A Blog from David Crump
Here is a recent report by The Empire Files detailing the history of CIA
operations in Afghanistan.
Is it any wonder that so many young Afghans are now joining the Taliban?
(Begin watching at the 1:40 mark. The specifics about Afghanistan begin at 3:30. The entire clip is 16 minutes long)
Not since the days immediately following the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11 has the war in Afghanistan received as much media attention as it is getting
today. Now, everyone is for its continuation, or so it seems.
Corporate media war-mongering knows no bounds.
President Biden’s plans to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan has suddenly turned every broadcast journalist into a distressed, hand-wringing, honorary member of Human Rights Watch, fretting and fussing over the future state of an Afghanistan free of American military forces.
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that US forces will continue to dominate the Afghan landscape (and neighboring Pakistan) with armed drones dropping bombs and missiles into peoples’ homes, a legion of civilian contractors pursuing American business interests, and intelligence operations manipulating the government and assassinating anyone who gets in their way.
Not since music producer Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound” have I heard such a fully orchestrated, monotonous, uniform wall of repetitious lament from corporate news broadcasters universally expressing, whether explicitly or by implication, their desire to keep US troops in a war overseas.
Never mind that this war – which has always included US attacks in neighboring Pakistan – has dragged on for over 20 years; never mind that the original mission of capturing Osama bin Laden was accomplished long ago; never mind that the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers demonstrates what many have long suspected – that no one in the Pentagon, State, or Defense Departments ever had any hope for the situation’s improvement, much less a military solution to our “why can’t we fix Afghanistan?” query.
Nevertheless, everyone from Fox News to MSNBC is now lamenting president Biden’s “irrational,” even “cowardly” decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Suddenly, it appears that American elites actually care about the fate of poor
Muslims overseas. Thoughts of a barbaric Taliban regime imposing their version of Sharia law over women and girls is more than suburban coffee table conversations can tolerate.
But the fact of the matter is that the only reason CNN and CBS news anchors now want us all to believe that Afghanistan’s future (sans US group troops) looks so devastatingly bleak, is because these same people have thoroughly and irresponsibly ignored the lives of the Afghan people for nearly 20 years.
Propaganda is not only a matter of spreading misinformation. It also requires withholding inconvenient truths.
Think about it.
How often has the American public been updated, on a regular basis, about the details of what the US presence in Afghanistan has meant for the country’s civilian population?
The answer is, rarely if ever.
How often have we been told about the tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the frequent US drone strikes?
What about the regular CIA assassinations; murders that can wipe out entire families, including young children?
(Below. Watch “Living Under Drones,” approx. 7 minutes)
No. Only the ignorant or the propagandists will believe that the future suddenly looks bleak for the Afghan people after America “leaves.” The truth is that sharing their country with America’s occupation army has always been a nightmare for the Afghan and Pakistani people.
Just ask the little children who instinctively run in fear every time they imagine a noise overhead because they are terrified of another drone attack.
In the early days of planning in the Oval Office, there was a nanosecond given over to the suggestion that al Qaeda should be treated as an international criminal organization, and that the Twin Towers attack should be viewed as a horrible crime rather than an act of war.
Two possible paths were laid out before president George W. Bush. The first option, with important historical precedent, is explained in a 2006 report, 9/11: Five Years Later. The Forward to this government report explains that: “Before 9/11, combating terrorism was treated largely as a law enforcement problem.”
Not anymore.
President Bush forever changed the US attitude towards “terrorism” – which still remains horribly (and conveniently) ill-defined.
Eager to declare himself “a war president,” George W. Bush acquiesced to the military bureaucracy’s (which naturally includes the weapons manufacturers who have made billions since this war began) insistence that 9/11 be viewed as an act of war requiring a military (rather than an international law-enforcement) response.
The people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Yemen, AND the United States have all suffered the devastating, inhumane consequences of that egotistical, presidential decision ever since.
Only those who have not been paying attention will now believe that US forces have been protecting Afghan women and children, civilians who will suddenly come under threat by our withdrawal.
Last week president Biden ordered more illegal airstrikes against Iraqi forces in Iraq and Syrian forces in Syria. The State Department issued a
statement (more on that below) declaring that the US was merely exercising “its right to self-defense,” echoing Israel’s favorite excuse for its illegal bombings in Gaza.
Let’s recall several crucial facts, however:
One, US military forces in both Iraq and Syria are in those countries illegally. Both are sovereign nations, whether or not we like their governments. Both governments have told the US, in no uncertain terms, that they wanted US troops OUT of their countries long ago.
Thus, we are in both countries as an illegal invading/occupying power. Under international law, such military forces have no right to “self-defense.”
We are the illegal aggressors. It is the Iraqis and Syrians who have every legal, moral right to defend themselves against the unwanted US forces that have outrageously installed themselves in their countries.
Two, Iran in a neighbor to both Iraq and Syria. The US is not. The Iraqi and Syrian governments are free to seek military assistance from anyone they choose.
Given the hostility directed against Iran by the US, and the close regional, strategic affinities linking Iraq and Syria to Iran, it is hardly surprising that local militias fighting against the unwanted US presence would seek and accept Iran’s assistance in their struggle.
That assistance does not constitute a threat against the US.
Keeping those simple facts in mind, Glenn Greenwald offers an excellent
analysis on Joe Biden’s war-mongering, which is actually a bipartisan, long-standing American practice.
It is not an accident that most of the people around the globe regularly say that the US poses THE greatest danger to the rest of the world.
Glenn’s article appears at SheerPost and is entitled, “Biden’s Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria Only Serves the Weapons Industry Funding Both Parties.” Below is an excerpt (all emphases are mine):
U.S. citizens derive no benefit, but instead suffer great loss, from endless war in the Middle East. But their interests are irrelevant to decisions of bipartisan Washington.
For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a U.S. bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden’s first air attack in February: The U.S., in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”
Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can U.S. airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be “defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense?” Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the U.S. “homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a U.S. colony or American property, nor does the U.S. have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were “defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.
The Pentagon’s description of the people bombed by the U.S. — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of U.S. aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the U.S. war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration’s claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were “defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon’s arguments.
Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden’s dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama’s deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump’s bombing of Assad’s forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden’s bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing U.S. troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.
In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden’s Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq.”
Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast‘s long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are “parody” because when it comes to the U.S.’s Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The U.S. presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the U.S.”
That is exactly right. The U.S. government is a lawless entity. It violates the law, including its own Constitution, whenever it wants. The requirement that no wars be fought absent congressional authority is not some ancillary bureaucratic annoyance but was completely central to the design of the country. Article I, Section 8 could not be clearer: “The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare war.” Two months after I began writing about politics — back in December, 2005 — I wrote a long article compiling the arguments in the Federalist Papers which insisted that permitting the president unchecked powers to wage war . . .
The rest of the article appears here.
I have followed Ray McGovern’s work for many years. He works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington.
His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
His latest article at AntiWar.com is entitled “New York Times Pushing the Envelope on Russia.” Mr. McGovern dismantles the latest story accusing the Russian government of hacking US agencies.
All demagogic governments think they need an enemy, real or imagined. Nothing unites a people like the fear of a common enemy. It’s an ancient tactic used to distract people from their own government’s failures and to unite them around an otherwise disreputable government establishment.
Naturally, career politician Joe Biden understands these things very well, as do the various agencies and corporate powers that benefit from keeping the American people misinformed and distracted.
The corporate media are not to be trusted, folks. Not at all…
Here is Ray’s piece:
If Wednesday morning’s passive-voice (“Russian hackers are accused of”), evidence-free New York Times article titled “Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden” has a familiar ring, look who wrote it. The senior author is David Sanger, the NYT’s chief Washington correspondent. Based on Sanger’s unenviable record, the story he wrote with Nicole Perlroth can be dismissed as a proverbial nothingburger with Sanger sauce.
The article claims that Russian hackers breached a contractor for the Republican National Committee (RNC) last week “around the same time that Russian cybercriminals launched the largest global ransomware attack on record”. Sanger and co-author Nicole Perlroth cannot resist editorializing in the first paragraph that the “incidents are testing the red lines set by President Biden” at the June 16 summit with Russian President Putin. Biden, they noted, “presented Mr. Putin with a list of 16 critical sectors of the American economy that, if attacked, would provoke a response”.
The NY Times does not seem to know if the RNC is included among those 16. Indeed, there is little sign that the Times actually knows what those 16 critical sectors are. No worries, the Russians nonetheless “are accused” of activities that “test those red lines”.
The Times, and Sanger in particular, have shown themselves receptive to parts of our government (especially the security services) as well as to those who need an enemy to justify huge defense spending – all of whom have a deep vested interest in painting Russia and Putin in the most dangerous colors. It is a safe bet that this is what is going on here.
Sanger was first off the blocks in parroting former CIA Director John Brennan’s concoction, in the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 6, 2017, that Putin personally directed the “hacking of the DNC emails”. Those who rely on the NT Times do not know this yet, but testimony taken under oath by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 5, 2017 revealed that no one – not the Russians, no one – hacked those emails.
That testimony was made public on May 7, 2020, 14 months ago, but the mainstream media have suppressed it. Clearly, it does not fit the Times’s narrative. The modus operandi of today’s NYT seems to be “only the news that fits we print”. See: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sh21.pdf. AND New House Documents Sow Further Doubt That Russia Hacked the DNC.
Still, it is hard to believe how Sanger nor Perlroth (who specializes in cyber security) can pretend to be unaware of the that House Intelligence Committee testimony.
While for the past five years Sanger has been concentrating on the “threat” from Russia and parroting grist from his CIA feeders, he has a long unenviable record as mouthpiece for those asserting WMD in Iraq, to those claiming falsely that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons, to those contriving the story about the Russians paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops.
His most disreputable performance came in the months before the March 2003 attack on Iraq. For example, Sanger reported “Weapons of Mass Destruction” as flat fact no fewer than seven times in this article of July 29, 2002.
Call me “quaint” or “obsolete”, but back in the day we intelligence analysts looked closely at a source’s record before we put his/her words into a serious report.
Andrew Bacevich offers a candid obituary of former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week. Bacevich speaks with a level of moral
clarity that you will not find in the main stream outlets which specialize in the hagiography of establishment figures.
Bacevich is the president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He’s a retired colonel and Vietnam War veteran. He is also professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and author of several books. His most recent book, just out, is titled After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. In May, he wrote a piece for The Boston Globe headlined “My son was killed in Iraq 14 years ago — who’s responsible?”
I have read a number of Bacevich’s books and they have all been informative, historically astute, and prophetic in their conclusions. I highly recommend anything Col. Bacevich writes.
He is also a devout Roman Catholic whose Christian faith informs his perspective on life and international relations. He cares deeply about everyone’s humanity, and so, is regularly a critic of US policies overseas.
Take a few moments to hear the truth about Rumsfeld’s legacy. It ain’t pretty. The video is approximately 18 minutes long. Below is Bacevich’s summary of Rumsfeld’s legacy:
I don’t expect that there’s going to be any revision of Donald Rumsfeld’s reputation in the future. He was a catastrophically bad and failed defense secretary who radically misinterpreted the necessary response to 9/11, and therefore, caused almost immeasurable damage to our country, to Iraq, to the Persian Gulf, more broadly. And I don’t think there’s any way to disguise that.
Recently Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Central American country of Guatemala, the jumping off point for the folks braving a dangerous overland journey to our southern border.
She told them, “Don’t do it. Do not come.”
She wasn’t worried about the risks these people would take in bringing their children to the US. Her motives were purely political, as the Republicans continue to browbeat President Biden over the pressures of (illegal) immigration.
The brutal irony of Harris’ order to Central America was the way it exemplified the history of US/Latin American relations. Once again, the USA is telling those Spanish-speaking southerners what they can and cannot do.
If only the people of Latin America had been able to tell the Americans, “Do not come. Stay home. Leave us alone.”
All of the countries in Central America, and almost all in South America, have been the victims of US-led military coups, US-trained death squads, political assassination’s, CIA interference with their democratically elected governments, and neoliberal economic manipulations that keep them as perpetual debtor states.
For just one example, journalists Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton of The Grayzone have produced a new documentary (approximately 13 minutes long) outlining current US efforts to destabilize the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua, close neighbor to Guatemala.
It’s called “How US govt-funded media fueled a violent coup in Nicaragua.”
You will never hear these facts from Kamala Harris or American media:
Max Blumenthal is one of America’s foremost investigative journalists.
He also happens to be Jewish, and has written two important books about Israeli militarism and the depth of Jewish Supremacy throughout the Jewish
Israeli population.
I highly recommend his books, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza if you want a good picture of life in modern Israel and the Gaza strip.
Mr. Blumenthal is also the chief editor at The Gray Zone, an important, independent news site.
Today I discovered that he has written a story which I have been searching for.
In the heat of the current wave of accusations about “rampant” antisemitic attacks — all of them stirred up by pro-Palestinian demonstrations during Israel’s recent bombing of Gaza — I have been searching for someone who has investigated the details of these alleged attacks.
Today I found it.
Below is an excerpt from an actual investigation into the specifics of these charges. As I suspected, and as often happens, pro-Israel/pro-Zionist activists (like the Anti-Defamation League[ADL] and the Jewish Defense League [JDL]) have been manipulating and misrepresenting the evidence.
Yes, there have been isolated instances of antisemitic speech, like the outrageous, offensive Tweets declaring that “Hitler was right.”
But for the most part, the facts are quite the opposite of what the ADL and JDL have been reporting.
Max’s article is entitled, “To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freakout.” Here is an excerpt:
With deceptively edited videos and dubious allegations, the Israel lobby has
manufactured an antisemitism epidemic to turn the media’s gaze away from dead children in Gaza.
Following an 11-day assault on the Gaza Strip in which the Israeli army killed over 220 people, including more than 65 children, and days of videotaped rampages of Jewish extremist mobs against Palestinian people and property inside Israeli cities, Israel lobbyists in the US and Canada have launched a carefully coordinated public relations campaign to deflect outrage.
Having failed to successfully defend massacres of entire families in their homes and the deliberate demolition of civilian residential towers and media offices in Gaza City, the US Israel lobby and the Israeli government it advocates for have manufactured an epidemic of antisemitic violence with the goal of portraying American Jewry as the true victim of the crisis.
Led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Israel lobbyists have portrayed a series of street scuffles between supporters of Palestine and pro-Israel activists as anti-Jewish pogroms. In nearly every case, no evidence exists to substantiate claims that Jews were targeted as Jews for violent assault. There is ample proof of deception, however, as video and photographic evidence reveals pro-Israel elements provoking demonstrators, initiating violence and falsifying or embellishing their testimonies. . .
Now, as the Israeli police round up hundreds of young Palestinians citizens of Israel for participating in protests against their own dispossession, the New York Police Department has begun doing the same, arresting Palestinian American youth, jailing and investigating them for “hate crimes” over their involvement in videotaped tussles with pro-Israel demonstrators.
In many high-profile cases, however, video and photographic evidence examined by The Grayzone contradicts the allegations made by pro-Israel forces and reveals the stories of several accusers to be highly deceptive, if not entirely false. . .
You can see the entire article here.
Matt Taibbi’s latest article on Joe Biden’s presidency — The Two Faces of Joe Biden — makes two important points with plenty of supporting evidence.
First, all presidents and their administrations lie to us. It’s a fact of life and we all need to remember it.
It is certainly true that Donald Trump set a new bench mark for the volume of pathological lies spewed daily from the Oval Office. But his special gift for dishonesty was only unique in volume not in kind.
Second, now that political partisanship is baked into the DNA of American media outlets, pure propaganda (as opposed to actual investigative reporting) is the established norm in cable and network news.
No matter which stations or networks you watch, you are being lied to much of the time. That, too, is a fact of modern life.
Taibbi lays all of this out in black and white as he explains not only the two-facedness of Joe Biden’s policies, but the eagerness of so-called journalists at places like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to carry water for this Democratic administration.
Taibbi gives special attention to those lap-dog stenographers who are enthusiastically describing Biden as America’s new FDR.
Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article.
To read the entire piece requires a subscription, but it’s only $5/month and well worth the money:
. . . With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences.
In the case of Biden, we’ve seen in the first few months that the upscale, cosmopolitan target audiences of outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post want to believe they’re living through a “radical,” “transformative” presidency, the political antidote to the Trump years. The same crowd of West Wing power-tweeters was leading the charge against “purity” in politics about eight minutes ago.
In fact, in the 2019-2020 primary season, Bernie Sanders was regularly lambasted by the same blue-leaning press outlets for trying to re-imagine F.D.R. through programs with names like the “Green New Deal.” Proposal after proposal that had been directly inspired by F.D.R. was described as too expensive, unrealistic, or a political non-starter heading into a general election.
Now that the real version of that brand of politics has been safely eliminated, a new PR campaign is stressing that Democrats did elect F.D.R. after all. Moreover, a legend is being built that crime-bill signing, PATRIOT-Act inspiring, Iraq-war-humping Joe Biden wanted all along to be a radical progressive, but was held back by the intransigence of the evil Republicans. Is that even remotely true?
Observe, for instance, the hilarious Ezra Klein editorial that just ran in the New York Times, called “Four Ways to Look at the Radicalism of Joe Biden” (someone actually wrote that headline!):
Before Biden, Democratic presidents designed policy with one eye on attracting Republican votes, or at least mollifying Republican critics. That’s why a third of the 2009 stimulus was made up of tax cuts, why the Affordable Care Act was built atop the Romneycare framework, why President Bill Clinton’s first budget included sharp spending cuts…
Over the past decade, congressional Republicans slowly but completely disabused Democrats of these hopes. The long campaign against the ideological compromise that was the Affordable Care Act is central here…
The result is that Obama, Biden, the key political strategists who advise Biden and almost the entire Democratic congressional caucus simply stopped believing Republicans would ever vote for major Democratic bills.
Question for Ezra: did Obama also accelerate the drone program, expand the surveillance state, and abandon enforcement of white-collar crime to a degree that made John Ashcroft look like Eliot Ness, in a similar effort to reach across the aisle? Or were those Executive Branch behaviors just expressions of unrequited love?
Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 contrasted himself with Hillary Clinton by insisting he would be the guy to stop kowtowing to special interests. On health care, he was incredibly specific: he would green-light drug re-importation from Canada and allow Medicare to negotiate bulk pharmaceutical prices, insisting also he was a “proponent” of single-payer.
Obama went so far as to do an ad blasting former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who went from helping write the ban on Medicare bargaining to going to “work for the pharmaceutical industry making two million dollars a year” at the lobbying group PhRMA.
“Imagine that,” said Obama. “That’s an example of the same old game‐playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game‐playing.”
The year after this ad ran, Obama was meeting with that same Billy Tauzin in, ironically, the Roosevelt Room of the White House (Tauzin would end up visiting a dozen times). There, they hammered out a deal: Tauzin’s group, PhRMA, would fund a $150 million ad campaign boosting Obama’s health care program, in exchange for the Obama White House agreeing to kill the reimportation idea and leave the ban on Medicare negotiation in place.
Tauzin later described the deal, saying it had been “blessed” by the White House, and emails later released showed a union official who was part of health care bill negotiations explaining how Obama’s White House planned on paying for its PR campaign: “They plan to hit up the ‘bad guys’ for most of the $.”
Obama in other words won a contentious primary against Hillary Clinton by snowing reporters like me into hyping him as the clean hands guy who’d push aside Clintonian transactional politics. Then he turned around a year later and passed his signature program with help from the worst industry actors, paying for it by killing the progressive parts of the plan.
This history — important history — is now being rewritten by people like Klein as an “ideological compromise” inspired by the Obama/Biden White House’s misguided desire to govern with Republican votes. The fact that the Affordable Care Act passed with a grand total of zero such votes is apparently irrelevant, as was Biden’s ignored and erroneous (do we only say “lie” in some cases?) insistence as a candidate last year that he found “Republican votes” for “Obamacare.”. . .
Click here and subscribe to read the entire piece.
Regular readers of this blog know that the Australian journalist Caitlin
Johnstone is one of my favorite bloggers.
Even though I cannot share in her atheistic, philosophical humanism, I deeply appreciate her analytical insights into the manipulative corruption at the heart of the American establishment.
Her most recent post is entitled, “Consent That’s Manufactured by Propaganda is Not Informed Consent.” She explains how the Biden administration’s hypocritical foreign policy is, in fact, the long-standing, American, bi-partisan status quo.
I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
A new Twitter post by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows:
“We will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are
at stake, but we will do so only when the objectives are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws, and with the American people’s informed consent – together with diplomacy.”
Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.
Firstly, US military force is never used to protect “American lives” in modern times, unless you count the lives of US troops and mercenaries in foreign lands they have no business occupying in the first place. The US military is never used to defend American lives against an invading enemy force; that simply does not happen in our current world order. It is only ever used to protect the agenda of unipolar planetary domination, which would be the “vital interests” which Blinken obliquely refers to above.
Secondly, Blinken’s claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without “the American people’s informed consent” has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden’s airstrikes on Syria last month. The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed. A nation the US invaded (Syria) was bombed because troops are being attacked in a second nation the US invaded (Iraq) on the completely unproven claim that a third country against whom the US is currently waging economic warfare (Iran) supported those attacks. At no time were the people asked for their consent to this, and at no time was any attempt made to ensure that they were informed of the situation before it happened.
Thirdly, US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people’s informed consent. Literally never. Consent is always manufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception. The bigger the military operation, the more egregious the deceit used to manufacture consent for it. Even in relatively “peaceful” times when the US is merely raining dozens of bombs and missiles per day on foreign soil, Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of distorted and outright false narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction.
Consent that has been artificially manufactured by propaganda is not informed consent, any more than sex with someone who’s been dosed with rohypnol is consensual sex. US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation. Informed consent plays no role whatsoever in the use of US military force, nor indeed in any other major aspect of the behavior of the US or its allies.
Every aspect of the US-centralized power alliance is propped up by a relentless deluge of mass-scale psyops. Imperialism, capitalism, electoral politics; consent for all its key pillars is constantly being manufactured by the plutocratic news media, by television, by movies. All of the most influential generators of modern mainstream thought and culture are heavily influenced by a plutocratic class which has a vested interest in keeping power out of the hands of the people.
Recently, one of Terry’s (my wife) Facebook posts was flagged and deleted for violating Facebook’s content policies.
Her censored comment advocated for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She noted that it was the Israeli government, not the occupied Palestinians, who were regularly committing acts of terrorism.
That particular political observation is no longer permitted by the Facebook censorship policies — which we all know are expanding rapidly.
It’s more evidence of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country which would love to censor ALL criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people living under its control.
Fortunately, the Jewish-led, Palestinian rights organization called Jewish Voice for Peace has begun a campaign on Facebook aimed at combating the Israel Lobby’s dangerous, anti-first amendment influence online.
They call it, “Facebook We Have to Talk: On Distinguishing Anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism in Public Spaces.” Below is an excerpt:
In January 2021, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced a global campaign “Facebook, we need to talk” about the social media giant’s inquiry into whether criticism of the movement Zionism “falls within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards.”
In its current form, the controversy centers around forcing universities, social media platforms, and other public spaces to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard which defines current anti-Semitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel, overall a definition that would essentially shut down any criticism of the Zionist state.
According to Lara Friedman, the goal of Zionist groups who are pushing for this action “isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel.”
In response, hundreds of activists, intellectuals and artists from around the world have launched a petition to ensure that Facebook does not include “Zionist” as a protected category in its hate speech policy—“that is, to treat ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for “Jew or “Jewish.” In its first 24 hours, the open letter gathered over 14,500 signatures, including such figures as Hanan Ashrawi, Norita Cortiñas, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gabriel.
“Cooperating with the Israeli government’s request,” the petition notes, “would undermine efforts to dismantle antisemitism, deprive Palestinians of a crucial venue for expressing their political viewpoints to the world, and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for its violations of Palestinian rights.”