Tag Archives: Freedom Fighters

Syria neoliberal invasion ad campaign casts chicks with guns but no helmets

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THAT’S RICH. When they’re not bombarding western viewers with contrived photo-ops of camera-facing toddlers, victimized by Asad’s bombs never ours, the neoliberal propagandists are fishing for left-leaning sympathies with “Freedom Fighters” who Americans could not should not leave behind. Meet the West’s own Femen ForWar, Kurdish anarchist insurgents, one even dubbed “Angelina Jolie”, who are photographed in action, with wide smiles in sniper’s nests, looking like they’re otherwise hanging in homeroom detention. I’m surprised we never see the lighting crews or makeup artists reflected in the shattered glass, but what we don’t see in plain sight are HELMETS. Apparently only real soldiers need those.

There’s even a Chicks-with-Guns meme gone viral of a bareheaded Freedom Fighter breaking into a huge grin after narrowly escaping a sniper’s bullet. One man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter. Western media’s freedom fighters are your Freedom Fries.

Colo. College guest Donald Gregg: the man who hired the man who killed Che

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He administered OPERATION PHOENIX during the Vietnam War, the CIA counterinsurgency operation which sought to pacify Vietnam with the targeted assassination of thousands of potential insurgents. For Vice President George H. W. Bush’s office, he coordinated the funding of the illegal US covert war against Central America, aka, the IRAN-CONTRA scandal. Yes, he supervised both Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, each of CIA-state-sponsored-terrorism fame. But Colorado College introduced Donald P. Gregg only as former national security adviser and ambassador to Korea. And CC gave Gregg an honorary degree — with not a peep from the know-nothings they laud as their exemplary students.

I attended because I was insulted by the lecture’s title: “What do Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jung Il have in common?” the speaker further slandered the father of modern Vietnam by indulging to associate another villain to the list, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi. But gracefully Gregg acquitted himself by explaining that Ho Chi Minh had been misjudged, and thus perhaps there is call to engage even our most despicable adversaries in dialog, lest we repeat our mistaken policies, as Gregg believes we are doing in Afghanistan.

Not much objectionable with that. Actually, you can read Gregg’s address, it’s virtually word for word the introduction he wrote for a 2009 study of the CIA’s unheralded successes in Vietnam. To his credit, Gregg does not echo the ongoing theme that Vietnam was winnable.

Relating his more recent expertise about Korea, Gregg offers that Kim Jong Il is more than your common loon. Rather, Il is of unusually high intelligence, underrated by the US, driven despotic by his isolation.

Or driven mad by our offense, I’d add. I’m surprised Kim Jong Il tolerates that we name our ambassador in Seoul as the Ambassador to Korea, rather than to South Korea. How dare US-occupied Korea assert to represent the national identity of Korea? As in Vietnam, it’s the north doing the heavy lifting toward inevitable unification.

Gregg nearly had me convinced he was reformed until he added a forth bogeyman for comparison, Iran.

Iran mustn’t get nukes, etc, etc, Ahmadinejad unpredictable, can’t be trusted, etc.

Ho Chi Minh had been demonized Gregg said, based on a wrong-headed anti-Communist domino-theory mindset, yet Gregg is perfectly willing to be stuck to Capitalism’s current mindset against Islam.

Gregg made such winning arguments for tolerance, respect, diplomacy, and the integrity of the best intelligence officers, but isn’t that precisely the neo-liberal spiel? The CC audience lapped it up.

Here was the closest most of us will ever get to someone connected to the murder of Che Fucking Guevara, icon of the world struggle against Western oppression. That’s explaining the obvious, but I’d add, Che’s heroic stature is no more diminished even if only known as a t-shirt image to this crowd.

School-of-the-Americas-trained Rodriguez knew the stature of the hero he was cutting down, to this day he brags about wearing Che’s watch as a keepsake. Rodriguez returned from this assignment with a piece of notebook paper wrapped around the tobacco left in Guevara’s pipe.

Donald Gregg didn’t kill Guevara, but we might have asked him how many youthful Viet Cong he killed or had tortured, etc, how many aspiring Nicaraguan freedom fighters, or Burmese victims, or boys and girls of yet to be named regions, of the CIA’s yet unrevealed adventures in extrajudicial preemptive death-dealings.

All of this may be blood under the bridge, except that the undercurrent of this elder statesman’s lecture tour is beating the drum for confrontation with Iran.

Furkan Dogan was no Leon Klinghoffer, (nor Abu Abbas, ergo no press for him)

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Interesting that when Palestinians hijack a passenger ship, and kill one person, it’s quite a different story than when the Israelis pirate a ship and kill nine, even when one is an American. We remember the Achille Lauro, and the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer executed when the hijackers’ demands were being ignored. 19-year-old Furkan Dogan was executed without the Israeli Commandos making clear why they had any authority to attack the Mavi Marmara in international waters. Not one complaint from the US press or government. The difference is of course that Dogan was not Jewish, but Muslim. Israel’s own brand of antisemitic racism, obviously America’s too.

I wonder if Midnight on the Mavi Marmara will be immortalized like the Voyage of Terror: the Achille Lauro Affair? We all know that story. Evil Arabs seize innocent passengers, negotiate release of passengers for escape flight, American renege on safe passage, intercept plane and capture the terrorists, all except for the ringleader whose name become household for nefarious evildoer. Americans still knew the Iagoian Abu Abbas when he was captured in the invasion of Iraq and died in US captivity. What had been the point of hijacking the Achille Lauro? Prisoner release? Something about Palestine and Israel? That part is certainly fuzzy.

Apparently giving voice to the motives of terrorist acts is to play into their hands, ergo, they’re simply despicable “terrorists,” no one else’s freedom fighters.

Identity of CIA bomb victims spill forth

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khost victim of CIA bomberUS forces in Afghanistan suffered an unprecedented setback this weekend when a suicide bomber was able to blow to smithereens a gathering of CIA operatives in an outpost in Khost Province. Seven agents were killed and six injured, and a great tragedy is that these covert deaths, like that of the security contractor killed with them, are not counted as official casualties of war, to weigh against the public conscience for us to wonder, was it worth it? These were professional killers and torturers whose names are now withheld to protect their families.

But some Americans –God bless them– will not be denied the deification of their downed warriors, and so some families have gone public about the loss of their mercenary kin. Thus we have names, and Facebook memorials, to the men and women who commit the clandestine crimes for which the rest of the world holds us accountable. But first, a word about what they were doing.

Forward Operating Base Chapman caught my attention because that’s the kind of military post which protects the celebrated school building projects of Greg Mortenson, and Khost Province is one of his territories. It turns out that the US Army is also busy [re]-building schools, and boasts 53 in Khost. Also, for reasons of deteriorating security, FOB Chapman was no longer housing US military, but instead was strictly for private firms contracted to the reconstruction, except now journalists are at liberty to say that the camp was always known to be “not regular” — code for CIA.

“Although Chapman was officially a camp for civilians involved in reconstruction, it was well-known locally as a CIA base. Over the past couple of years, it focused on gathering information on so-called high-value targets for drone attacks, the unmanned missile planes that have played a growing role in taking out suspected terrorists since President Barack Obama took office. The Haqqanis were their principal target.

” ‘That far forward they were almost certainly from the CIA’s paramilitary rather than analysts,’ said one agent.”

So FOB Chapman was used for a drone command post. Not controlling drones, but gathering intelligence about where to target their missiles. I’d be curious that what had been an “underground gym” for US soldiers, where the dozen CIA officers were meeting their informant/surprise-bomber, wasn’t being put to an altogether more menacing function by the CIA. Obviously on this particular occasion it was a briefing room/wake.

It’s conjectured that the CIA at FOB Chapman was targeted because the local Taliban had suffered one too many CIA drone attacks. Other accusations emerge that the CIA had recently killed Afghan detainees while in custody, in their effort to break the Haqqani network. One reporter’s source phrased it: “Those guys have recently been on a big Haqqani binge.”

The CIA is not releasing the name of the bomber, reportedly an informant “candidate,” but strangely his name is being reported in the Arabic press. He was a Jordanian doctor named Khalil Abu Hammam Mellal Al-Balawi, of the Beer Al-Saba’a family, codenamed “Abu Dajana Al-Kharasani,” a supervisor on the Al-Hisba internet forums, where so-called official al-Qaeda communications are regularly transmitted. His identity might explain how a visit with this “informant” warranted the attendance of a dozen agents, including a high ranking officer from Kabul and the Khost station chief.

The station chief was reported to have been an agent in Afghanistan for 14 years, since the days of the so-called Alec Station which was tasked with tracking the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. She was a loving mother of three, so it’s possible her identity is being concealed until her family can be extracted from the region.

The first agent to be identified publicly was Harold Brown Jr., 37, of Bolton, Mass., whose father thought he worked for the State Department. Before the “State Department,” Brown worked for Science Applications International Corp.

The next to be identified was Scott Michael Roberson, 39, of Akron, Ohio. He was a policeman when he wasn’t a CIA security officer. Robertson co-founded the Metro Atlanta Police Emerald Society and was a member of the Iron Pigs, a national motorcycle club for police and firefighters.

Another of the CIA agents wasn’t American at all, but a member of the Jordanian royal family. The body of Capitan As-Sharif Ali bin Zeid Al Awn has been returned to Jordan with much pomp and ceremony, without an official report of the incidence of his death, the family unable to explain what he was doing in Afghanistan, except to deny accusations that he was employed by the CIA.

The lone non-CIA victim was security contractor and former Navy SEAL, Jeremy Jason Wise, 35, of Virginia Beach. Wrote the WSJ: “Today, the CIA and President Obama acknowledged that seven of those killed were CIA agents. No one would say who employed the eighth American.”

(Except he was really the seventh American, because one of the dead was a Jordanian.)

UPDATE: It’s now revealed that Jeremy Wise was employed by Xe/Blackwater, who admit now that two of the CIA victims were Blackwater.

With suicide bombers all over the news, from the successful to the pantywaist, as blogs spill over with nuke-em-all comments which reveal Americans seem perfectly comfortable with the idea that peoples are collectively accountable for the deeds of criminals among them.

Or the deeds of insurgents aka freedom fighters, about whom you or I might disagree.

US Blackwater goons for example, have been let off the hook for the Nisour Square atrocity in Iraq. According to our neoliberal world order, Iraq should be able to track miscreants with drones, and since we refuse to bring them to justice, lay waste entire American neighborhoods and schools if informants report they are nearby.

I’ve certainly always argued that Americans are all of us responsible for the crimes our government is committing. Even with our combatant criminals killed in battle, I’m not sure that the people who cheered them on don’t still owe their victims responsibility.

Avatar: novel push for noble savage

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Avatar movie poster based on the novel by SapphireI’d like to contrast the high-profile critical receptions being given two Hollywood films about darker-skinned-ness. Precious is about an African-American girl so dark she absorbs the light, without being about race at all. The movie tells a story of poverty, incest and the cycle of abuse, while tipping the scales with gratuitous stereotypes of Hottentot welfare mamas attendant their usual good-for-trouble black males. Vilifying the subjects it pretends to rescue, Precious has the blessing of the media, a shameless Oprah included. James Cameron’s Avatar on the other hand, opened to depth-charges of faint praise calculated to dim the buzz, perhaps because it packs the most subversive black-is-beautiful message since Muhammad Ali.

Avatar evokes rudimentary indigenous spirituality, peppered with what even elementary-schooled audiences can associate as Native American themes, from which we can infer the concepts are eternal, but idealizes an athletic aesthetic more human than the movie’s live-action characters. The “blue cat people,” as the critics have chosen to describe its Na’vi tribe, are but fantasy-striped, tailed Spartans, computer iterations of the Williams sisters and NBA dream teams. The real humans of Avatar tower in prowess, dignity and luminescence over their modern mensch oppressors.

Where racial equality on film is plotted according to how black figures are granted access to the world of white priviledge, Avatar celebrates the sovereignty of dark skin in its environment, where it’s not a barbershop, rapper’s crib, or street corner in Harlem. And instead of prepping the more palatable light-skinned negro for easier assimilation to the welcome-diversity crowd.

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, is an ugly project by and for gentrified American, whose title character is White-America’s usual avatar into their mysterious conception of Black America. I can do it no better justice than this review excerpt published Counterpunch:

A fiction whose “policy message is that welfare recipients are black women who wish to avoid work, who use their time having sex with their daughters, watching television and dining on pig leavings.” Is this a film – or a crime?

A crock and defamation that reinforces white man’s supremist burden.

Under Iran’s culturally repressive Islamic Revolution, the artists have produced a golden age of film. The greatest of these films have had to disguise their social message in analogies surrounding the concerns of children. Avatar takes perhaps a similar tack. Behind diversions of fantasy and special effects, is a profound morality tale. Critics can attack James Cameron for his simplistic storytelling, it’s the price to pay to bring the simplest of viewers along. Perhaps the director can release a final cut for cineastes which omits the redundant exposition. I don’t mind that Cameron uses a highlighter for the Cliftnote set. A survey of online comments shows me that some fans applaud themselves for getting Avatar’s message where they are certain their fellow audience members might not.

Most certainly the alarm most critics are raising has to do with the unpatriotic attitude which Avatar takes toward Capitalist imperialism. In GWOT America where we still “Support Our Troops” and still refrain from labeling our military contractors as mercenaries, this film will rub flag wavers the wrong way. I’d hate to be an active duty US soldier, watching Avatar in my uniform, as the audience roots for good to vanquish evil. It will probably be some time before Americans will want to see Iraqi or Afghan freedom fighters depicted as heroes. We’ve yet to see sympathetic accounts for example of the Vietcong holding down the Ho Chi Min Trail, or for that matter, the real Germans or Japanese beyond the Allied propaganda. But by disguising his story in science fiction, James Cameron has rehabilitated the Vandal and Visigoth, from the shadow of the Roman Empire. The shadow of man’s civilizing drive which grows darker the more it is illuminated.

And best of all, Cameron’s pagans are not whites like the typical Anglo Semites of the Christian holy lands. Cameron’s indigenous humans have the beautiful noses, skin and haunches indigenous to the climates which cradled humankind.

DC Sniper John Allen Muhammad was early post-911 Muslim Avenger

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john allen muhammad beltway sniperWhat morbid fortuity that as President Obama heads to Fort Hood to commemorate the victims of renegade Nidal Malik Hasan, preparations are being made for the execution of another Islamic avenger, the Beltway sniper. As Americans satiate their blood lust against Muslims in the person of John Allen Muhammad who is scheduled to die tonight by lethal injection, perhaps comparisons to Major Hasan will draw attention to the ideological motives behind the 2002 shooting spree. We don’t have to like them, but it would obviously pay us to listen.

Not to excuse the Washington DC killings, nor suggest that the Gulf War veteran and convert to Islam is any less a cold-blooded murderer, but TV crime shows have painted he and accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo as sadistic serial killers, completely burying the sociopolitical elements which tie the snipers to the Global War On Terror/Islam, the legacy of the African American struggle, and its extreme incarnation as the Black Liberation Army.

Muhammad maintains his innocence, primarily because the evidence implicating him remains circumstantial. He was convicted on the strength of partner Malvo’s testimony, and recently lost a Supreme Court appeal. In his testimony, Malvo described three phases to Muhammad’s murderous plans. First was to be the sniper killings, which the two calculated could claim six victims a day. Phase two involved plans to murder a policeman and set bombs at the site of his funeral, to claim an unprecedented toll of police casualties. With money extorted from the government in return for a cessation to the killings, Muhammad and Malvo planned to retreat to Canada, where they planned to build a Utopian community for other disenfranchised African American men, where they would be trained for bigger and more numerous missions against the US.

While I can understand US public figures having to distance themselves from Muhammad, I’m not sure why the organizations speaking out for US political prisoners weren’t showing their solidarity for his motives. Were Muhammad’s ambitions much different from the freedom fighters of the EZLN? Does the rejection of Muhammad reflect the post 9/11 pallor of insurrection in word only?

The case against Major Hasan proceeds apace with the usual unofficial press leaks. I heard reporters site sources who don’t want to be identified by name, in deference to the legal constraints of the ongoing investigation. The accusations they make against Hasan, however, for the benefit of the media outlets, reflects not a concern for Hasan’s due process, but rather their fear for getting themselves in trouble. But the media is eating it up.

Attack Drones: Freedom is so fucked

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Armchair freedom fighters like me count on there remaining some parity between the forces of oppression and man’s inexorable drive to be free. Masses can repel the few, nonviolence can shame the hesitant, terrorism can haunt the genteel, IEDs can pick off the occupiers, training can dispatch the sentries, but how to overcome automatons? We’ve confronted impregnable drones in scifi movies, and now such drones have become reality. They’re bits of nothing in the air really, but a literal boatload of firepower has got their back.

The Economist reports that drones can monitor the activity of shoeboxes from an altitude of near-space, beyond the range of an RPG fired from a hot air balloon. A drone’s vulnerability remains its communications channels, but even intercepting those is outside the realm of non-military technology.

While drones reduce the exposure of real soldiers to harm’s way, they increase a military force’s effectiveness. Drones are lauded as cheaper to operate as conventional jet fighters, but in reality their functionality draws on greater resources. The Economist writes of a drone the size of a corporate jet called a Global Hawk, which requires a staff of 20 to 30 to operate. Many more than would be necessary inside a C130 gunship, but of course, almost all of them manning new killing devices.

So long as the empire has an unlimited budget to spend, Freedom Fighters are fucked, and terrorists will be the only recourse. The only target available to the adversary of a drone, is the command center which controls it. Be it in America, or a distant military base, that’s where the enemy will have to strike.

Or the American public will have to renounce the budget which affords this technology.

You may not be bothered by the notion that remote-operated drones can monitor human activities and rain destruction upon them when appropriate. The old, “what have I to fear if I’m doing nothing wrong?” Wait until you are the wrong side of the oppressors. Coca Cola kills union organizers in Colombia. Walmart would probably like to kill you in their parking lot if you are leaving with a shopping cart filled insufficiently relative to you debit card balance. They already know it, but a drone in their hands will give them the ability to find you.

2p, 2p and Honduras… and Mexico… and Nicaragua… and…

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I don’t know if I’ve published this here or not or how I packaged it. But for background, the “p” stands for “piastre” a South VietNamese coin that was worth a little less than a quarter of a U.S. penny. This was the “Great Free Market Opportunity” our government was sending people to fight and die to defend. The way I heard it on some occasions it’s used to condemn the VietNamese people.”How nasty and vile and filthy they are” for living in such poverty.

But it was the VietNamese version of a washroom attendant, a little old granny lady… “Wipe your ass for you, GI… 2p, 2p do extra good job 2p, 2p…”

Yes, we were there, so it seems, to give the people such a wonderful Free Market and the opportunity to wipe our asses for less than a half a cent per “use”.

And to despise them for being so desperately poor.

I wasn’t there, my sources were, so what if you say it’s false?

Talk to them, those who are still alive that is.

Now there’s a war going on in Honduras, backed exclusively by U.S. and Canadian corporations, to topple a “Dictator” who was going to nationalize the resources of Honduras and make the U.S. and Canadian corporations pay more than the 3-4 dollars a day for the labor of the People of Honduras.

The police and military have been battling in the streets for a week now, busting the heads of “elitists” who are trying to “enslave” everybody in Honduras. They did this in a Military coup ahead of an election that the “Dictator” probably would have won.

That there’s no CIVILIANS out busting the heads of these “elitists” and “Communist Radicals” tells a far different story than you might hear on, say, Fox News or in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

In Nicaragua the goon-squads were called “Contras” and backed by the same people who bring us Fox News and the Gazette. They bombed and shot up schools, orphanages, churches and hospitals, and “our” government called them Heroes and Freedom Fighters.

In Mexico, the PAN party has been running the show for a while now. They took over from the “socialist radicals” in the PRI party and for the same reason as Honduras, and Nicaragua, and South VietNamese, to give the people “Freedom” and the unfettered “Free Market” and all the benefits of Capitalism.

Doug Lamborn and Tancredo and Michelle Malkin tell us so, thus, it must be true.

They also tell us that the economy in Mexico after two and a half terms of a PAN controlled “Free” government, so filled with opportunity… is somehow oh.. how does one make this sound logical… fueling a massive wave of Illegal Immigration into the United States. By people seeking to feed their families.

Record Numbers in fact.

My my my my my… give them all the Benefits of a Reagan-inspired Libertarian Free Market and their country falls to shit and more of the people have to flee poverty and come here to find work.

Like the KTEL commercials used to say “Now how much would you pay? BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!”

They’re wanting to expand the same Corporate Free Market Rule all across the United States as well, promising us such wonderful Economic Freedom and Opportunity…

Wipe your ass GI, 2p, 2p…

Reenacting wars of colonial imperialism

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A Revolutionary War reenactment with Colorado Springs D-12 schools
COLORADO SPRINGS, 1776. District 12 elementary school 5th graders reenacted a couple Revolutionary War battles, where the heretofore unstoppable Red Coats fought in vain to crush the American insurgency.

Ryan
Aided by Awakening Councils of British Loyalists, the English troops threw overwhelming force against Colonial militias who would not fight fair.

Hiding in the woods
Comprised mainly of army irregulars, dressed often as ordinary civilians, because they were, the “American” rebels would not renounce terrorist tactics, human shields and unconventional warfare.

Fighting against insurgents
British soldiers were conscripted from among the families who could afford neither education or apprenticeships to the skilled trades. Whereas their Tory collaborator were from the colonies’ wealthy landowners.

Devon
The British armies represented a coalition from client states of the empire, such as the Scottish Highlanders. These occupation forces supplemented their number with private contractor mercenaries, the professionally equipped, widely despised Hessians.

French
The Continental insurgency was accused of including foreign fighters.

Wounded on the field

Red Coats
British military superiority was overwhelming, wherever they concentrated their forces, the rebels withdrew. But there were never enough British soldiers deployed to hold the entire countryside.

Continental Army
The American Freedom Fighters were assisted by France, home of “French Fries,” later called “Freedom Fries,” and the Statue of Liberty.

Ryan
After eight long years of far flung military engagements, incurring an insurmountable national debt, the English conceded victory to the separatists in what became known as the American War of Independence.

EPILOG:
Support Our Troops
Playing the heavy in a reenactment of the US patriotic struggle against British occupation, was not so bad as playing a turncoat.

Most Americans look back and picture themselves having been Lexington Minutemen, or Kentucky Rangers or Continental Marines, but many of our forefathers fought against the patriots. The more ignoble among the collaborators were: Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers, the Loyal Irish Volunteers, the New Jersey Volunteers, Brant’s Volunteers, Butler’s Rangers, Caldwell’s Company, Docksteader’s Rangers, DeLancey’s Brigade, Brewerton’s Company, the King’s Royal Regiment, the Loyal American Regiment, the Royal American Volunteers, the Queen’s Rangers, and Tarleton’s British Legion.

POSTSCRIPT:
Reports of atrocities were dismissed as enemy propaganda. Evidence emerges later of what happens when infantry are left to their own initiative. Witness: stretcher-bearers and wounded come upon a British patrol coming off the lunch-hour, and are put to the bayonet.
Nurses

Mentally challenged unfit for insurgency

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Indignity at the barrel of a gunUS disinformation forces in Iraq pointed recently to an insurgency so in its last throes, that it was desperate enough, and dastardly, sure enough, to press mentally retarded girls into service as suicide bombers. Soon enough our military was forced to recant that report. The young Iraqi women may have been bipolar, or depressed, but they didn’t have Down Syndrome, as cranial deformities caused by the bomb blasts had led the US forensics to conjecture. But the false accusation had its desired effect and there was worldwide condemnation of the Iraqi resistance. This story has irked me in both incarnations.

Namely, why in the name of the Special Olympics is it alright to presume the mentally handicapped could not rise to the challenge faced by their fellow insurgents?

That there would need to be suicide bombers is sad for anyone to contemplate. But a people oppressed by overwhelming military dominance have little recourse. The US drove the Japanese to resort to recruiting Kamikazis. The French pushed the Algerians to the most desperate efforts. The Soviets, the US and Israel have since left Afghans, Iraqis and Palestinians no option but “terrorism.” We don’t label carpet-bombing, detainment or torture as “terrorism,” but freedom fighters and their asymmetrical warfare is enough to terrorize us.

And so, to many Iraqis, maybe especially those orphaned by our invasion and occupation, to be a suicide bomber is to be put to the only strategy which may yet prove effective. Rocks thrown against tanks do nothing. Shots fired against armor-clad troops yield naught but a hail storm of higher caliber bullets. IEDs are now up against heavier mine-resistant vehicles. Civilians without access to artillery or high-tech triggering remotes have no choice but to deliver their angry message in person, guided and detonated by their brave partisan selves prepared to pay the price with their lives.

Of course a mentally disabled person cannot reasonably be considered to have understood enough to make such a profound sacrifice. But I’m surprised the PC crowd wouldn’t allow them the dignity to aspire to contribute to the cause of their fellow Iraqis. I’d venture to ask if their lives could have served a more honorable service. It must suck to be mentally handicapped in Iraq, considering the US has destroyed every semblance of health care service, and refuses to rebuild it. The US is killing the health-needy of Iraq, even as they accuse the insurgency of the exploitation/murder.

And which side cannot deny preying upon the retarded from which to recruit its troops? With casualties on the rise, American motives unmasked, the timetable interminable, and the prospect of surviving intact virtually null, who but the mentally challenged are signing up to “defend freedom” for Uncle Sam?

What is the purpose of the ‘War on Terrorism’, and when did it start?

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When did this war start that is now called ‘The War on Terrorism’ and what is its purpose? The answers to both questions would seem rather simple and obvious to Americans, but on closer examination are not what would be most considered. Why the war on terrorism’s purpose is to stop attacks from terrorists on our country and the world, would certainly be the most common reply. And the war started, of course, on September 11, 2001.

But are these 2 simple answers really the true answers here? And we really should ask yet a third question to get to the bottom of this issue. Is Osama bin Laden the original ‘terrorist’ that had the US government launch its ‘War on Terrorism’? Actually, the “War on Terrorism’ was launched by the US government on January 17, 1991. The terrorist then was considered to be Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq. His victim was considered to be not the United States, but the country of Kuwait that had just been occupied by the Iraqi military forces under the command of Hussein.

The war to stop terrorism was then labeled the ‘War to Liberate Kuwait’. To those Americans under 35 or so, this might be new history, of sorts. And to those under about 46, the decade plus before the launching of this war of liberation from Saddam Hussein, the ‘terrorist’, must seem like almost unknowable ancient history. So let’s review it some. Let’s review from February 11, 1979 (fall of the US backed Iranian dictator, the Shah of Iran) to February 7, 1990 (fall of the Soviet Union).

Pre “War on Terrorism’, the US favored the ‘terrorists world wide. They used them to fight 3 major proxy wars against their enemies. First off, the US spent billions that was sent to irregular forces who used the money to fund terrorist actions against the Soviet backed government of Afghanistan. This is where the US recruited Osama bin Laden and made him their ally. Second group of irregular recruits of terrorists was made in Central America, where the US funded terrroism against Nicaragua. Third use of terror by the Americans was when the US backed Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, when Iraq attacked Iran. It was only when Hussein later attacked and occupied Kuwait, that the media campaign began to call his war making terrorism. Before then, the media remained totally silent about Hussein’s use of terrorism.

So why did the US go from making terrorism ( in the eighties) its strategy, to making its strategy the fight against ‘terrorism’ (in the nineties onwards), so to speak? That would have to be from the negative publicity that the US got from using terrorism repeatedly against Nicaragua. This put a bad mark against the US in international circles. So propagandists within the uS government began to react from trying to defend terrorists as being so-called ‘freedom fighters’, to themselves attacking the supposed ‘terrroism’ of others. The fight to ‘liberate the Kuwaits’ was what launched the US continual ‘War Against Terrorism’. Nobody under about 45 can remember much being said one way or the other about Kuwaitis. But those 45 and older can remember how America became suddenly bombarded about how supposedly virtuous the Kuwaitis were supposed to all be. Kuwait being raped by Saddam Hussein, the terrorist! Babies being thrown to the ground even!

I personally heard American after American who claimed to know a Kuwaiti or two. They all told of what a wonderful folk they were in the most graphic manner! In the Arab world, the Kuwaitis had horrible reputations. The Kuwait citizens were the mionority of the population in their own country, yet employed huge numbers of other Arabs from around the Middle East who they treated like slaves. The women of Kuwait had absolutely no rights what-so-ever. Yet, the American press began a gigantic propaganda campaign to ‘liberate Kuwait’ from the Iraqi ‘terrorist’, Hussein! That is the reason, that even today so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein had some sort of role in the toppling of the World Trade Towers. The US launch of the ‘War Against Terrorism’ began with plans to ‘liberate Kuwait’, and continued with the let’s get Hussein campaign.

But George Bush Senior was a smart man. Who was he going to have as ‘terrorist’ foil if he actually caught Hussein? So Kuwait was ‘liberated’, but the most evil ‘terrorist’ was not caught. That unfortuantely left the Democrats as the leaders in the ‘fight against terrorism’ when Bush unexpectly did not make it a second term. But what to do since the victim of terroism, Kuwait, was already ‘liberated’? Could a new victim be found? Well, yes it was soon found. The victim was potential, as Hussein was claimed to be developing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons! And of course, the potential victim could only be ourselves, us the poor US citizens, so the terrorist had to be stopped! Eight years of the ‘War Against Terrorism’ was then fought by Clinton and Gore against the people of Iraq, where hundreds of thousands weree killed by economic sanctions designed solely to stop the ‘terrorist’.

Now we know, all of that was the big lie. The Democrats actaully have the nerve to credit Bush Junior with lying about that! Takes some gall, it sure does. But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, communists could no longer be the offical enemy, so ‘terrorism’ had to be it. The fall of the Soviet Union was over 10 years before 9/11, and Saddam Hussein was the big guy bad guy, before we ever began to think about Osama. Fast forward to now, where terrorists are all over, and all ephemeral.

We now know when the ‘War Against Terrorism’ started, but what has been the purpose? To stop terrorists from harming us? Why NO, that’s not it at all. To catch Osama? No, he has been killed already, more than likely. NO, the real purpose is to provide an official enemy that can camoflage 2 countries’ needs to steal from others. One Holy Land needs to steal land, and the other needs to steal oil. Together they have allied themselves to fight a continual conflict, that they now call, a “War Against Terrorism’. Even as it’s fought, we create yet more of the official enemy to fuel our production of war equipment. Oil and industry for us, and stolen land for our ally. That’s the purpose that makes our leaders march us like so many sheep, into this war against the shadows they create.

The ‘War Against Terrorism’ cannot be stopped, until the land is stolen, and the oil supplies are ours.

Irreligious troubles

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Remember the troubles in Ireland? They were religious wars is what we were told. The Catholics against the Protestants. Been going on for centuries. Indeed.

England has occupied Ireland for centuries, that much is true. And the English lackeys who settled the land for the British king and played landlord to the Irish were Protestant indeed. And the native Irish who have been fighting to regain their sovereignty are the religion of St Stephen who drove the pagan snakes from Ireland and converted everyone to Christianity before there was such a thing as Protestantism. The English were Catholic until Henry VIII was refused an annulment from the pope and so created his own Church of England. British subjects had to follow their king into Protestantism, and the enemy freedom fighters in Ireland would, of course, not.

And so the battle between the Irish and their English occupiers waged on, cleverly repackaged by the empire, the British Empire and ours, as religious troubles. Who sympathizes with an opponent’s foreign religion? The plight the dispossessed is another matter.

Likewise in Palestine. Are we to believe that Muslims are fighting Jews over the fate of their religious differences in Palestine? Oh, it’s been going on for thousands of years. Really?

Israel’s pretext for entitlement to the Holy Land dates back two thousand years, that’s true enough, when Jews last ruled Judea. There probably can be no end to land disputes when you argue claims that far back. Courts decided long ago to simplify disputes with statutes of limitation. In war however, every conqueror likes to assert they are reclaiming what lands were theirs by predestiny.

Palestinians are fighting the Israelis for their homeland. Israel occupies Palestine and keeps building settlements unto more of it, displacing and killing the original occupants. Israel’s motives might be religious, but the conflict is not. The fighting is occupation versus resistance, er, insurrection. The internecine strife amongst Palestinians and amongst Lebanese are no more sectarian than it is about who is collaborating with the occupiers.

Sectarian differences in Iraq, as throughout the Middle East, have similarly less to do with religion than the struggle against colonial occupiers. Right now we are demonizing the Shia, the fundamentalist hard ballers out of Iran, who threaten the Sunnis. They do, but hardly for religious reasons. The Sunni are and have been our agents, the administrative class for the West’s domination of the Middle East. When you hear Egypt opine, that’s us. Saudi Ariabia, that’s us. All the feudal sheiks, sultans and monarchs? Ours. In our pocket and we in theirs. They don’t like the Shias because they’re as irreligious as alpha males in a harem. Once more the occupiers have their religious or counter-religious pretext. The oppressed are fighting for their land and their freedom.

Black gloves

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Standard GI uniformCan somebody explain the psychology of our boys in their black gloves? Am I too distracted by the bad-guy movie image? Black gloves remind me of hired assassins, mafioso, bad cops, sadists, interrogators and torturers.
 
Did I miss any good guys who wear black gloves? Scuba divers? Al Jolsen?

The French para-military sent to put down the Algerian Islamic freedom fighters wore black gloves. They were notorious torturers. Did the gloves have to be black to hide the blood?

The Gestapo wore black gloves. And before them Hessian mercenaries. Americans had to fight black-clad Hessians during the Revolutionary War. Is that why black has such an ingrained stigma?

All the more reason why Americans would be sensitive to projecting themselves as heavies. Unless, like Hitler’s Death Head division, we want to create a fearful impression. How about a name? Brown Shirts. Jack-Boots. Black Gloves.

What authoritarian rule looks like

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Several recent events have lead me to some dots that need connecting. The dots may seem wildly disparate: the kidnapping of peace workers in Iraq and Palestine, the recent NYT revelations of counter-protest tactics employed be the NYPD, and a French film about heavy-handed manipulation of political prisoners.

Part One: Les Yeux des Oiseaux
I saw a movie two decades ago called EYES OF THE BIRDS. It depicted a prison in Uruguay for enemies of the state. They were making preparations for an inspection by the Red Cross. The story told of repercussions suffered by the political prisoners as a result of the long anticipated visit.

A couple of recent news items made me recall the film. In an early scene the prison warden ordered one of his men to do something irrational. Without provocation the warden ordered a guard to begin shooting at the prisoners who were assembled in the yard. At the same time, the warden filmed how the prisoners reacted.

That night the prison staff studied the footage to determine who among the political prisoners were the troublemakers. They weren’t looking at who was the more provoked, who was the quickest to run for cover, or even who was the most defiant. They weren’t looking for the strongmen or cellblock Kapos, they were looking for the leaders. They noted who shielded the others with their own bodies, who shepherded fellow prisoners to cover, and who sought to defuse the chaos by urging everyone to remain calm.

Those persons were then sequestered from the rest of the population, kept from contact with the Red Cross inspectors, and promptly dispatched with bags over their heads and buried. The film was fictional, but based on many corroborated accounts from Uruguay’s long years of repressive rule and disparados.

Part Two: NYC undercover cops
A recent New York Times article describes how NYPD officers infiltrated a number of peaceful street protests to incite the crowds to react. Tactics like this are nothing new for union-busters. The Pinkerton Security Agency for example got its start by hiring thugs to disrupt early efforts to organize strikes.

But do we expect such behavior from our men in blue? They’ve sworn to protect and serve us “with honor!” It used to be against the law for law enforcement to infiltrate political organizations.

Here’s what the NYPD was doing. Perhaps so as not to risk charges of false arrest, the police would plant, not drugs, but arrestees! The police would confront a crowd of protesters and arrest their own undercover officers. Immediately one of the arrestees would reveal himself as being under cover. This would divert suspicion from the ones still playing the victims and serve to incite the crowd to anger. They were angry for having been infiltrated, and then for seeing several among them arrested without apparent provocation.

With the crowd sufficiently distracted from its non-violent mantras, uniformed officers could move in from the sidelines and make their selective arrests.

Three fake protestorsFrom video taken by an IndyMedia reporter.
Number 36 cried out
“I’m under cover.”
The two behind him
pretended to be arrested,
only to be spotted later
at another protest site.
Real arrests followed.

Does this authoritarian maneuver resemble the M. O. used in Uruguay? To work, the perpetrators count on two things. First, that the heat of the moment will wrong-foot even the most defensive strategist. The tactic is after all nothing new.

That the targets feel the heat counts on a second, very cynical, assumption: that peace activists, like political dissidents, like freedom fighters, have a not easily repressed sense of humanity. They’ll betray their own goodness sooner than bear witness to injustice.

Probably you can see where I’m going with this.

Part Three: CPT Peace activists in the Middle East
When we hold vigils for the Christian Peacemaker Team members still held hostage in Iraq, we wonder how can those nasty insurgents threaten the lives of people who are so plainly on the side of the Iraqi people? It does seem particularly godless of those rebels doesn’t it? And absurd. I offer four thoughts.

A. Peace workers held in high regard
A friend of mine went to Iraq before the first Gulf War as a human shield to try to prevent the U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq. He wore a t-shirt which proclaimed his purpose there.

He told me that after a while, his journalist friends were begging to buy his t-shirt from him. So revered were the peace activists, they could walk into the worst areas in the middle of the night, and fear nothing. The few reporters and photographers who remained in Baghdad were so jealous of the access the peace workers had to ordinary Iraqis as a result of the deference shown to them.

B. Iraqi treatment of captured U. S. soldiers
Without exception, American soldiers captured by Iraqi forces have been returned to us safe and sound, neither hooded, tormented, tortured, nor humiliated. The extent of the “interrogation” of the captured supply line crew was to ask them to put truth to a lie: “had they been greeted with flowers and candy?”

Americans captured by IraqisFootage banned in the US: Iraqis ask them “were you greeted with flowers and candy?”

Not far from there, Iraqi doctors were already trying to return the captured Jessica Lynch to the American lines, but American soldiers kept shooting at their ambulance, forcing them to turn back. (Later American doctors would accuse the dumb-founded Iraqis of having raped Jessica’s limp body. In fact Lynch had earlier been forceably sodomized by a fellow U.S. soldier.)

Indeed Iraqis have shown a greater sense of compassion and humanity than our feeble representatives have ever shown them. From cluster bombs to DU to acceptable collateral damage to Free-Fire Zones to Kill Boxes to indiscriminate savagery to dehumanizing protocol. Americans have proven to be as barbaric as the Iraqis are cultured and forgiving.

What about the suicide bombers and the beheadings? The Iraqis are a divided people, and they have been driven to desperation. Execution by beheading, so horrifying to us, is more commonplace in their traditions. And then again, all may not be what it appears…

C. The mysterious beheading of Nick Berg
Nick Berg was a young do-gooder who traveled to Iraq on his own dime to try to take part in the reconstruction. He supported the war apparently, but it would be hard to paint him as an opportunist or profiteer. Nick Berg went to Iraq without a contract, nor much prospect for getting one. He went there to help.

The last people to see Nick Berg alive were CIA, a fact they denied at first. Nick was being detained by the U.S. military before his disappearance into the hands of his executioners. Though he was horribly decapitated on a video distributed all over the world, no reporter is quite ready to say who did it. Behind Nick Berg in the video, the figures under the robes did not look quite right.

The U.S. military immediately said the voice on the tape was that of AL-ZARQAWI. Robert Fisk, one of the most respected and senior reporters of Middle East affairs is not prepared to say that he even believes there exists such a person as Al-Zarqawi.

The timing of Nick Berg’s beheading was also very strange. World outrage was at an all time high from the photos just out of Abu Ghraib prison. Nick Berg’s gristly death seemed to provide a counterpoint to Lindy England’s sorry pose.

If I were suggesting that U. S. Forces were behind the Nick Berg execution, the case has been made by many already, I would be going off track. It certainly reflected poorly on the insurgents. But making the other side look bad is no clever trick. We trained Central Americans to do it all the time. Take off your uniform, dress up like rebels, and make it look like they massacred the village and not you.

When the Iraqi police in Basra apprehended two British black-ops this summer and then refused to release to them to British custody, the British forces immediately organized a prison break by driving a tank into the police station. They rescued the captured brits before they would be made to explain why they were dressed up like insurgents and what they were planning to do with a carload of live Improvised Explosive Devices!

It is suggested that those who killed Nick Berg took Abu Ghraib off the front page. I would suggest that the abduction of westerners serves a motive more closely related to the Uruguayan – NYPD gambit.

Why aren’t these hostages taken from the ranks of American soldiers? Some of the hostages have been contractors, and I’m sure many of their abductors have been criminals. Large ransoms are being paid for these hostages, it stands to reason that organized crime wants a piece of it. And whether these abductions are sanctioned or renegade, they achieve the same result, for whomever.

For the most part, the highest visibility hostages have always been people sympathetic to the cause of righteousness. It makes the insurgent/resistance fighters look bad, but more importantly I bet it makes them feel bad. Whichever it is, the Iraqi people probably scramble as desperately as we do to save the lives of the hostages.

D. British aid workers kidnapped in Gaza
Peace workers go to Palestine for one purpose, to save Palestinian lives. Palestinians are being shot left and right by Israeli soldiers, it is only when they are accompanied by western volunteers that the Israelis are deterred from shooting them and that Palestinians have a chance of being permitted through checkpoints so that they can reach medical care, or so that their children can reach school unmolested.

Activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall died putting themselves between Palestinian civilians and Israeli rifles. Activists brave tough Israeli travel restrictions to get into the occupied territories so that they can try to save innocent lives.

Certainly only the most heartless of Palestinians could be threatening the lives of these altruist activists. Maybe the Israeli military is counting on the fact that most Palestinians will not be heartless enough to sit idly by.

If there are Palestinians who believe the kidnap scenario, perhaps they are trying to contact resistance members whom they believe might have some influence. Perhaps resistance members themselves are hurriedly trying to ferret out possible miscreants in their ranks.

Regardless of who is in possession of the captives, the Israeli military is no doubt studying everyone’s movements very carefully. Normally a resistance network has to communicate between cells very sparingly. But with the clock ticking, with international pressure, and the life of a selfless non-combatant at stake, resistance fighters might eshew the risks of disclosing their activities in their effort to facilitate the search for an unjustly jeopardized fellow human being.

What does Palestine have to do with Iraq?
More on that another time. It is fashionable to argue that the liberation of Iraq was less about democracy and more about oil. What are you now paying for gas? This war is even less about oil than it is about global dominance. In the Middle East our colonial presence is called Zionism.

Could the Americans be orchestrating the kidnapping of sympathetic westerners in an Uruguayan style provocation of the Iraqi resistance? Have our other military actions been any less dastardly?

Let’s pause for a moment of silence for the hostages. May both sides unite to save the lives of the captive Christian Peacemaker Team, and of Kate Burton and her parents in Palestine. And please Lord, may too many Iraqis not jeopardize their own lives trying to help save a handful of ours.