John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN GOV’T SLAVES

 

“Never Forget, 50 Years Ago the US Slaughtered 500 Unarmed Men, Women, & Children”

 

Well, yes, but, first, it is important to realize that it was only one of a number of massacres, some small, some large. The others weren’t witnessed and photographed.

There were also many Individual atrocities. I once met an American deserter in Toronto who had raped and then blasted with his rifle a Vietnamese girl. My understanding then was that kind of savagery was not unusual among young conscripts far from home and unhappy about being there, ignorant young men from far away, holding absolute power over the people they likely blamed for making them be in such a “hellhole.”

More importantly, the fact is that the entire war was an atrocity.

America killed about 3 million Vietnamese and did so in their own land, a place America had no business even being. It used all kinds of pretenses and lies to put itself there.

America left the place a horror of bomb craters and death, with vast deposits of Agent Orange and other poisons left to kill and maim for decades to come. So, too, countless land mines left to blow off peasants’ legs when they tried reclaiming their farms.

And the secret bombing and incursions into Cambodia – all totally illegal – destabilized a neutral government, allowing monsters to come to power, monsters who killed another million people while the United States watched and picked its collective nose.

So-called “heroes” of the war, men like John McCain, represented nothing so much as America’s desperate wish for something worthy or heroic to be discovered out of the dark horrors for which they were responsible.

America’s government, too, encouraged the thought of there being something positive or worthy. After all, it had been utterly humiliated in being defeated by a nation of peasants, after using every form of destruction they could think of, short of nuclear weapons, which indeed had been seriously considered.

McCain was a war criminal, shot down while bombing civilians in Hanoi. The rich creep never even properly thanked the humble Vietnamese man who saved his life. He had landed in water and would have drowned.

His fellow prisoners also said he received special treatment, and some say he cooperated with his captors. The Vietnamese knew perfectly well who this life-long spoiled brat was, the son and grandson of American Admirals.

His entire life story is one of a fairly shabby man with an ugly temper, never very able in anything he tried, who bullied everyone to make his way up under the influence and reputations of his father and grandfather. Later, of course, his status as “hero” catapulted him into politics, a field in which he frequently disgraced himself.

America’s Vietnam War was a true modern holocaust, killing about 4 million people in total including what happened in Cambodia.  Many died horribly with new American weapons and ghastly practices such as large-scale use of napalm and carpet bombing.

There were also horrors like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix which murdered somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 peasants in an effort to destroy social cohesiveness in the country. Night-crawling special forces went out to villages in the dark, under CIA guidance, and literally used large knives to cut the throats of residents such as mayors or other officials.

My Lai was terrible, but it was only the tiniest part of this deliberately-created hell.

None of it served any good purpose. It just reflected immense America arrogance and the brutality born of immense power. Its only purpose was to hold America’s artificially-created foothold in Asia, South Vietnam, a place itself run by ugly dictators.

American presidents lied countless times about what they were doing, and what they were doing was indistinguishable from some of the work of the Nazis themselves.

You see, there is nothing in slogans about democracy or freedom that saves a people from sinking into the most depraved behavior, and that is the real lesson of the Vietnam War, but it is ignored to this day.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF

Of course she should.

But then that goes equally for her former boss, a.k.a., the President.

For thinking people, there never has been a great mystery about Benghazi.

It is an instance of classic blowback in a dirty intelligence operation.

The U.S. was rounding up, from the bloody mess they made of Libya, weapons and human scum to be shipped through Turkey to go kill still more people in Syria.

The Ambassador, up to his armpits in the dirty business, provided some thugs an accessible target as attractive in their eyes as any they might find in Syria.

The United States cannot explain the events in Libya because to do so would admit its responsibility for the bloody horrors of Syria.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST AND PROMPTLY REMOVED

This man’s words are pathetically ignorant special pleading and, in publishing them, the National Post shows how far it will go to stir up the right-wing against the proper working of justice. The comments generated by the article, the ones left posted, resemble an orgy of right-wing hate-masturbation.

You go to war, sometimes you get wounded. You don’t whine and snivel about it long afterward, even more so when you were a paid professional killer in America’s special services, as this man was.

The man was a Green Beret, the guys who made their wonderful reputation crawling around at night in the jungles of Vietnam to sneak into villages and cut civilian officials’ throats. They were part of the CIA’s Project Phoenix which included perhaps 40,000 such brave and honorable acts.

But here he is, whining about a 15-year old who was caught up in the bloody mess of war, as though he were a criminal.

Omar Khadr is not a criminal, full stop.

Otherwise every soldier and volunteer who ever went to a foreign war is a criminal, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, including many who ran off to Israel’s various wars to help the IDF kill Arabs.

But they are not treated as criminals by the law.

It has never been the practice, after a war is over, for the winners to try the losers as criminals, unless flagrant war crimes were involved, and even then, it generally has not been the practice.

The United States has itself behaved as a massive war criminal in Western Asia. War after war. Threat after threat. Killing after killing. Massacres. Assassinations. And plenty of torture. The “laws” of war were broken countless times by the United States, and then it had the arrogance to try others for war crimes after torturing them for confessions, including a child, no less.

Only recently, it has been confirmed that a million souls perished in America’s totally illegal invasion of Iraq. Criminal acts do not come a great deal larger than that, but no one received years of confinement and torture for being part of them, much less planning and authorizing them.

This young man was fifteen when American soldiers shot him – twice in the back, a little detail often left out in the telling of the story.

Then they shipped him off for years of torture and isolation in Guantanamo, denying him for a long time all Red Cross-guaranteed rights. His interrogator was a Nazi-like American who made this kid sit up – pulling at his serious and unhealed wounds each time he brutally questioned him, and that after sleep-deprivation.

After years of abuse and without a hope of improving his situation, Khadr finally gave his torturers what they wanted and confessed to killing an American. I am virtually certain he did not kill anyone, but even if he did, he was a mere child and in a war the United States launched. The U.S. in its abuse of him has violated countless laws, including violating the UN Treaty on Child Soldiers, the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War, and Red Cross International Conventions on the Rights of Prisoners.

If you want a world governed by law, then you yourself must live by the law. Otherwise, we have international anarchy where might makes right and where America feels free to tell everyone, everywhere what they can and can’t do and even decide who may live and who may die.

And this man who is whining about Khadr’s finally receiving bail was himself nothing less than part of America’s bloody enforcement mechanism.

Thank God for a Canadian judge with some courage and proper legal values. A lot of the most beloved qualities of our Canada have suffered under the hateful government of Stephen Harper, but every once in a while it’s nice to see the old values shine through the gloom.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN INTIFADA REPEATED FROM THE TELEGRAPH

The Archbishop has long been one of the West’s most important moral critics, as one might expect from a genuine Christian leader.

Contrast his tough and honest views with the kind of diplomatic pap we typically get from, say, the Vatican.

Or compare his moral bravery with certain American Christian fundamentalists who sound as though their job was to serve as cheerleaders for the American military-industrial complex.

In books and stories about the past, we invariably praise the kind of character we find in the Archbishop.

But in real life, the establishment and substantial parts of the population have no use for them, because their tough views and moral authority call into question accepted clichés and create inconvenient truths.

Recall the powerful and famous scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus returns to earth to meet the Grand Inquisitor, and the two have a conversation.

Jesus himself recognizes none of his teachings in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Inquisitor grows irritated with someone he regards as a nuisance, finally sending Jesus off to be heard from no more.

That is, sadly, the immortal truth of how power and establishment welcome honesty, decency, and truth: they don’t, ever.

America has descended to the ghastly moral level of Israel in all of its reactions to 9/11: illegal arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassinations, ignoring international laws and treaties, imposing harsh new laws completely out of the spirit of its Constitution, maintaining an international torture gulag, and making deals with monsters like General Dostum.

When you throw away everything of genuine human value in a place like America, all you are left with is a great imperial power ready to crush anyone with whom it disagrees.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/obama-bin-ladens-assassination-nothing-to-celebrate-and-no-justice-at-all-considering-the-facts-this-is-just-one-more-proof-of-might-makes-right/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/more-on-bin-ladens-assassination-the-nonsence-of-al-qaeda-web-sites-making-announcements-the-nonsense-of-al-qaeda-background-on-bin-laden/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRWIN STELZER IN THE TELEGRAPH

The Special Relationship?

Oh, I believe Irwin Stelzer means by that expression the arrangement whereby Britain waits around to serve as a convenient tool to be picked up or tossed away as need arises.

Britain made it possible for the U.S. to call its international-law breaking murderous effort in Iraq a “coalition” effort.

There is no Special Relationship, but it is hard to communicate that to writers like this, too blind to see.

It’s like telling a child there is no Father Christmas.

Blair joined in America’s war crimes and demeaned his office in a hundred ways with dishonesty for the sake of the “Special Relationship.”

What did Britain get for its disgraceful efforts? Nothing.

It was treated as a mouse squeaking near Uncle Sam’s boot. None of Britain’s views were even considered on any international issue.

Of course, Blair personally got plenty in return for his dirty work.

He’s a wealthy man today with many ill-gotten sinecures from American or American-controlled foundations.

Perhaps Mr Stelzer is hoping to enjoy a bit of the same one day?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“First of all, we need to know a lot more about each individual still being held in Guantanamo…”

That’s rather cowardly, to say the least.

We know more than enough.

These men were arrested and sent to Guantanamo against all international law.

They have been abused and tortured for years, again against all international law.

For years, they were allowed no lawyers, no visitors, and even the Red Cross was not allowed to visit.

The US has not only ignored international law and obligations, it ignores its own principles.

You cannot have a Bill of Rights worth spit if its provisions are completely ignored as soon as you put a toe over the border.

The very existence of this concentration camp – for that is precisely what it is – is an affront to people who love freedom and decency.

It is also the final proof of George Bush’s complete incompetence: he foresaw none of the consequences of creating this horror.

______________________

The case of Omar Khadr is the one I am thoroughly familiar with.

He has suffered, at the hands of American soldiers, beyond the understanding of most.

He was a mere boy, pushed by ideological parents, when he went to Afghanistan.

At the age of 15, he was shot twice, in the back, by cowardly American soldiers.

Then he was arrested and imprisoned in violation of all international conventions about child soldiers.

He was charged with a crime over something that is not even a crime in war, that is shooting one of your opponents.

But as we know now, he didn’t even do that. It has all been trumped up.

Khadr was tortured for years, again against international conventions. This included a particularly vicious American interrogator, well known for his brutality, having the boy with two horrible wounds trying to heal sit up regularly in uncomfortable positions, pulling at his wounds.

Khadr was held with no access or help for years.

I recall in many, many wars abroad having nothing to do with the US – civil wars and revolutions and colonial wars from Spain to the Congo – American soldiers of fortune and motivated idealists going off by the thousands to fight for one side or the other.

They weren’t subjected to this Nazi-like treatment afterward. This is a total disgrace on the part of the United States.

And our Prime Minister’s cowardly refusal to stand up for a citizen and an abused boy is also disgraceful, but he unfortunately reflects American sensibilities. To have asked for this boy, in view of a family history which includes a dead father who knew Osama bin Laden, would have been viewed as an unfriendly act by an insanely mad American government.

And we have the horrible irony that some of the images from that other ghastly place, Abu Ghraib, now being held back include images of American guards Sodomizing young prisoner boys. Our great investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has told us this over and over, but America pays little attention.