Crocodile Tears
 
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had adopted a policy known as the Tar Baby Option, according to which the US sought to maintain close relations with the white rulers in South Africa. Ronald Reagan continued to support links with South Africa, describing the ANC as "a terrorist organization", but congressional pressure forced increased distance between the two governments.--Wikipedia

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings. Who are they now to pretend that they are the policemen of the world, the ones that should decided for the people of Iraq what should be done with their government and their leadership?--Nelson Mandela
 
      It was a CIA tip in 1962 to their buddies in the fascist South African police that put Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years. And it was only five years ago, long after Mandela had served as president of his country, won the Nobel Peace Prize and had become a universally admired figure, that Washington finally removed him from its terrorist watch list.
    Official America and its kept media hated Mandela just as they hated Martin Luther King. To them, Mandela was a communist terrorist, the worst things, apart from also being a Muslim atheist, that anyone could be. (In fact, he was for a time a member of the South African Communist Party.)
    In other words, most of the encomiums to Mandela we’ve heard from on top in recent days are, like the Mafia attending the funerals of its victims, obscene exercises in cynicism.
    Back when the apartheid regime was at its murderous worst, the pro-Nazi racists who ran it were reassured that the U.S. and Israel*, its two best friends in the world, had its back.
    But in time, the forces of freedom won out, sending apartheid rule to hell and inspiring the beaten down across the globe.  Washington had to reluctantly join the celebratory crowd, lest it lose propaganda points by mourning or, worse, trying to revive the ancien regime. 
     Plus there were business opportunities aplenty in the new democratically-ruled South Africa. Calling its president a criminal was obviously not the way to make friends and profits. And so the official U.S. designation of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist was quietly dropped by the Bush administration in 2008. Pols and pundits switched gears as they had done with Chairman Mao back in 1970 and began pretending that Mandela was their hero all along.
    Mandela was lucky. If he had remained on the list after 2008, Obama might have droned him.

*See: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polokow Suransky.

Murder and Mendacity
    I wasn’t going to write anything about the murder of JFK to mark this 50th anniversary. Been there, done that to a fare thee well. But then a certain line of endlessly repeated bullshit by the media this week prompted me to make just one point about that long ago event.
    The particular bovine excrement spread by the prosties of the press is that “conspiracy theories” about the killing are born of a refusal by Americans to believe that such an awesome crime was committed by a lonesome nobody.
      In truth, the DNA-proven father of “conspiracy theories” is the ongoing refusal of those in power to supply coherent and plausible accounts of the Kennedy and Oswald killings.
    By now there’s a library full of books dealing in painstaking detail with the facts and forensics of the case. It is the official finding of the House Special Committee on Assassinations that there was, in fact, a conspiracy. Among the serious and honest, the report of the Warren Commission attributing sole guilt to Oswald has long since been relegated to the fiction shelves.
    That our media sluts repeat nonsense about Oswald being a solitary screwball shows them to be lazy at best and corrupt at worst.  If they had a shred of integrity, they could show it by demanding that the CIA open its still secret files on Oswald and, in particular, release his income tax returns for the years before the shooting. Let's see who he was working for. After half a century, I’m not holding my breath. 
   PS--If all the ballyhoo has gotten you interested in the case, a good place to start is with two of the early books that carefully examined the official evidence: Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact and Mark Lane's Rush To Judgment.
   
Straight Skinny on Obamacare
    On a totally different subject, I just read what I consider the best single piece on what Obamacare is all about. Click this LINK if you're interested.
 

Enemy Index
      It’s been a while since we moseyed over to the threat board and adumbrated our adversaries. We found something different this time. Instead of a country like Iran, a clan like the Pushtuns or a creed like Islam, our list of dreaded enemies is now topped by an individual human being. 
    Of course, it’s Edward Snowden. Scouring my memory and that of Wiki, I’ve yet to find a single person who has made a bigger dent in modern history simply by dint of taking his work home with him.
     Thanks to Snowden millions of Americans have learned that their government is just as megalomaniacal when it comes to invading our privacy as our military is about invading countries that have done us no harm.
    At the same time, hundreds of millions of foreigners have learned that there is more to Yankee imperialism than simply suffering its diktats.  The empire also aims to be a global Stasi, snooping on everyone everywhere about everything.  
    It looks like Snowden’s store of secrets will just keep flowing into the indefinite future. I can foresee two revelations that would bring on the biggest political mess since the failure of the Articles of Confederation. The fit would hit the shan with proof that the NSA was spying on our elected politicos. And all heck would break loose on evidence that the White House or some other  executive branchlet was using the NSA to surveil Congress.
    Meanwhile, as the revelations pour out, Snowden’s stock rises while that of Obama and the quasi-Stazi state he presides over sinks. Abroad, even old allies are saying suffit to Washington's increasingly absurd 'leadership,' while at home lefties and rightwing libertarians are finding that they finally agree on something: reining our self-destructive propensity to snoop and strafe the planet. So far, this is, for a change, all to the good.
    I’ll catch up with the other culprits on the old threat board with my next blog.

Our Secret Syria
      Revolt and civil war. A government that poisons its rural population with chemical agents and directs death squads to deal with the political opposition. Hundreds of thousands of dead. Millions of internal refugees and more hundreds of thousands who have fled to neighboring countries.
    Syria?
    No. It’s our bloody best buddy Colombia, the Syria just to the south of us.
    As opposed to the endless news reports from that distant Arab country, coverage of the horrors that go on in Colombia range from miniscule to non-existent. Instead, what we’re told about Colombia is that it’s a ‘developing’ democracy and our best ally in Latin America. If pressed, our leaders admit that Colombia could do a tad better when it comes to human rights. But don’t worry, they’re working on it.
    There are lots of reasons for our media blackout on Colombia. One is that Washington doesn’t want the truth out about its sponsorship by way of billions in weapons, training and direction of what other Latins call a “death squad democracy.” It doesn’t fit with our pretense of being a champion of freedom.
    Another reason is that to acknowledge the millions of Colombian refugees is to admit to the enormity of the evils being committed there. It also turns our propaganda upside down. We are supposed to believe that people are fleeing from leftist countries like Ecuador and Venezuela. How do we explain hundreds of thousands flocking into those countries to escape Washington-sponsored ‘democracy?’
    Thankfully, the latest news from Columbia isn’t all bad. The current president, Santos, is a shade more reasonable than his murderous predecessor Uribe. And there are peace talks going on in Havana between the rebels (who have been at it for 60 years) and the government. But still atrocities go on as in Catatumbo.

Gasus Belli 
vv
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.--Winston Churchill, 1919 
  
    Old Winston was cogitating about the most effective ways to punish Iraqis (nee Mesopotamians) who had the impertinence to rise up against rule by Perfidious Albion.
    Back in the day, it was permissible for colonial powers to use any weapon. no matter how horrible, to teach the wogs a lesson. We gringos, for example, pioneered dive bombing back in the 1920s. Our targets were refractory Nicaraguan peasants. The Nazis adopted the technique as a central element of their Blitzkrieg strategy.
    In Indochina we ended or extended the misery of millions of Vietnamese with the chemical Agent Orange. Then we helped our erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein gas Iranians and Kurds back in the ‘80s. And all of our recent wars have included the use of depleted uranium weapons.
    So it should be difficult for Washington to threaten war over alleged Syrian gas attacks on civilians with a straight face. But, then again, who in Washington has a straight face?
    I have no idea about why such a self-destructive decision was made, but it appeared a couple of days ago that Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama was on the verge of making war on Syria, yet another distant country that has done us no harm.
    It seemed so because the media, in place of the usual political drivel, started rolling out the warhawks to salivate about weapons and tactics. Their jingoism was tempered this time by the worry that Syria may have means to defend itself.  Picking fights with those who can fight back has long been a no-no for the Pentagon and its contractors.
     Yesterday, Tuesday, the media was announcing war by tomorrow, Thursday. Now they seem to be backing off a bit. There’s talk of giving the UN inspectors more time. A NY Times headline finds the U.S case for war “muddied” by the refusal of the Arab League to endorse an attack on Syria.    
     After a dozen years of blood-letting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world’s most powerful empire only managed to make everything worse. It's all but guaranteed that a more awful result will result from a war on Syria. But, hey, the Pentagon contractors make a ton of bucks every time we fire off a million dollar cruise missile. So it's not all bad.

Tales of Terror 
  WASHINGTON — The United States intercepted electronic communications this week among senior operatives of Al Qaeda [since identified as Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of the global terrorist group, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] in which the terrorists discussed attacks against American interests in the Middle East and North Africa...
 
    The above lede from the NY Times  raises some questions. For instance:
    It’s been 12 years since the world’s  most powerful military, informed by the world’s most expensive intelligence apparat, began waging relentless war on Al Qaeda. Yet this latest alert implies that the longest war in our history hasn’t accomplished much. Washington is tacitly admitting that, after all those drone strikes and special ops, Al Qaeda still has “senior operatives” able to plan wide-ranging attacks by way of conference calls. 
     Were these Al Qaeda confabs conducted in clear or in code? If it was the former, Al Qaeda executives are among the stupidest terrorists ever. If they were in code, then U.S. intelligence operatives are the stupidest counterterrorists ever for revealing by their alert that they had broken Al Qaeda’s code.
     And why, 12 years after 9/11, do the terrorists still “chatter” about their plans even though they know they’re being listened to? Why do they alert Washington by increasing that chatter whenever an attack is said to be imminent? You think they should have learned better by now.
    Popular  fiction about terrorism tends to be far more plausible than the nonsensical stuff put out by Washington. Would that our leaders could rise to the level of the writers for Chuck Norris movies. Then again, why should they when their tired old tales still work? Consider that it’s been 34 years, a third of a century, since Washington started warning us that Iran was on the verge of developing a nuke? And that inveracity remains serviceable to this day.
    Meanwhile, the Times did not completely give itself over to the terror tattlers. It reported deep in the same story cited above that, “Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the NSA's data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.”
    That’s a take I can take.

Just Throw Money

WASHINGTON -- The House passed a defense budget Friday that exceeds the deal cut by Congress and President Barack Obama last summer, and that would have to be paid for with cash taken from poverty programs, health care and the federal workforce.--Huffington Post

    One of the oddest anomalies about us Americans is our willingness to endlessly spend treasure and blood and to sacrifice our living standards in a vain effort to rule a world about which we are otherwise ignorant and indifferent.
    Typically, a  few months back, there was a brouhaha about security screw-ups at our consulate in Benghazi that cost the lives of four Americans. An informal poll showed that the Congress people making the loudest noise about the incident had no idea of where Benghazi was.
    Rightwingers and liberals might seemingly be at each other’s jugulars in Washington, yet still bloated budgets for the Pentagon and its endless overseas adventures pass with massive majorities by both Reps and Dems.
    And this goes on, decade after decade, no matter the failures of the empire. I’m old enough to remember a time when, if we lost a war or yet another country turned “anti-American,” there was consternation in Congress with charges of treason and betrayal flying everwhere. If I recall, it was our “loss” of China in 1949 that fueled McCarthyism and the great big red scare.
    Today, no one seems to care that the empire is shrinking. Where’s the anger over the fact that our corrupt and incompetent military has been humiliated by feudal tribespeople in Afghanistan, or that we’ve left Iraq a messier and more dangerous place than when we stupidly invaded it?
    Such anger no longer exists because our interest in the world--never very high--has all but disappeared.  What’s replaced it is the belief that if we throw trillions at the Pentagon and our spying and security apparats, we need bother ourselves no further about the other 95 percent of humankind. Why worry when Hillary and now John Kerry are so good at their jobs?   
   Where will these endless trillions come from? Ordinary Americans, of course.  How will they be accounted for?  They won’t. Who will tote up the results, good and bad, from the constant intrigues, insurrections, coups and wars launched from Washington? No one.
    And who will get the blame when the debacles of our martial and financial regimes again sink the economy? The usual suspects, meaning the poor and powerless who serve as our national scape goats.
     So, it’s on to liberate Syria, or will it be Ecuador? No reason for us common folk to think about such stuff. The pols and generals know what they’re doing. And even if they don’t, zillion dollar drones will make the world obey us again.

-----------

Where’s Jack McCoy 
When We Need Him?
    He’s killed Americans with no more than an emperor’s thumbs down in place of due process. He’s committed or condoned countless war crimes. He’s rewarded rather than prosecuted the authors of the greatest financial ripoff in history. And now it looks like Barack Obama and his meta minions are also violating the national security and privacy laws of just about every nation on the planet. 
    And not just countries. The latest is that the U.S. was spying on the European Union’s offices. NSA spooks got a tip that the EU was full of foreigners and they apparently assumed that some were terrorists disguised as pencil pushers. Who knows if drone attacks on Brussels were contemplated? The Europeans, who take privacy a lot more seriously than we ‘let it all hang out’ Yanks, are so furious they’re contemplating canceling trade deals.
    As I noted in my last missive, when you tote up the billions being spent and vast facilities being built by the United Stasi of America, the logical conclusion is that, just as Washington seeks military mastery of Earth and space, so does it demand access and control over all the world’s electronic communications. That, of course, is megalomania, not to mention against a load of laws from here to Hobart.
    What’s needed from the illuded 95 percent of the world are prosecutors as gutsy as Law and Order’s fictional JackMcCoy or Spain’s actual Baltasar Garzón who are willing to indict Obama and his henchpersons. Edward Snowden, his laptops loaded with primo proof, would make an excellent witness for the prosecution.
    It was Garzón who filed charges against Washington’s good buddy and bloody dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile for the torture and murder of Spanish citizens. Pinochet was visiting the UK at the time and Mrs. Thatcher’s government detained him in luxury before allowing him to go back to Chile. He avoided a host of charges at home by getting sick and dropping dead. Not being a right winger accused of torturing 30,000 men, women and children, it’s doubtful that Edward Snowden would be accorded such genteel treatment by our UK flunky.
     Doubtless the leader of the world’s most lawyerful empire would find ways to avoid or beat the rap. But just having indictments hung around Obama’s neck like leis from his Hawaiian home place might well dissuade future presidents from playing Ghengis Khan with a keyboard. 
     We've seen brave hackers like Edward Snowden step forward to challenge the empire. Now it’s time to see some brave jurists join the fray.

Honest, We Only Do It To Foreigners
    Ever since Edward Snowden gave his fellow Americans more proof that our spy services were busily turning the country into an East German-style surveillance state, the Obama administration has been trying to placate us by lying that it’s only snooping on foreigners.
    That wasn’t very bright, given that 95 percent of the world are foreigners. Not only that, many live in countries that take citizen privacy seriously and have laws against bugging that render the U.S. an outlaw.
    On his stop in Germany last week, Obama got an earful from foreigners, who, after experiencing the Gestapo and the Stasi, weren’t too happy about Uncle Sam violating their laws by emulating those awful organizations in their own country.
    Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe in Hong Kong, the same snoops we lavish with billions to secure us from the bad guys, were embarrassing Obama and the government by letting the desperately wanted Edward Snowden, formerly one of their own, slip through their nets and get away clean. It makes one ask how efficient these expensive spooks really are? In the end all they could do was to hurl empty threats against the nations that helped Snowden.
     And which countries were they? There was Russia, which we are continuing to surround with military bases 20 years after the Cold War. There was China, whose emergence on the world scene Washington and Wall Street expected to “manage.”  Instead, the Chinese committed the horrible anti-American act of managing themselves. There was Cuba, a country we’ve been trying to starve to death for half a century.  And there was Ecuador, whose highly popular government is not exactly in love with us since we tried but failed to overthrow it and kill its president back in 2010. Are those any reason for them not to love, cherish and obey us?
    What’s shocked official Washington is this outright disobedience of the great empire, beginning with the hitherto pliable Hong Kong authorities who let Snowden board a Russian airliner. Typical were the angry remarks by New York’s Senator Schumer, berating Russia’s Putin for defying the empire on Iran, Syria and now Snowden. He sounded like a plantation overseer fuming at an onery slave. 
    Given a carte blanc budget and the massive facilities it’s building, it’s an easy guess that our super duper surveillance state is not all about terrorism, so far a minor problem in the big scheme of things (In fact, since 9/11 we Americans are more likely to be run over by a Hupmobile driven by Judge Crater than fall victim to terrrorism.).
    Rather, it’s apparent that NSA and its public and private confederates want to mine all the world’s data. Not because it would somehow protect us but simply because bureaucracies are infinitely ambitious and treat those who would limit their limitless power as treasonous.
    As usual in such scandals, our corrupt media focus on discrediting the messenger and ignoring the message.  The secret documents revealed by Snowden, Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg and others tell us that Washington and Wall Street operate a global criminal empire that spawns cruel repression, coups and conflicts, endless wars, and untold misery--all to the profit of a tiny few.
    I know, most Americans don’t want to know that.  They'd rather remain blissfully ignorant or indulge the fantasy that our leaders always mean well despite the evils they commit.
    Snowden has done us a great service at the risk of his life. I hope he enjoys a long one.  I can picture him as an old man rocking contentedly on the porch of his finca somewhere special south of the border.

The Longest War In Short 
    Q. How long was America’s longest war?
    A. Twelve years (2001 to 2013), or three times the length of World War II.
    Q. Where was it fought?
    A. Mostly in Afghanistan and partly in Pakistan?
    Q. Who was the enemy?
    A.The Taliban (meaning students), a reactionary Islamic movement composed mainly of Pushtoons, a medieval and largely illiterate tribe armed only with light infantry weapons..
    Q. How many died?
    A. Over 2,000 Americans, and the rest we don’t count.
    Q. How much did the war cost?
    A. A trillion or so, but, as I said, who’s counting? 
    Q. Anything special about these costs?
    A. Yes. Afghanistan was so backward that it didn’t have a banking system. So Washington flew over shrink-wrapped pallets of $100 bills, each pallet worth a million.  It’s estimated that up to  $12 billion in cash disappeared, often right off the tarmac as the planes were being unloaded.
    Q. Where did the money end up?
    A. A lot went to the Gulf states, where well-connected Afghanis built mansions and invested in businesses. Some of it came back here to finance the boom in private military contractors we’ve been enjoying.
    Q. Was anyone ever prosecuted?
    A. A few Wilmers for show.
    Q. Can you give me other examples of misdeeds?
     A. Sure, at one point a shipment of 180,000 rifles and pistols disappeared, a lot ending up with the Taliban. And then there was the revelation that our military was paying up to $400 a gallon to the locals for gasoline. Talk about high test.
    Q. How was the war fought?
    A. A main tactic was busting into houses in the middle of the night, looking for Taliban. Since, without banking, Afghans kept their valuables at home, this tactic was very popular among U.S. troops.
    Q.  What’s happening now?
    A. U.S. forces are pulling out by 2014. And Washington is negotiating Afghanistan’s fate with the evil Taliban. But, in fact, everything's iffy and likely to blow up in everyone's face.
    Q. So who won the war?
    A. We don’t talk about that.
    Q. Wait a sec. You mean the world’s most powerful, not to mention expensive, military couldn’t beat a ragtag feudal tribe! That’s an epic scandal. There should be inquiries and investigations. Heads should roll.
    A.  As I said, we don’t talk about that.