evidence of Bush's deliberate deception surfaced in the Washington Post last week, with a story detailing the mountain of doubts, caveats and outright debunking about Iraq WMD that U.S. intelligence services placed on Bush's desk before the war -- all of it wilfully ignored as Bush continued to deceive the nation about the "undoubted" WMD "threat."
Then last week, the New York Times highlighted Bush's murderous torture system in Afghanistan: American captors beating prisoners to death, pulpifying their limbs as part of a regimen of exquisite torments later exported to Iraq -- including Abu Ghraib, where Hersh's tattooed soldier entered Hell.
We have reported here in great detail on the voluminous evidence establishing that the endemic, systematic torture in Bush's gulag was created by the White House, sanctioned by Bush's appointed "legal experts" who ruled that as Commander-in-Chief, he is not constrained by laws against torture -- or indeed, by any law whatsoever. Equally copious evidence establishes that Rumsfeld and selected Pentagon officials eagerly implemented the torture regimen -- then systematically worked to block or limit investigations once the truth began leaking out.
For example, one of the low-ranking "bad apples" finally convicted in the Afghan murders -- after extended Pentagon coverups -- was sentenced to just three months in jail by a military court this week, AP reports: three months for helping beat a chained, helpless man to death. The message Bush is sending to his shock troops in the gulag is clear: If by some freak chance your torture duties are uncovered, you will be gently removed from the scene with only nominal punishment -- as long as you don't rat out your superiors, of course.
The evidence of the Regime's culpability -- for torture, for mass murder -- is overwhelming. The burden of proof is no longer on Bush's accusers, but on those who would defend his evil actions. Yes, evil is the word. The Nuremberg Tribunal called aggressive war "essentially an evil thing." To initiate such a war -- under any circumstances -- "is not only an international crime," said the Tribunal, "it is the supreme international crime," because it carries all the others in its wake. It breaks down all barriers of law and morality, in states and in individuals, creating the necessary inner chaos -- and physical opportunity -- for the most abysmal perversions of human nature.
There are of course many other evils in the world, including the terrorism that Bush invokes, mendaciously, to justify an act of aggression that he planned long before the September 11 attacks. But the invasion of Iraq is the "supreme international crime" of our day. No tattoo, no new skin can blot it out.
Chris Floyd
ANNOTATIONS
Seymour Hersh, chronicler of American madness from the My Lai Massacre to Abu Ghraib, tells a chilling story of the lingering aftermath of atrocity.
As the revelations of brutal torture by the victors were first spilling from conquered Iraq, Hersh was contacted by a family member of a young American woman who had served in a unit policing Abu Ghraib, the Guardian reports. The young soldier had "come back a different person," the relative said: distraught and angry, turning her back on her family.
The relative retrieved a computer she'd lent the soldier to use in Iraq and found there a file crammed with torture porn: photo after photo of a naked Iraqi prisoner writhing before the onslaught of fierce police dogs. One of the pictures was later published worldwide and became an emblem of the dehumanizing brutality of the American occupation.
The young soldier thought she'd been sent to fight for democracy and freedom, the relative told Hersh, but it was a lie. Instead she found herself in Hell, committing crimes, violating her own nature, her sense of duty perverted by leaders who twisted it into a weapon to serve aggressive war. Since her return, said the relative, the young soldier keeps getting black tattoos, more and more of them, slowly covering her entire body -- trying literally to change her skin.
The fate of this soul-broken, tormented daughter of America embodies the nation itself under the malevolent reign of George W. Bush. The whole country is changing its skin, trying to cloak its shame and complicity by a wilful disfigurement. Who could look on the hideous form of Bush's America -- the snarling faces belching rancor on Fox News; the rabid partisans oozing bile through the halls of Congress; the money-glutting religious extremists relentlessly pushing ignorance, intolerance and theocratic dominion; the corporate beasts devouring the landscape, destroying communities, writing their own laws, gorging on unprecedented profits wrung from global sweatshops, corruption and war; the somnolent, silent, acquiescent public, blankly countenancing torture, deceit, elitist rule, military aggression and the open destruction of their Constitutional order -- and not see in all this a body politic in profound psychological crisis: traumatized, guilt-ridden, turning itself inside out in a frantic attempt to escape the truth?
And this desperation only grows as the truth piles up, fragment by fragment, dug out from Bush's slagheap of lies. In the past month, there have been a barrage of "smoking guns" outlining the Regime's criminality in such stark and blatant terms that even the American corporate media -- those cringing enablers of atrocity -- have been forced to take some notice.
First came the final report of Bush's own inspection team, confirming, yet again, that there were no weapons of mass destruction or even any WMD programs in Iraq: they had all been destroyed 12 years before Bush's invasion. Then there was the leak of the 2002 "Downing Street Memo," where the UK's war council confirmed, once again, that Bush was determined to conquer Iraq no matter what, and was "fixing the facts and intelligence around the policy."
Of course, this was old news to anyone outside the American media's echo chamber. For example, we reported here in September 2002 that top Bushists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had signed off on a plan in September 2000 calling for the military occupation of Iraq -- even if Saddam Hussein's regime had already been overthrown. Thus the "liberation" of the Iraqi was just as much a phony casus belli as the non-existent WMD.
Even more fresh evidence of Bush's deliberate deception surfaced in the Washington Post last week, with a story detailing the mountain of doubts, caveats and outright debunking about Iraq WMD that U.S. intelligence services placed on Bush's desk before the war -- all of it wilfully ignored as Bush continued to deceive the nation about the "undoubted" WMD "threat."
Then last week, the New York Times highlighted Bush's murderous torture system in Afghanistan: American captors beating prisoners to death, pulpifying their limbs as part of a regimen of exquisite torments later exported to Iraq -- including Abu Ghraib, where Hersh's tattooed soldier entered Hell.
We have reported here in great detail on the voluminous evidence establishing that the endemic, systematic torture in Bush's gulag was created by the White House, sanctioned by Bush's appointed "legal experts" who ruled that as Commander-in-Chief, he is not constrained by laws against torture -- or indeed, by any law whatsoever. Equally copious evidence establishes that Rumsfeld and selected Pentagon officials eagerly implemented the torture regimen -- then systematically worked to block or limit investigations once the truth began leaking out.
For example, one of the low-ranking "bad apples" finally convicted in the Afghan murders -- after extended Pentagon coverups -- was sentenced to just three months in jail by a military court this week, AP reports: three months for helping beat a chained, helpless man to death. The message Bush is sending to his shock troops in the gulag is clear: If by some freak chance your torture duties are uncovered, you will be gently removed from the scene with only nominal punishment -- as long as you don't rat out your superiors, of course.
The evidence of the Regime's culpability -- for torture, for mass murder -- is overwhelming. The burden of proof is no longer on Bush's accusers, but on those who would defend his evil actions. Yes, evil is the word. The Nuremberg Tribunal called aggressive war "essentially an evil thing." To initiate such a war -- under any circumstances -- "is not only an international crime," said the Tribunal, "it is the supreme international crime," because it carries all the others in its wake. It breaks down all barriers of law and morality, in states and in individuals, creating the necessary inner chaos -- and physical opportunity -- for the most abysmal perversions of human nature.
There are of course many other evils in the world, including the terrorism that Bush invokes, mendaciously, to justify an act of aggression that he planned long before the September 11 attacks. But the invasion of Iraq is the "supreme international crime" of our day. No tattoo, no new skin can blot it out.
Chris Floyd
ANNOTATIONS
Ring of Fire: The Fallujah Inferno
Originally published in The Moscow Times on November 19, 2004.
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic – transforming human blood into gold.
"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."
This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings – and, above all, the reports of "embedded" journalists shaping the "narrative" into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as "Satan," the Associated Press reports.
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism – specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack; yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah – and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months.
But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an "al Qaeda ally in Iraq" – even though Zarqawi was on Bush's Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him – a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources.
Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.
ANNOTATIONS:
"Inside Fallujah: One Family’s Diary of Terror [Artica Salim],"
Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/46056
"Smoke and Corpses,"BBC, Nov. 11, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4004873.stm
"20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent,"
UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=44075&SelectRegion=Iraq_Crisis&SelectCountry=IRAQ
"US Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital,"BBC, Nov. 6, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3988433.stm
"Civilians Killed While Crossing Euphrates,"
Associated Press, Nov. 14, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041114/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_escaping_fallujah_1
"Ghost City Calls for Help,"BBC, Nov. 13, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4008887.stm
"Questions Mount on Bush Failure to Hit Zarqawi Camp,"
Wall Streent Journal, Oct. 25, 2004
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB109866031609354178-IdjgYNhlaR3n52paIKIaKmGm4,00.html
"Civilian Cost of Battle for Fallujah Emerges,"The Observer, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062732-103550,00.html
"Fallujah a Sea of Rubble and Death After Offensive,"
Reuters, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO446775.htm
"A City lies in Ruins, Along with the Lives of the Wretched Survivors,"
The Independent, Nov. 15, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582915
"The Enemy Has Got a Face: He's Called Satan,"
Associated Press, Nov. 6, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041106/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq&cid=540&ncid=716
"Marlboro Men Kick Butt in Fallujah,"New York Post, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.nypost.com/seven/11102004/index.shtml
"Let Them Drink Sand: War Crimes in Fallujah,"CounterPunch, Nov. 13, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132004.html
"American Heroes,"
Baghdad Burning, Nov. 16, 2004
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#110063119588554403
"Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Roam Free,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes392.html
"Sy Hersh: The Relentless Bombing of Iraq,"
Editor and Publisher, Nov. 11, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000717958
"A City in Ruins, Sky Full of Smoke: 'Let's Kick Ass the American Way!"
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062701-103550,00.html
"I Got My Kills; I Just Love my Job,"Daily Telegraph, Nov. 9, 2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/09/wirq109.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/09/ixnewstop.html
"Marine Kills Injured Prisoner in Falluhah Mosque,"MSNBC, Nov. 15, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6496898/
"'This One's Faking He's Dead.' 'He's Dead Now,"
The Independent, Nov. 16, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=583322
"Running Out of Patients: Fallujah Hospital Bombing,"The Village Voice, Nov. 7, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000514.php
"Iraq Hospitals Could be Used as Propaganda Centers, says Pentagon,"New York Times, Nov. 8, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/international/08CND_IRAQ.html?ei=5094&en=8b32979d8c8d9235&hp=&ex=1099976400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
"We're Not Focused on Zarqawi, General Says,"
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49798-2004Nov14?language=printer
"A Wrecked Nation, a Desert, a Ghost Town. And This Will Be Called Victory,"
The Times, Nov. 17, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1361818,00.html
"John Pilger: The Unthinkable Becomes Normal,"
New Statesman, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=3965
"Few Foreign Fighters Among Insurgents,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 2004
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/la-fg-fighters16nov16,0,3409500,print.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
"US Suspects Many Insurgents Have Fled,"Washington Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041112-120122-7344r
"Fallujah 101,"In These Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/fallujah_101/
"The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic – transforming human blood into gold.
"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."
This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings – and, above all, the reports of "embedded" journalists shaping the "narrative" into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as "Satan," the Associated Press reports.
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism – specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack; yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah – and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months.
But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an "al Qaeda ally in Iraq" – even though Zarqawi was on Bush's Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him – a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources.
Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.
ANNOTATIONS:
"Inside Fallujah: One Family’s Diary of Terror [Artica Salim],"
Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/46056
"Smoke and Corpses,"BBC, Nov. 11, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4004873.stm
"20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent,"
UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=44075&SelectRegion=Iraq_Crisis&SelectCountry=IRAQ
"US Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital,"BBC, Nov. 6, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3988433.stm
"Civilians Killed While Crossing Euphrates,"
Associated Press, Nov. 14, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041114/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_escaping_fallujah_1
"Ghost City Calls for Help,"BBC, Nov. 13, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4008887.stm
"Questions Mount on Bush Failure to Hit Zarqawi Camp,"
Wall Streent Journal, Oct. 25, 2004
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB109866031609354178-IdjgYNhlaR3n52paIKIaKmGm4,00.html
"Civilian Cost of Battle for Fallujah Emerges,"The Observer, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062732-103550,00.html
"Fallujah a Sea of Rubble and Death After Offensive,"
Reuters, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO446775.htm
"A City lies in Ruins, Along with the Lives of the Wretched Survivors,"
The Independent, Nov. 15, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=582915
"The Enemy Has Got a Face: He's Called Satan,"
Associated Press, Nov. 6, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041106/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq&cid=540&ncid=716
"Marlboro Men Kick Butt in Fallujah,"New York Post, Nov. 10, 2004
http://www.nypost.com/seven/11102004/index.shtml
"Let Them Drink Sand: War Crimes in Fallujah,"CounterPunch, Nov. 13, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132004.html
"American Heroes,"
Baghdad Burning, Nov. 16, 2004
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#110063119588554403
"Beyond Embattled City, Rebels Roam Free,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes392.html
"Sy Hersh: The Relentless Bombing of Iraq,"
Editor and Publisher, Nov. 11, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000717958
"A City in Ruins, Sky Full of Smoke: 'Let's Kick Ass the American Way!"
The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5062701-103550,00.html
"I Got My Kills; I Just Love my Job,"Daily Telegraph, Nov. 9, 2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/09/wirq109.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/09/ixnewstop.html
"Marine Kills Injured Prisoner in Falluhah Mosque,"MSNBC, Nov. 15, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6496898/
"'This One's Faking He's Dead.' 'He's Dead Now,"
The Independent, Nov. 16, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=583322
"Running Out of Patients: Fallujah Hospital Bombing,"The Village Voice, Nov. 7, 2004
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000514.php
"Iraq Hospitals Could be Used as Propaganda Centers, says Pentagon,"New York Times, Nov. 8, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/international/08CND_IRAQ.html?ei=5094&en=8b32979d8c8d9235&hp=&ex=1099976400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
"We're Not Focused on Zarqawi, General Says,"
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49798-2004Nov14?language=printer
"A Wrecked Nation, a Desert, a Ghost Town. And This Will Be Called Victory,"
The Times, Nov. 17, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1361818,00.html
"John Pilger: The Unthinkable Becomes Normal,"
New Statesman, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=3965
"Few Foreign Fighters Among Insurgents,"Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 2004
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/la-fg-fighters16nov16,0,3409500,print.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines
"US Suspects Many Insurgents Have Fled,"Washington Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041112-120122-7344r
"Fallujah 101,"In These Times, Nov. 12, 2004
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/fallujah_101/
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Unnatural Acts: No Place for Mercy in Bush's Babylon
Originally published in The Moscow Times, April 13, 2004.
After months of bad press, here at last was an act of genuine humanitarianism by U.S. troops in Iraq that could have been trumpeted to the skies: a unit of National Guard troops – part-time citizen-soldiers from Oregon – rescuing a group of prisoners from sadistic torture by the security forces of the newly "sovereign" Iraqi government. Yet the incident was buried by American brass, who repudiated their own soldiers – and backed the Iraqi torturers.
It happened on June 29 – the first full day of Iraqi "sovereignty" -- when a Guardsman on routine patrol in an observation tower near a Baghdad prison saw Iraqi guards beating bound and blindfolded prisoners with metal rods, The Oregonian reported last week. The soldier called in the atrocity, and men from his unit were ordered into the prison. There they found dozens of prisoners – including children – bloodied, bruised, shot, starving, crammed into concrete pens, lying in their own filth. Torture implements were scattered through the compound, said the paper: "rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals."
The Guard troops – many of whom said they'd been shamed by the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib – disarmed the Iraqi security men and began giving first aid, water and food to the prisoners. They questioned the mysterious Iraqi civilian in charge – an "obese man" in swank mufti. He told them there'd been no torture at all – and anyway, these prisoners were just street scum: "thieves, users of marijuana and other types of bad people," according to the written account of the incident provided by eyewitness Captain Jarrell Southall and corroborated by the other soldiers.
There was no claim that the prisoners were insurgents or terrorists. Most of them had been rounded up in the poorest sections of Baghdad during broad, brutal "security sweeps" ordered by Iyad Allawi, the former terrorist chieftain and Baathist Party enforcer now serving as the unelected overseer of the Bush Regime's Iraqi plantation. (In this, the prisoners doubtless shared the fate of their brethren in Abu Ghraib, where the Red Cross says that 70-90 percent of the thousands of captives taken by the Americans were innocent of wrongdoing.)
Having stopped the torture, the Oregon soldiers asked for further orders: what should they do now? The request was relayed up far up the chain of command, and the answer came back from on high: Go away – and give the prisoners back to the men who were torturing them. Give back the weapons, give back the torture tools, stop helping the prisoners, mind your own business.
And that was it. The American troops, outraged but obedient, withdrew. The prisoners – the wounded men, the bleeding children – were bound up again and shoved back into the stinking pits. Why? It's simple. Because the Iraqi security goons were doing exactly what George W. Bush wanted them to do.
One year ago this month, we noted here that Bush had begun hiring agents of Saddam's murderous security service, the Mukhabarat – "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment," as the Washington Post described it then. Top Bush officials confirmed they were secretly putting dozens, perhaps hundreds of Saddam's most vicious killers and rapists on the U.S. payroll, the Post reported.
We must admit to shockingly childish naiveté in that earlier column. Although the Eye did voice some mild criticism of Bush's Mukhabarat embrace ("a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum," was the demure phrase), at the time we assumed Bush was simply looking for local proxies to do his dirty work, so American soldiers wouldn't have to. Now, of course, we all know that Bush and his top legal advisors had already spent months concocting devious "justifications" for a systematic torture regimen to be used by U.S. forces throughout a global gulag of hidey holes, secret prisons, holding pens and concentration camps. The Abu Ghraib crimes that so shamed the Oregon soldiers are just one small chunk of a giant dungheap that is very slowly but surely oozing into view – and creeping up toward its Oval originators.
So Bush obviously didn't want the Mukhabarat as a proxy for the dirty work; he was glad – even eager – to have Americans taint themselves with such evil. Saddam's men were not substitutes but reinforcements, allies, comrades-in-arms in the noble crusade to put a more pliable strongman on Iraq's throne. Of course, the American military presence in Iraq – planned years ago by Bushist cadres – is wildly unpopular among the conquered. Thus for Bush's great work of looting and dominance to continue, the Iraqi people must be beaten down – with metal rods, if necessary.
And that's what it's all about: loot. Bush's own auditors confessed last month that at least $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money controlled by the Americans is now unaccounted for, Colonel David Hackworth reports in DefenseWatch. This secret siphon – doubtless sloshing into offshore accounts around the world, as Hackworth notes – is on top of the tens of billions in tax dollars openly pumped to Bush's corporate cronies and campaign donors.
But that's just the short-end money. Getting a stranglehold on world oil supplies through the strategic Iraqi bottleneck – the ultimate object of the whole blood-soaked exercise – will be worth trillions as reserves begin running out in the coming decades. For Bush is not just thinking of himself, you see; no, he's fighting to secure the future for generations of corrupt elitists yet unborn.
And for that, he needs terrorists, torturers, ruthless goons – not a bunch of Oregon boy scouts gumming up the works with acts of mercy.
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago: Trapped in a Net of State Terrorism
Original version published in The Moscow Times, March 19, 2004
This is the story of three innocent men, held in brutal captivity for more than two years; three innocent men, stripped, blinded, beaten, tortured, caged and silenced, all in the name of freedom and civilization; three innocent men, ground into the dust by an implacable power that defends its "enduring moral values" with the boot in the groin, the gun to the head – and the abetting of atrocity and murder.
This is the story of three innocent men, held in brutal captivity for more than two years; three innocent men, stripped, blinded, beaten, tortured, caged and silenced, all in the name of freedom and civilization; three innocent men, ground into the dust by an implacable power that defends its "enduring moral values" with the boot in the groin, the gun to the head – and the abetting of atrocity and murder.
It's the story of three Britons released this month from the U.S. concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – 26 months after they began their progress through the guts of the Pentagon Archipelago, the chain of American detention camps and "interrogation centers" that now encircle the earth. In a remarkable interview with David Rose of The Observer – a pro-war UK paper – Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal from the middle England town of Tipton told the tale of their ordeal in the Bush Regime's legal purgatory.
(But first – who says these guys are innocent? They're Muslims, ain't they? They were captured by God's own soldiers in the devil land of Afghanistan, weren't they? As President Bush's new campaign ads have reminded us, every Ayrab-looking swarthian out there is a card-carrying terrorist minion of Osama bin Kerry unless proven otherwise by the proper authorities. So who exactly has cleared these men of all charges? Well, let's see: the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, MI5, MI6, London's Metropolitan Police, and the governments of the United States and Great Britain. Will that do?)
The three men, lifelong friends in their early twenties, went to Pakistan in September 2001 for Iqbal's wedding. The following month, as Afghanistan's civil war flared under the shadow of the impending American attack, the friends joined Muslim relief efforts in war-ravaged Afghan villages. As avowed moderates, they were under constant threat from the Taliban – the virulent extremists who'd been armed, funded and sustained in power by U.S. ally Pakistan and the Bush Family's business partners in Saudi Arabia.
When American bombs started falling, the friends tried to flee the country. But they were trapped in Kunduz with thousands of refugees when the city fell to U.S.-backed warlord Rashid Dostum, a former Soviet collaborator turned jihadnik. Known for his macabre punishments – he liked to see his victims torn apart by tanks – Dostum fell upon the surrendered masses with his wonted fury. Thousands died on a death march through the mountains to Shebargan, where Dostum linked up with U.S. Special Forces. There, the captives, including the Tipton men, were packed by the hundreds into metal truck trailers, where they were left for days to suffocate and die. Fires were lit under some of the trailers, roasting those trapped inside. Of the 35,000 who left Kunduz, only 4,500 remained alive.
The survivors were crammed into Shebargan's open-air prison, where they continued to die in droves – as U.S. forces watched coolly from the perimeter. Finally, the three friends were sent to an American camp in Kandahar, where, hooded and chained, they were "processed": stripped, rectally probed, beaten, forced to kneel for hours, naked, their necks pressed to the floor by a guard's boot. Then came the first "interrogation": again kneeling, chained, with beatings and kicking followed by questioning – as an agent stood on the back of their legs, pressing a pistol to their heads. This routine went on for weeks. The only relief came when British spies appeared for a session: "Don't worry, they won't beat you while we're here," the jolly James Bonds would say. At night, there were head counts every hour to prevent the prisoners from sleeping, and periodic shakedowns of their tents, which were open at all times to the winter weather.
Months later, for reasons unexplained – perhaps a false confession beaten out of someone else down the line, throwing out names of "accomplices" to sate the voracious interrogators – the Tipton men were frog-marched onto a plane bound for Cuba, triple-chained and beaten along the way, beaten and kicked upon their arrival. Then began the long, dazed, limbo-life of Guantanamo. Endless interrogations: each man was grilled at least 200 times, sometimes for 12 hours at a stretch, always kneeling, chained to the floor. Constant punishments: for "backtalk," or seeking privacy for their bowel movements, or arranging their utensils incorrectly. And always, over and over, the farcical accusations that could have easily been disproved with five minutes of investigation.
But their captors weren't interested in the truth; they wanted "results." Finally, after two years of relentless physical and psychological pressure – including the ever-present threat of a military tribunal and execution without appeal – the friends cracked and signed false confessions to the most ludicrous charge of all: that they were top bin Laden lieutenants, pictured with him in a video from August 2000, despite the existence of documentary evidence – witnesses, pay stubs, school records – that proved they were in England at the time. But before their show trial could begin, British intelligence belatedly examined the charge and confirmed the alibis of all three men.
Now they're free, as the Regime flushes the most embarrassing cases out of the system before the Supreme Court rules on the "legality" of the Bush gulag this summer. The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.
But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn't designed to fight terrorism; it's designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of "military necessity" – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It's part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime's openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum dominance" of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.
Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over.
Chris Floyd
Ground Zero: The Anatomy of an Honest Mistake
Original version published in The Moscow Times, Jan. 30, 2004.
A man in Lawrence, Kansas, walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.
He pulls out the gun and shoots a little boy in the head, leaving his face a gob of bone-flecked goo. Then he fires into the chest of the girl in the next chair; she dies still clutching the stuffed rabbit she brings with her every day. Another boy is hit while running for the door. The man is using special bullets, tipped with depleted uranium; the shot explodes the boy's shoulder in a spray of red mist and sends his gangly body hurtling down the concrete stairwell.
A day-care worker grabs the man, tries to wrestle him down. He turns, jams the gun barrel against her womb and fires. She dies, eviscerated, clinging to his shoulders. The other children have run away screaming, except for one little girl who's fallen in the slick of blood. She tries to scramble to her feet, slips again, can't find her footing, claws at the floor in a wild panic. The man fires into her back, obliterating her spine, the heavy bullet drilling through the polished wood below.
The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:
"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: did he have a gun or a knife – or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."
The cops roll their eyes – another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"
The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? – Say, you fellas aren't going to lock me up, are you? It was an honest mistake. I just got bad advice, that's all. "
This fable is the precise moral equivalent of the Bush Regime's murderous misadventure in Iraq. Last week, the Regime's own duly-appointed, CIA-paid weapons hunter, David Kay, finally coughed up a dinosaur-sized bone and admitted, openly, publicly, what the sane world has long known: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war – and in fact hadn't had any since George Bush Senior stopped supplying Saddam Hussein with the money and material to make them many years ago.
The existence of Iraqi WMD and the dire threat it posed to America and the world was the publicly stated cause for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The utter falsity of this claim has now been established beyond rational dispute. Likewise, it is impossible for a rational person to believe that, in the absence of any real weapons, a substantial body of credible "evidence" for this phantom stockpile could have been amassed by the Anglo-American intelligence services. You can't have real evidence of something that isn't there.
Thus we come to this unavoidable conclusion: the Bush Regime launched a war of aggression on the basis of evidence that had to be, by its very nature, insubstantial, insufficient, false. That's the only kind of evidence they could have had. What does this mean? It means they have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of children – blown them to pieces, shot them, crushed them, terrorized them, rendered them into hunks of rotting meat – in an act of moral insanity no different from that of a nutball in Lawrence, Kansas, shooting up a day-care center to "protect" himself from imaginary threats.
And they've reacted to the consequences of their crime with the same kind of moral nullity. Colin Powell – the "moderate" Bushist – simply shrugged his shoulders at Kay's revelations. "We had questions that needed to be answered," he said, while flying to Moscow to tell the Russians they must resolve all their problems peacefully, within the strict rule of law. "What was it [Saddam had]?" mused Powell. "One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons" of WMD? "Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing?"
Nothing, as it turns out. All those children – each one of them an individual human being, each one a unique and irreplaceable vessel of consciousness, a single coalescence of the blind, churning forces of nature into a starpoint of awareness, brief but incandescent, worthy beyond measure, and every bit as valuable as any mother's tow-headed darling in Lawrence, Kansas or Crawford, Texas – killed, eliminated, snuffed out…for nothing. For zero.
Yet Powell dismissed these pointless killings, echoing George W. Bush's Solomonic declaration on the question of existing weapons versus hypothetical ones as a basis of war: "What's the difference?" Powell said the decision to kill the children was "based on the best intelligence we had at the time" – intelligence which, as we've seen, could not possibly have been substantial or convincing. But who cares? We heard rumors. "We had questions." We killed children. We found nothing. We're not guilty. It was bad advice, an honest mistake.
That's all they have left as a public defense: the ravings of a man who killed for no reason, who sits in the ghoulish mire he's created and calls himself good.
Chris Floyd
Brothers in Arms: The Osamic Vision of George W. Bush
The original version of this was published September 27, 2002, in the Moscow Times.
Last week, we explored the extremist texts underlying the Bush Regime's maniacal foreign policy: the PNAC plans for global dominance. On the very day that column was published, George W. Bush made these dreams the official "National Security Strategy" of the United States.
In many ways, this bellicose document represents the final twinning of Bush and his shadow, Osama bin Laden. There has always been a remarkable symmetry between these two sons of privilege: pampered, high-living wastrels in their youths, each coasting on his father's name and money, then turning to a grim fundamentalism with simplistic creeds that overpowered their humanity.
Both believe you must strike your perceived enemies, without provocation, before they strike you. Both accept that innocent people will die in these "pre-emptive attacks," but consider it an acceptable price to pay for combating "evil." Both utterly reject the way of peace – unless it's the peace of the conqueror, the bold warrior who serves God with the sword: "The only path to safety is the path of action." (Which man said that? Hint: he doesn't live in a cave.) Finally, both believe there is only one acceptable vision of reality, and both are willing – no, eager – to impose that vision by force.
Now, this dark fraternity finds "legitimate" expression in the new security strategy. Bush begins with a grandiose flourish, proclaiming that, in all of Creation, there is but "a single sustainable model for national success." That model, needless to say, turns out to be the rarefied world of the American elite at the turn of the 21st century, where the wealthy must never be encumbered in any way by restrictions of law, regulation, popular will, morality or common sense. Air, earth, water and sky must be laid bare to exploitation by the powerful, whose investments are guaranteed by the military might of the state.
Bush not only recommends this model to others, he insists they follow it, or else they'll be ranged with those who "reject basic human values and hate the United States" – an act of apostasy that makes them targets for "the path of action." In any case, no country, friend or foe, will be allowed to pursue even the "hope of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States," says Bush. How will they be dissuaded from such a foolish course? Simple – by "the unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces and their forward presence" throughout the globe.
Naturally, this bristling military occupation of the earth will not be carried out for "unilateral advantage," but only to advance "human freedom." What is freedom? Here is Bush's definition, with some slight exegesis.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "say what they think" – unless of course they criticize the Regime and its allies too harshly or demonstrate against the president or speak with a strange accent in a Georgia restaurant, in which case they will be denounced as terrorists, fired from their jobs, arrested for stepping out of officially circumscribed "free speech zones," or chased down the Florida highways by Jeb Bush's stormtroopers, all of which happened recently in the heartland of the "single sustainable model."
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "choose who will govern them" – unless of course they choose the wrong person, as the American people did in 2000, in which case a better leader will be appointed for them.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "worship as they please" – unless of course, they worship a god who calls for the wrong kind of holy war, or a god who enjoys the sacrament of ganja, or a god who denounces the rich, demanding that we give everything to the poor and live in common, or a god who promotes polygamy or blesses homosexual marriage or does anything that offends the sensibilities or threatens the privileges of the Single Sustainables.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "educate their children, male and female" – unless, of course, you want to educate them about sex or evolution or the history of all the crimes that governments have committed in their name.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "own property" – if they can afford it, that is, or unless some rich wastrel wants to, say, build a baseball stadium on it, or drill for oil under it, or put a military base on it, in which case it will be taken away.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "enjoy the benefits of their labor" – unless, of course, they have unionized in order to procure these benefits, in which case they can be fired or beaten or killed, as happens every day in countries employing the "single sustainable model."
"These values of freedom," Bush says, "are right and true for every person, in every society" – except, of course, when they are not, and always exempting those countries (such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Colombia, etc. etc.) that repress and/or murder their own people but don't interfere unduly with the profits of the Bush family and the other Sustainables.
Tellingly, Bush's list of basic freedoms contains no right of privacy, no inviolability of person, no right to information about government actions, no right of redress for wrongs inflicted by the powerful, nor a host of other freedoms once considered essential to the liberty of an independent citizen.
No, what we have here is simply a candy-coated model for a militarized world, a fanatical ideology enforced by the ever-looming threat of punishment and death.
What we have here is bin Laden writ large.
Chris Floyd
Last week, we explored the extremist texts underlying the Bush Regime's maniacal foreign policy: the PNAC plans for global dominance. On the very day that column was published, George W. Bush made these dreams the official "National Security Strategy" of the United States.
In many ways, this bellicose document represents the final twinning of Bush and his shadow, Osama bin Laden. There has always been a remarkable symmetry between these two sons of privilege: pampered, high-living wastrels in their youths, each coasting on his father's name and money, then turning to a grim fundamentalism with simplistic creeds that overpowered their humanity.
Both believe you must strike your perceived enemies, without provocation, before they strike you. Both accept that innocent people will die in these "pre-emptive attacks," but consider it an acceptable price to pay for combating "evil." Both utterly reject the way of peace – unless it's the peace of the conqueror, the bold warrior who serves God with the sword: "The only path to safety is the path of action." (Which man said that? Hint: he doesn't live in a cave.) Finally, both believe there is only one acceptable vision of reality, and both are willing – no, eager – to impose that vision by force.
Now, this dark fraternity finds "legitimate" expression in the new security strategy. Bush begins with a grandiose flourish, proclaiming that, in all of Creation, there is but "a single sustainable model for national success." That model, needless to say, turns out to be the rarefied world of the American elite at the turn of the 21st century, where the wealthy must never be encumbered in any way by restrictions of law, regulation, popular will, morality or common sense. Air, earth, water and sky must be laid bare to exploitation by the powerful, whose investments are guaranteed by the military might of the state.
Bush not only recommends this model to others, he insists they follow it, or else they'll be ranged with those who "reject basic human values and hate the United States" – an act of apostasy that makes them targets for "the path of action." In any case, no country, friend or foe, will be allowed to pursue even the "hope of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States," says Bush. How will they be dissuaded from such a foolish course? Simple – by "the unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces and their forward presence" throughout the globe.
Naturally, this bristling military occupation of the earth will not be carried out for "unilateral advantage," but only to advance "human freedom." What is freedom? Here is Bush's definition, with some slight exegesis.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "say what they think" – unless of course they criticize the Regime and its allies too harshly or demonstrate against the president or speak with a strange accent in a Georgia restaurant, in which case they will be denounced as terrorists, fired from their jobs, arrested for stepping out of officially circumscribed "free speech zones," or chased down the Florida highways by Jeb Bush's stormtroopers, all of which happened recently in the heartland of the "single sustainable model."
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "choose who will govern them" – unless of course they choose the wrong person, as the American people did in 2000, in which case a better leader will be appointed for them.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "worship as they please" – unless of course, they worship a god who calls for the wrong kind of holy war, or a god who enjoys the sacrament of ganja, or a god who denounces the rich, demanding that we give everything to the poor and live in common, or a god who promotes polygamy or blesses homosexual marriage or does anything that offends the sensibilities or threatens the privileges of the Single Sustainables.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "educate their children, male and female" – unless, of course, you want to educate them about sex or evolution or the history of all the crimes that governments have committed in their name.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "own property" – if they can afford it, that is, or unless some rich wastrel wants to, say, build a baseball stadium on it, or drill for oil under it, or put a military base on it, in which case it will be taken away.
Freedom, Bush says, means people can "enjoy the benefits of their labor" – unless, of course, they have unionized in order to procure these benefits, in which case they can be fired or beaten or killed, as happens every day in countries employing the "single sustainable model."
"These values of freedom," Bush says, "are right and true for every person, in every society" – except, of course, when they are not, and always exempting those countries (such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Colombia, etc. etc.) that repress and/or murder their own people but don't interfere unduly with the profits of the Bush family and the other Sustainables.
Tellingly, Bush's list of basic freedoms contains no right of privacy, no inviolability of person, no right to information about government actions, no right of redress for wrongs inflicted by the powerful, nor a host of other freedoms once considered essential to the liberty of an independent citizen.
No, what we have here is simply a candy-coated model for a militarized world, a fanatical ideology enforced by the ever-looming threat of punishment and death.
What we have here is bin Laden writ large.
Chris Floyd
Team Spirit: Bush's B-Siders Replay Their Greatest Hits
Originally published in the Moscow Times on Feb. 4, 2004.
The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. "How could the intelligence reports have been so wrong?" they cry, wringing their hands in consternation. "Independent" commissions filled with Establishment worthies are now in the offing, as the architects of the war – and their media sycophants – pledge to resolve this disturbing mystery.
But of course there is no "mystery." Anyone with a passing acquaintance of recent history knows exactly how, and why, the intelligence data concerning Iraq's nonexistent WMD came to be used as a justification for military aggression. Indeed, this history is so open, so transparent and so widely available – in news reports, unclassified government documents, think-tank publications, etc. – that a cynic might suspect that these government-appointed "investigations" are actually designed to obscure the already evident truth.
It began in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush established a new intelligence analysis unit called "Team B." Championed by top Ford White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush unit was packed with hardcore ideologues – including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle – bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of the Soviet Union were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Soviet aggression and the Kremlin's ever-increasing political and economic might.
At every turn, the B-teamers cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for massive increases in military spending. During the Reagan-Bush years, the B-Teamers and their acolytes spread throughout the corridors of power, where they launched covert operations and proxy wars around the world, always citing "credible evidence" of "imminent threats" – such as Ronald Reagan's famous warning that tiny Nicaragua, then besieged by a U.S.-backed terrorist army, could invade the sacred American heartland of Texas "in a matter of hours."
As it turned out, even the "softest" CIA assessments vastly underestimated the weakness and instability of the Soviet regime. Team B's wildly inflated perversions of reality were exposed as perhaps the most incompetent, ignorant – and costly – intelligence failures in U.S. history. For in addition to the lives and money wasted fighting phantom threats "to America's very survival," the now thoroughly B-Teamed CIA armed and funded a horde of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, schooling them in "asymmetric warfare" and terrorist operations. No doubt the B-Teamer's ideologically blinded "intelligence" told them that the Western-hating jihadists would never turn this training against their American paymasters.
The end of the Soviet Union found Team B still entrenched in the White House. In 1992, Bush, now president, directed Cheney, now Pentagon chief, and his deputy, Wolfowitz, to draw up a plan for America's strategic future. Despite the collapse of the Communist enemy, the plan called for – what else? – massive increases in military spending and a more aggressive, unilateral "pre-emptive" posture against perceived threats to American interests, with "vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf Oil" listed as the first priority, the New York Times reports. The objective, openly stated, was American dominance over global economic and political development in all spheres.
The Cheney-Wolfowitz plan was then refined by the B-Teamers during the Clinton interregnum in such groups as the Project for the New American Century, whose activities have been well-detailed in these pages. When George W. Bush took office, he restored Team B to glory and enshrined PNAC's plan as the official national security strategy of the United States, adding a new imperative to establish "the single sustainable model of national success" – Bush-Enron crony capitalism – in every land. After Sept. 11 Rumsfeld created a new "Team B" at the Pentagon: the Office of Special Plans, packed with hard-line ideologues bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of Iraq were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Saddam's aggression and his vast arsenal of WMD, The New Yorker reports.
At every turn, the OSP cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for the invasion. Rumor, hearsay, and forgeries were "stovepiped" directly to the White House, bypassing professional analysts. Anything that contradicted the Bush Regime's ideological delusions was ruthlessly pruned away. Anything that flattered their desire for war – no matter how specious, how false – was eagerly embraced.
So there's no mystery in the current situation. It's how "Team Bush" has always operated. They pervert intelligence to suit their needs – and their greeds. When they're proved wrong – at a horrendous cost in blood and money – they never admit it, never apologize. They simply break out the whitewash, blame someone else – usually the very intelligence services they've suborned – and lumber on in their brutal quest for dominance: ignorant, incompetent and untouchable to the end.
The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. "How could the intelligence reports have been so wrong?" they cry, wringing their hands in consternation. "Independent" commissions filled with Establishment worthies are now in the offing, as the architects of the war – and their media sycophants – pledge to resolve this disturbing mystery.
But of course there is no "mystery." Anyone with a passing acquaintance of recent history knows exactly how, and why, the intelligence data concerning Iraq's nonexistent WMD came to be used as a justification for military aggression. Indeed, this history is so open, so transparent and so widely available – in news reports, unclassified government documents, think-tank publications, etc. – that a cynic might suspect that these government-appointed "investigations" are actually designed to obscure the already evident truth.
It began in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush established a new intelligence analysis unit called "Team B." Championed by top Ford White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush unit was packed with hardcore ideologues – including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle – bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of the Soviet Union were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Soviet aggression and the Kremlin's ever-increasing political and economic might.
At every turn, the B-teamers cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for massive increases in military spending. During the Reagan-Bush years, the B-Teamers and their acolytes spread throughout the corridors of power, where they launched covert operations and proxy wars around the world, always citing "credible evidence" of "imminent threats" – such as Ronald Reagan's famous warning that tiny Nicaragua, then besieged by a U.S.-backed terrorist army, could invade the sacred American heartland of Texas "in a matter of hours."
As it turned out, even the "softest" CIA assessments vastly underestimated the weakness and instability of the Soviet regime. Team B's wildly inflated perversions of reality were exposed as perhaps the most incompetent, ignorant – and costly – intelligence failures in U.S. history. For in addition to the lives and money wasted fighting phantom threats "to America's very survival," the now thoroughly B-Teamed CIA armed and funded a horde of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, schooling them in "asymmetric warfare" and terrorist operations. No doubt the B-Teamer's ideologically blinded "intelligence" told them that the Western-hating jihadists would never turn this training against their American paymasters.
The end of the Soviet Union found Team B still entrenched in the White House. In 1992, Bush, now president, directed Cheney, now Pentagon chief, and his deputy, Wolfowitz, to draw up a plan for America's strategic future. Despite the collapse of the Communist enemy, the plan called for – what else? – massive increases in military spending and a more aggressive, unilateral "pre-emptive" posture against perceived threats to American interests, with "vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf Oil" listed as the first priority, the New York Times reports. The objective, openly stated, was American dominance over global economic and political development in all spheres.
The Cheney-Wolfowitz plan was then refined by the B-Teamers during the Clinton interregnum in such groups as the Project for the New American Century, whose activities have been well-detailed in these pages. When George W. Bush took office, he restored Team B to glory and enshrined PNAC's plan as the official national security strategy of the United States, adding a new imperative to establish "the single sustainable model of national success" – Bush-Enron crony capitalism – in every land. After Sept. 11 Rumsfeld created a new "Team B" at the Pentagon: the Office of Special Plans, packed with hard-line ideologues bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of Iraq were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Saddam's aggression and his vast arsenal of WMD, The New Yorker reports.
At every turn, the OSP cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for the invasion. Rumor, hearsay, and forgeries were "stovepiped" directly to the White House, bypassing professional analysts. Anything that contradicted the Bush Regime's ideological delusions was ruthlessly pruned away. Anything that flattered their desire for war – no matter how specious, how false – was eagerly embraced.
So there's no mystery in the current situation. It's how "Team Bush" has always operated. They pervert intelligence to suit their needs – and their greeds. When they're proved wrong – at a horrendous cost in blood and money – they never admit it, never apologize. They simply break out the whitewash, blame someone else – usually the very intelligence services they've suborned – and lumber on in their brutal quest for dominance: ignorant, incompetent and untouchable to the end.
Annotations for "Inside Joke"
Annotations for "Inside Joke," June 17, 2005:
Arms Control and Proliferation:
Profile of Robert G. Joseph
International Relations Center, June 2005
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/joseph/joseph.php
The Nuclear Posture Review: Reading Between the Lines
Common Dreams, Jan. 17, 2002
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0117-10.htm
Bolton's Broken World
Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks13jun13,0,536183.story
The U.S. Removes the Nuclear Brakes
Haaretz, May 26, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=580533
Gonzales and Torture:
Gonzales: A Record of Injustice
American Progress, November 2004
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=246536
A Secret Re-Writing of Military Law
New York Times, Oct. 24, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/24/MNG339FC401.DTL
Apologia Pro Tormento
Discourse.net, June 9, 2004
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html
Loyal to a Fault?
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109495/
Memo Offered Justification for Torture
Washington Post, June 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23373-2004Jun7?language=printer
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner RightsNew York Times, May 21, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-06.htm
2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
Newsweek, Dec. 18, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/
Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7765.htm
The Most Dangerous Lawyer in America
The Village Voice, Jan. 26, 2005
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000693.php
Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
TomPaine.com, May 12, 2005
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050512/two_amigos_and_their_gulag_archipelago.php
Some Held at Guantanamo Are Minors, Lawyers Say
New York Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/politics/13gitmo.html?ei=5090&en=9dd1b075e5c81c00&ex=1276315200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
War and Lies:
The Downing Street Memo and Related Documents
AfterDowningStreet.com
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
Illegally Financing the WMD Hoax
Media Monitors, May 27, 2005
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/15207/
The Secret's Out – Now What?
Antiwar.com, June 15, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=6308
Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse'
The Sunday Times (London), June 12, 1005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html
The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
Common Dreams, June 2, 2005
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0602-25.htm
[US-UK] Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam Into War
The Sunday Times, May 29, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html
The Lies That Led to War
Salon.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8891.htm
Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000, Says Family Biographer
Guerilla News, Oct. 27, 2004
http://russbaker.com/Guerrilla%20News%20Network%20-%20Bush.htm
British Military Chief Reveals New Legal Fears Over Iraq War
The Observer, May 1, 2005
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5183693-102279,00.html
MI6 Chief Told PM: Americans 'Fixed' Case for War
The Sunday Times, March 20, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html
Ground Zero: The Anatomy of an Honest Mistake
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 30, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/02/ground-zero-anatomy-of-honest-mistake.html
The Culture of Life:
CIA Kills in Pakistani Shadows
International Herald Tribune, May 16, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/16/news/pakistan.php
CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002
http://www.rense.com/general19/kill.htm
Bush's Death Squads
Ratical.org, Jan. 31, 2002
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/Jaccuse.html
Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill TerroristsNew York Times, Dec. 15, 2002
http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/bushwidened.html
Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions,
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003
http://dynamic.washtimes.com/twt-print.cfm?ArticleID=20030108-12935202
Our Designated KillersVillage Voice, Feb. 14, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/hentoff.php
A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0309/hentoff.php
U.S. General From Abu Ghraib Scandal Promoted
Stars and Stripes, March 15, 2005
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=27754
Fighting Terrorism:
Former Bush Official Questions Government 9/11 Story
The Washington Times, June 13, 2005
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/03/cry-havoc-bushs-own-personal-janjaweed.html
US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040811/pl_afp/us_attacks_militias_040811091028
Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh23.html
Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/into-dark-pentagon-plan-to-foment.html
Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/darkness-visible-pentagon-plan-to.html
Compassionate Conservatism:
Retirement's Unravelling Safety Net
Washington Post, June 14, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400515_pf.html
Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-sachs12jun12,0,1301992,print.story
The G8 Rescue Plan: A Truckload of Nonsense
The Guardian, June 14, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5214948-103390,00.html
Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/03/body-blow-bushs-worldwide-war-on-women.html
Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers
London Review of Books, June 2, 2005
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/runc01_.html
Virginity or Death!
CBSnews.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/19/opinion/printable696613.shtml
The Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind
New York Times, June 5, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/05/news/class.php
Promoting Democracy:
US Opposed Calls at Nato to Probe Uzbek Killings
Washington Post, June 13, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301550_pf.html
Catering to Kazakhstan's Kleptocracy
Antiwar.com, June 8, 2005
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6256
U.S. Helps Pakistan Torture U.S. Citizens
Human Rights Watch, May 24, 2005
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/printer_21134.shtml
Police in Azerbaijan Beat Protestors Demanding Liberty Before Pipeline Opening
Washington Post, May 22, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100542_pf.html
Reports Cite US and Egypt on Torture
Reuters, May 10, 2005
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1364930.htm
Bush Family History:
Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz
Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002
http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.html
Bush and the NazisNewsweek Poland, May 29, 2003
http://newsweek.redakcja.pl/archiwum/artykul.asp?Watek=7159&WatekStr=1&Artykul=4903
Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951: Federal Documents
New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2
Arms Control and Proliferation:
Profile of Robert G. Joseph
International Relations Center, June 2005
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/joseph/joseph.php
The Nuclear Posture Review: Reading Between the Lines
Common Dreams, Jan. 17, 2002
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0117-10.htm
Bolton's Broken World
Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks13jun13,0,536183.story
The U.S. Removes the Nuclear Brakes
Haaretz, May 26, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=580533
Gonzales and Torture:
Gonzales: A Record of Injustice
American Progress, November 2004
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=246536
A Secret Re-Writing of Military Law
New York Times, Oct. 24, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/10/24/MNG339FC401.DTL
Apologia Pro Tormento
Discourse.net, June 9, 2004
http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html
Loyal to a Fault?
Slate.com, Nov. 11, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109495/
Memo Offered Justification for Torture
Washington Post, June 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23373-2004Jun7?language=printer
Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner RightsNew York Times, May 21, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-06.htm
2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
Newsweek, Dec. 18, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6732484/site/newsweek/
Gonzales Excludes CIA from Rules on Prisoners
New York Times, Jan. 20, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7765.htm
The Most Dangerous Lawyer in America
The Village Voice, Jan. 26, 2005
http://villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/000693.php
Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
TomPaine.com, May 12, 2005
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050512/two_amigos_and_their_gulag_archipelago.php
Some Held at Guantanamo Are Minors, Lawyers Say
New York Times, June 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/politics/13gitmo.html?ei=5090&en=9dd1b075e5c81c00&ex=1276315200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
War and Lies:
The Downing Street Memo and Related Documents
AfterDowningStreet.com
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
Illegally Financing the WMD Hoax
Media Monitors, May 27, 2005
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/15207/
The Secret's Out – Now What?
Antiwar.com, June 15, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=6308
Ministers Were Told of Need for Gulf War 'Excuse'
The Sunday Times (London), June 12, 1005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html
The Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun
Common Dreams, June 2, 2005
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0602-25.htm
[US-UK] Bombing Raids Tried to Goad Saddam Into War
The Sunday Times, May 29, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html
The Lies That Led to War
Salon.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8891.htm
Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000, Says Family Biographer
Guerilla News, Oct. 27, 2004
http://russbaker.com/Guerrilla%20News%20Network%20-%20Bush.htm
British Military Chief Reveals New Legal Fears Over Iraq War
The Observer, May 1, 2005
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5183693-102279,00.html
MI6 Chief Told PM: Americans 'Fixed' Case for War
The Sunday Times, March 20, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html
Ground Zero: The Anatomy of an Honest Mistake
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 30, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/02/ground-zero-anatomy-of-honest-mistake.html
The Culture of Life:
CIA Kills in Pakistani Shadows
International Herald Tribune, May 16, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/16/news/pakistan.php
CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002
http://www.rense.com/general19/kill.htm
Bush's Death Squads
Ratical.org, Jan. 31, 2002
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/linkscopy/Jaccuse.html
Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill TerroristsNew York Times, Dec. 15, 2002
http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorintelligence/bushwidened.html
Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions,
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003
http://dynamic.washtimes.com/twt-print.cfm?ArticleID=20030108-12935202
Our Designated KillersVillage Voice, Feb. 14, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0308/hentoff.php
A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0309/hentoff.php
U.S. General From Abu Ghraib Scandal Promoted
Stars and Stripes, March 15, 2005
http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=27754
Fighting Terrorism:
Former Bush Official Questions Government 9/11 Story
The Washington Times, June 13, 2005
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004
http://empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com/2005/03/cry-havoc-bushs-own-personal-janjaweed.html
US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040811/pl_afp/us_attacks_militias_040811091028
Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh23.html
Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/into-dark-pentagon-plan-to-foment.html
Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/darkness-visible-pentagon-plan-to.html
Compassionate Conservatism:
Retirement's Unravelling Safety Net
Washington Post, June 14, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051400515_pf.html
Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-sachs12jun12,0,1301992,print.story
The G8 Rescue Plan: A Truckload of Nonsense
The Guardian, June 14, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5214948-103390,00.html
Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/03/body-blow-bushs-worldwide-war-on-women.html
Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers
London Review of Books, June 2, 2005
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/runc01_.html
Virginity or Death!
CBSnews.com, May 19, 2005
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/19/opinion/printable696613.shtml
The Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind
New York Times, June 5, 2005
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/05/news/class.php
Promoting Democracy:
US Opposed Calls at Nato to Probe Uzbek Killings
Washington Post, June 13, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301550_pf.html
Catering to Kazakhstan's Kleptocracy
Antiwar.com, June 8, 2005
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6256
U.S. Helps Pakistan Torture U.S. Citizens
Human Rights Watch, May 24, 2005
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/printer_21134.shtml
Police in Azerbaijan Beat Protestors Demanding Liberty Before Pipeline Opening
Washington Post, May 22, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/21/AR2005052100542_pf.html
Reports Cite US and Egypt on Torture
Reuters, May 10, 2005
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200505/s1364930.htm
Bush Family History:
Heir to the Holocaust: Prescott Bush, $1.5 Million and Auschwitz
Clamor Magazine, May/June 2002
http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.html
Bush and the NazisNewsweek Poland, May 29, 2003
http://newsweek.redakcja.pl/archiwum/artykul.asp?Watek=7159&WatekStr=1&Artykul=4903
Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951: Federal Documents
New Hampshire Gazette, Nov. 7, 2003
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2
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