John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

The article’s headline and photo suggest it is about Amazon, but it is not. It purports to explain why tech companies’ behavior is much like that of older companies, giving a few anecdotes of interest but not much else.

Steve Jobs indeed had a long public record of behaving as a bastard, including in his private life. He once tried to disown in court his illegitimate daughter, trying to pay nothing for her support, then settling on what can only be called a token amount for a man of his then resources. His business practices with employees and customers did not depart from his personal behavior, although he liked to play the smiling guru, a little like the Ghandi parody done by Bill Gates in meetings.

Other companies the author mentions are also known for some unpleasant practices with their customers, most notably Facebook, a ruthless outfit in bed with the CIA from the start. The author left out the most egregious example, Microsoft, surely one of world’s most disliked companies and deservedly so.

But I do not believe Jeff Bezos belongs in that crowd. I stand ready to be corrected by facts, but the author of this article provides none.

The article in The New York Times does not convince. Much of the public still seems to believe The New York Times is a voice of authority, but it is not, and it is not owing to its own shoddy practices over the years. It actually has a long record of dishonest journalism, favoritism to friends and associates, and a number of terrible with-hunts.

Its witch-hunts included, for example, investigation of a woman some years ago who said that a Kennedy cousin raped her at a Kennedy beach house. Not only was her testimony believable, but in trying to discredit her, The Times revealed her identity, something against court practice in such cases. It was a shameful example of pandering to a wealthy family with which it had connections. Another case involved the scientist Wen Ho Lee. The Times pursued him with a long series of articles for crimes of which he was never convicted because the FBI did not have evidence.

There have been many such cases in American domestic affairs, but The Times is just as guilty in foreign affairs. Several times it has been caught with CIA agents on the payroll. It has never once failed to beat the drums for war too. And it accepts and justifies every atrocity committed by Israel. It is hardly the voice of dispassionate journalism.

So an article by The Times should serve only as a starting point for an investigation, but the author of The Guardian article has done none.

I think the article he has written has an extremely naïve starting assumption, that tech industry somehow was thought to behave differently as an employer and supplier than traditional industries.

The last time I looked, humans had not shown any recent advance in evolution. We remain relatives of chimpanzees, only with larger brains capable of still more damage than those cute but nasty animals. So why would you be surprised human behavior in a newer industry hasn’t changed? It seems to me it was a false premise from which to start writing.

But even in older industries we do sometimes have enlightened and responsible owners, and until I am convinced otherwise by facts I regard Bezos not as Andrew Carnegie but as a decent and innovative businessman.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANSION OF A POSTED RESPONSE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH SYRIA’S PRESIDENT ASSAD IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

I am no great defender of unelected leaders like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but in the case of Syria’s current troubles I support him and wish him success against the forces responsible for murder and destruction on a large scale in his country.

The great writer, Graham Greene, said:
“…the writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change.”

Syria is the victim in this case, and the bloody bullies attacking Syria are the United States and Israel, both too cowardly to attack directly and both dishonestly claiming that the Free Syrian Army represents a genuine popular revolt.

The aim of the United States and Israel in all this violence is to wipe Syria off the Middle East chessboard, leaving it a divided society with no central direction.

Their efforts are designed to serve Israel’s drive to dominate the Middle East, just as America’s invasion of Iraq served the same drive. Israel aspires to be a miniature replica in the Middle East of what the United States has become globally, and the United States’ government, compromised by its corrupt election financing system and the central role of special interests in that system, is more than willing to grant Israel the role.

The brutality and hypocrisy involved in creating a pseudo-popular uprising and putting millions of innocent people at risk are breathtaking. The United States and Israel have gathered, armed, and supported a gang of thugs and injected them (through Syria’s border with Turkey, Turkey also offering refuge and re-supply) into what was a peaceful country, the very kind of cut-throats neither the U.S. nor Israel would allow to cross their own borders.

The recent death of an American ambassador in Libya at Benghazi, an event which no American official will discuss honestly, was part of the same dark scheme and involved the ambassador working with the CIA to gather killers and arms for export to Syria. The operation badly backfired when some of the thugs being dealt with turned on the Americans, something American officials will not acknowledge out of embarrassment and the desire to hide the dirty business in which they are engaged.

The world is not the simple place of angels and devils as America’s propaganda efforts ceaselessly proclaim it – great camps of goodness and evil ready to do battle for the soul of humanity. No matter whether a government is democratic in origin or not – and given the utter corruption of America’s politics, its claims to authentic democracy are tenuous – powerful insiders are fully capable of bloody, ruthless behavior in secret, destroying the lives of others.

While the United States loves hearing itself talk about being a bastion of freedom and rights, the fact is that over the last 40 or so years, it has been, quite simply, the most murderous nation on earth, killing 3 million in Vietnam plus a host of victims in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and in many, many other places either invaded or toppled in bloody coups. It still runs an international torture gulag, of which Guantanamo is only a part.

The world can support a bloody global dictator even less than an individual country can support a local one. So, in Syria we see a stark choice, and the ethical balance favors for once a local dictator.

If you want the rule of law, you must abide by the rule of law, a principle which neither the United States nor Israel makes even a pretense of embracing although they sure like talking about it between bombing runs and terrorist activities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

This is an absurd development.

Yesterday, in the morning, I read Mr Hagel saying that United States’ intelligence did not believe Syria had used chemical weapons.

Because Israel had already just claimed in public that Syria had used such weapons, Mr Hagel was careful to state that the United States used its own intelligence sources.

By that afternoon, we had this new story that indeed the United States thought it likely (but had no hard evidence) that Syria had used chemical weapons.

I know of no example from real life events more deserving of the descriptive term “Orwellian.”

We know from the inadvertently-overheard words of two presidents not terribly long ago, the presidents of France and the United States, talking in private that Mr Netanyahu is regarded by both of them as an inveterate liar.

Mr Hagel, owing to his independence of mind regarding the Mideast, fought quite a battle after the election to be confirmed for his cabinet post.

Of course, his first words about chemical weapons contradicted Mr Netanyahu.

Something happened in the course of one day to turn him around.

Was it the same group which so opposed his nomination and confirmation?

And that group is the special interest of American apologists for Israel’s excesses.

Actually, if anything, virtually the opposite is true. There was a documented incident of the so-called rebels using some form of chemical.

From where did they get the material?

From Israel, in an effort to create a casus belli?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN RUSSIA TODAY

Civilized is not the point.

The United States mouths stuff about human rights and democracy while assassinating, stealing, and abusing people.

Monumental hypocrisy is the point.

The fact must be thrown into America’s face when it makes spurious claims.

The CIA Torture Gulag – of which Guantanamo is only part – is gross hypocrisy, all of it carefully kept offshore, as though that fact kept the spirit of the Constitution.

The U.S. has in truth been a bloody monster for half a century: 3 million killed in its Vietnam Holocaust; a million in Cambodia owing to its destabilizing; a million in Iraq; and more.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is utterly paranoid nonsense from the CSIS official.

There is, and always has been, the risk of twisted individuals doing harm to the public.

It happens every day, but we do not call it terror unless the perpetrator happens to be a Muslim.

Just what do you think Clifford Olson or Robert Picton or Paul Bernardo were?

What do you think the creepy guys who shoot people in the Jane and Finch area are?

If we let our officials act the way the government of the United States has, we simply will no longer have the Canada we love.

The truth is no terrorist can take Canada away from us: we can only do that to ourselves.

The United States today is virtually a police state. Passengers are frisked and x-rayed even on local flights.

People are submitted to intense questioning on the least suspicion of a second-rate police-mind. The TSA now patrols some American internal highways and pulls people over arbitrarily.

The very books you borrow from the library are recorded by the FBI, an agency with its own past history of genuine terror tactics. The mails are invaded. Internet use is recorded. All phone conversations are recorded.

People convicted of nothing are secretly detained in prisons. The CIA continues to run an international torture gulag. The CIA murders people proved guilty of nothing every week by drones and missiles.

Is that the kind of environment the CSIS official desires?

I suspect it is the environment which is dear to the heart of a control-freak like our prime minister, a man who is also such an American wannabe he readily swallows whatever the American government dishes out.

God save Canada from the sick thinking of the CSIS official.
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“You have a better chance of falling off a ladder and dying or slipping and falling in the bath tub and dying than in a terrorist attack. Largely it’s a tactic to scare the population into allowing for infringement on rights and freedoms and herd the electorate more readily.”

Absolutely.

There are more deaths on bicycles every year even in the US than from any conceivable form of terror.

Americans murder their fellow citizens to the order of 20,000 each year.

Americans kill their fellow citizens on the highways to the order of 40,000 every year.

Half a million American children are seriously abused by a member of their own family every year.

Doctors making mistakes kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Thousands of young people are permanently injured every year in America playing violent sports like football.

Four hundred thousand Americans are taken by cancer every year – much of it preventable as in the case of smoking and exposure to other hazards.

Every society at all times has a substantial group of people who are subject to vague fears more than others and people who would like to closely control others for their own comfort: there is a natural distribution of them in any population.

But when you give such people – who tend always to be drawn to security or police or military work – too much leeway and resources in the name of paranoid fears, you begin to open yourself to the debilitating reality of a police state, whose ultimate limit is nothing less than  the horrors of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Reich.

The vigilance required to keep a genuinely free society is not the vigilance of outfits like the FBI or CIA or CSIS or the military: it is the vigilance of each of us against those who would abuse us in the name of terror or dark fears.
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“Can CSIS and the Harper regime tell us how many Afghans and Libyans have been killed in their own country by Canadians.”

Thank you.

The number of Afghans killed, mainly by the U.S., is in the tens of thousands.

The number of Libyans is in the thousands, again mainly by the U.S.

And we’ve assisted in bombing Libyan infrastructure back to the Stone Age.

That is no exaggeration, and no press in Canada will tell us the dark truth, not even CBC, these days quaking in its boots over its fate under the dark hulk we call prime minister.

Nothing to be proud of, any of it.

And if you really think about it, these were acts which only created legions of young men with grievances for the future.

Oh, but we do  have the buzz-cut thugs at the CIA playing computer games with drones and Hellfire missiles destroying the lives of thousands of others to protect us, don’t we?

That thought sure makes me feel safe. How about you?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Globe’s piece on the interview with Judyth Baker is so condensed, I’m sure it has lost much meaning.

I cannot at all assess her words treated poorly, as they are, by the Globe, although when she mentions things like the Reily Coffee Company, I know exactly to what she is referring.

The cancer labs ring bells too since a significant figure in the conspiracy was a highly eccentric pilot and gifted amateur researcher in New Orleans named David Ferrie, a man who was later murdered in an extremely violent fashion.

Her connection of the lab work like that with the CIA is likely something she surmised but did not actually know. If the CIA sets up such operations, the people who work there never know for whom they are actually working, much like the employees of the fake Apple Stores in China who believed they worked for Apple.

Her talk about Oswald in intelligence also rings true. Oswald, when he went to Russia from the Marines, was undoubtedly a low-level spy set up to find out about the realities of Soviet life by one or another of America’s numerous intelligence agencies. We know for a fact that there were a few other servicemen who did much the same thing in the 1950s.

Her talk about Oswald’s loyalties rings true. He was, in fact, a fairly patriotic young man who joined the Marines when underage, and because of his above-average intelligence, he was trained for secret radar operations with the new U-2 ultra-high flying spy planes in Asia.

The young Marine suddenly had a series of still unexplained incidents in his life abroad, started taking an interest in Russian matters, and someone trained him in a condensed course in the Russian language, a difficult language to learn. The course almost had to be the kind developed by and commonly used by the American military and intelligence.

Then he showily defected to Russia, with a lot of silly, deliberately public statements about his approval of the Soviet Union – something which totally goes against every factual thing we know about Oswald.

When he eventually returned, he was peacefully integrated back into American life…with, of all things, a Russian bride – this, at a time when there was such intense red-baiting that you could get in trouble in the United States for subscribing to the wrong magazine. It really was that dark and hostile, and what happened with Oswald’s return just could not ever have happened without hidden explanations.

(Oswald’s reintroduction to American life included his mysterious introduction to a group of Russian-speakers living in the Dallas area, an event whose probability of chance happening must be virtually zero.)

We also know Oswald worked at least part time in the period of his work at the Reily Coffee Company as an FBI informant. The Warren Commission itself was knocked off its pins when it learned something of this, but managed to sweep it under the carpet.

Next door to Reily’s was the Crescent City Garage, which just happened to provide parking for various government agencies. Two blocks away was the Newman Building, where ex-senior FBI Agent Guy Bannister had an office and where Oswald was not only seen but some of the pro-Castro leaflets Oswald sometimes showily distributed were actually stamped with its address.

There is sound testimony that a known FBI agent was seen once handing Oswald an envelope around the Reily location. Money? And of course, Oswald’s last note to the FBI in the Dallas office was literally destroyed by the Agent in Charge immediately after the assassination. We have nothing but lies about what it said from the very people who should have gone to prison for destroying evidence and obstructing justice.

As someone who, years ago, spent a good deal of time studying the assassination, I remain convinced Oswald was sucked into something he did not fully understand, but he didn’t shoot the president, and indeed, both temperamentally and by poor shooting skill, he simply couldn’t have.

The only genuine candidates for carrying out the elaborate scheme – and it was elaborate – were a few well-equipped candidate groups who had genuine motives and plenty of resources. For any one of whom to be identified in 1963, would have meant a major loss of confidence in America’s security organizations and perhaps a major blow to American policies. Also, there is the distinct possibility that the authorities never learned who was responsible – a fact itself which have been highly damaging to the sense of national security and well worth covering up.

While I have many questions about the statements thrown together in the Globe piece, I know Ms Baker is an intelligent woman who did indeed work in research. That is no guarantee of truth or of detailed knowledge but it is reason to read what she says. I look forward to reading her book

Readers may enjoy:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/1544/

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/lincoln-was-wrong-the-ease-of-fooling-most-of-the-people-most-of-the-time/

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“Oh, God… Spare us the JFK conspiracy nonsense.

“I’ve been to Dealey Plaza and the ‘grassy knoll’ several times. The physical space is much smaller than it appears on the Zapruder film.

“Any decent Marine markman could’ve laid down several accurate shots from the Texas School Book Depository window.

“End of story. Unless you’re Michael Moore.”

Just the kind of comment one gets from someone who has read or studied virtually nothing serious on the subject but yet feels qualified to speak.

The Zapruder film – long suppressed early on – shows Kennedy’s body responding, according to the laws of physics, to a shot from the front, full stop.

Interestingly, several notable press descriptions of the unseen film at the time – most notably Dan Rather’s on CBS – proved absolutely inaccurate later.

Interesting also is the fact that in the Warren Commission’s hastily assembled jumble of evidence, some key frames from the film were printed out of order, blurring the evidence of response to a projectile from the front.

The Luce family who originally purchased the film – of Life Magazine and Time fame – were well known for cooperation with the CIA. Luce publications are known to have been used as covers for phony foreign correspondents.

The autopsy photos, poor as they are, show massive damage to the rear of the head, half the scalp hangs down – always evidence of an exit wound with bullets as they mushroom through flesh.

The doctor in charge of the autopsy wrote one report and then destroyed it – actually a criminal act.  The one we have is his re-write, the re-write of a military man under great pressure.

All those attending the president at the hospital in Dallas attest to massive damage at the rear of the head.

Bullet entrance wounds – unless dum-dum bullets are used – always resemble what you’d see from the stab of an ice-pick. Often they are almost undetectable, as witnesses to the killing of a young man at a Toronto school realized.

The Warren Commission said hard-jacketed bullets were used, so the case for the back of the head being an entrance wound is zero.

Oswald was not a decent “Marine marksman.” He was a terrible shot, getting his badge finally as a mercy with a low score.

Those who knew him in Russia confirm his utter lack of facility with a rifle.

Finally, no expert marksman has repeated the feat attributed to Oswald. Indeed, a few years ago, tests in Italy – it was an Italian rifle supposedly used – confirmed its impossibility.

The overwhelming majority of witnesses in the Plaza turned towards and pointed towards and ran towards the grassy knoll immediately after the shots.

Last, the second investigation of the assassination – the Congressional one – accepted that there was a shooter from the front on the basis of expert analysis of inadvertent recordings of a policeman’s motorcycle radio left open.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Ms. Colton, The U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the U.S. is not interfering in Egypt’s politics.”

Well, if that were true, it would mark a first.

CIA bribes and influence are the norm in all such countries; the CIA maintains a huge secret fund for just that purpose.

I also think the situation in Egypt is more complicated than this story suggests.

The United States always maintains a noisy public commitment to words about democracy, but that is a very different matter than what goes on behind closed doors.

Not only is the United States comfortable with the stability and predictability of rule by military groups in the region, it must always be looking to the interests of its client-state, Israel.

A truly democratic Egypt is unlikely to be overly friendly to Israel, but a group of well-bribed military men or others keeps things on course.

I have heard an eloquent expert speak on parts of the situation in Egypt, and he said that Egyptian military is perhaps the country’s greatest industrial operation, controlling many profitable factories and businesses, much as the military in China or the Republican Guard in Iran.

The small number of people who control these enterprises are reluctant to give up any influence to popular notions about democracy.

The feeling is that if they, the military, just go slowly, the people will tire of their demonstrations and demands, and things can settle to something they regard as normal.

It is hard to believe that the United States government would seriously oppose this strategy, although, as always, it will do some public blubbering.

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‘Claims of a “meddling foreign hand” have routinely found resonance among Egyptians.’

And, considering Egypt’s history, why would it be otherwise?

That kind of statement is completely naive or it is dishonest.

Once controlled by Turkey. Once controlled by France. Once controlled by Britain. Britain, France, and Israel conspiring to take over the Suez Canal in the 1950s?

A popular hero like Nassar the target of foreign plots and plans for assassination?

A tyrant president like Mubarak, completely in the pay and in the pocket of the United States, for thirty years?

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“Noticably absent from this is how Saudi Arabia has been furiously funding fundamentalist groups as they are also terrified about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Why don’t the world powers call Saudi Arabia out on this?”

Sorry, but that is very naive.

Behind the scenes, the Saudi princes, the United States, and Israel have long been great pals.

They often work together secretly towards certain ends.

None of them would value democracy in Egypt, each for its own reasons.

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“Never trust muslims [sic].”

I prefer never trusting people who make ignorant statements like yours.

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“Democracy is not for everybody. To make it work you need an educated, enlightened and engaged population.”

That is a very old and rather trivial idea. It is also quite arrogant.

Just where, among advanced democratic states do you see these conditions?

In the United States?

The United States that believes in polls that Saddam assisted in 9/11 and had secret weapons of mass destruction?

The United States that has ignoramuses like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin seeking the highest office?

The United States whose greed and complete lack of self-control just pitched the planet into a years-long financial disaster?

“As a nation, Egypt would be better served by a benevolent tyrant.”

And who selects the tyrant? And who determines that he is off on the wrong path?

Churchill had it right when he said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others.

The historical truth is that democracy comes when a society has a large enough middle class who feel that their many interests cannot be properly looked after by a tyrant or king. Peasants don’t have many interests beyond keeping alive, but the middle class has business needs, investment needs, property-law needs, and many other interests.

Democracy flows naturally out of economic growth, always and everywhere.

The flow is often temporarily interrupted by old established interests, but only temporarily.

There is no reason to believe Egypt is not ready for democracy. It has a large middle class. It has millions of educated people.

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The Egyptian military has made deals with people like the Muslim Brotherhood in order to broaden its base of support.

That fact only points to the United States and Israel not being afraid so much of “Islamists” as democracies where people disagree with them.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by the way, is not a terror organization of any kind. It is a rather tame organization.

Actually, many of the Muslim organizations in Egypt expect a form of Sharia Law to be established.

Now, we have been trained by an endless bombardment of Islamophobic propaganda to think that sounds terrible, but in fact is not much different to the fundamentalist Christians – millions of them – in the United States who demand the Ten Commandments in courts and prayers in schools and other public institutions.

And it is little different to the laws of Israel which enable ultra-orthodox Jews to practice their many ancient and backward rules, especially those concerning the inferiority and submission of women and the complete control of children by the husband.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD SPENCER IN THE TELEGRAPH

“All bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theory of course.”

It is not at all clear why you should say that. The “of course” only emphasizes the lack of analytical basis for your total dismissal.

Especially when one considers that in the end you yourself suggest a theme to the material.

“Ultimately, they put the onus on Middle Eastern countries to explain themselves. The cables are America’s own explanations. Neither Iran nor many of its Arab friends and enemies like being held to account overmuch.”

In our own lifetimes, we have learned of many dark operations more impressive than the selected release of some not-all-that-secret documents, many of them having release dates of not too many years in the future. The term “conspiracy theory” is now consistently used to disparage those who are genuinely puzzled about the official explanations of certain big events.

Yes, we have the paranoid extreme, but that extends into the mainstream too, even into politics.

In the end you must judge major news events by the standards of the late I.F. Stone. You must read different versions and explanations and make comparisons and weightings. You must judge the purport of the material itself, what it is intended to say or not say.

We live in a shadow world as never before in human history with vast intelligence establishments working day and night and a press now reduced to a small number of owners who have their own reasons for giving slants to affairs or even completely misrepresenting them.

Truth is perceived infrequently, but there are immensely well-financed establishments busy “getting out the story” and even creating it in some cases. To say otherwise is to admit to extreme naiveté or perhaps dishonesty.

When was the last time a paper like your Telegraph or even the New York Times did some serious investigative journalism for readers? Especially where the earth-shaking matters are concerned, rather than mother’s milk stuff like the abuse of parliamentary expenses. Almost never.

Where were you with Blair’s countless lies? Bush’s lies and absurdities? We lived through a set of events in which, after the greatest peace march in history, Blair managed to twist the truth and lie his way into doing something against the overwhelming sense of the British people. And the press pretty well let it happen.

We only have a few genuine investigative journalists in the world, and they include notably Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. But even their work must be subject to evaluation. They can have things planted on them, and they make mistakes.

The WikiLeaks material is undoubtedly authentic, but that does not at all exclude an underlying purpose in its release.

It is a well-known practice of intelligence agencies to give large bits of genuine material, none of it too compromising, in order to get either an important piece of intelligence in return or to “bury” some damaging deception like a fish hook planted in a minnow.

The CIA used to brag of having a huge house organ whose keys could be played to create the sense of a Bach fugue of seeming news. It was talking about all the publications, both compliant and duped, in which it could plant a story and have it reverberate ultimately as a convincing event.

I’m not sure whether WikiLeaks itself falls into the compliant or duped category, but the nature of the material, the main themes plus the many important things undoubtedly missing, say something important to those listening carefully.

I am completely underwhelmed by the content of the military WikiLeaks, both this time and previously.

Very little there that well-informed people did not already know. Yes, of course, the juicy tidbits about so-and-so said are fun, and so they are meant to be, but they are not all that informative.

I am sure there are countless lies and atrocities contained in the universe covered so far by WikiLeaks, but they are not in the material released.

The idea that no one knows where Assange is also strikes me as slightly ridiculous in this age of massive intelligence operations and the trampling of individual rights in the name of fighting terror.

If you think otherwise because of Osama bin Laden, you are rather late in learning he has been dead since the bombing of Tora Bora. The United States has kept him alive, as it were, for a focus in its insane War on Terror.

Cui bono?

The US looks like an innocent victim, just guilty of some unpleasant gossip here and there. Who wouldn’t know that? Israel gains support for an attack on Iran.

The leaks serve Israeli-Pentagon interests.

And do so in a convincing, seemingly disinterested way.

These leaks also serve America’s now cancerously-swollen intelligence apparatus in seeking more repression and secrecy within American society.

Your off-hand dismissal is unfair and unwarranted.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE TELEGRAPH

Sorry, but this editorial begs an essential question.

What mission?

The “mission” has never been defined.

And why is that? Because the “mission” cannot be defined.

It is truly preposterous to talk of remaking an ancient society of about 30 million people who mostly live hardscrabble lives in the mountains and deserts.

Afghanistan is only barely a country with traditionally no real central government, no roads, and few of any other modernity.

It is a collection of tribes, many of them living as people lived centuries ago. Even its borders are not fixed, the arbitrary Durand Line serving as an imposed border with Pakistan.

Just consider how long it takes for serious economic development to occur, economic development being the only path to modern democratic society.

Even China – the economic miracle of our age – which had much infrastructure, a cohesive society, and great human capital has taken more than thirty years of growth to arrive where it is.

And great parts of China are still poor and backward, especially in the West.

Or consider how long it takes to change one important human habit, say smoking. Only after decades of effort are we changing this once everyday-accepted habit.

Yet the newspaper editorial rooms, following the well-paid flaks at the Pentagon, speak blithely of immense changes in what is a gigantic country.

The United States never went into Afghanistan to advance its people. If it had wanted that, it could have dropped dollar bills instead of bombs.

What the United States wanted was vengeance, and also, I believe, that football-atmosphere feeling of, “Well, after all we are the greatest, and these poor turban-heads can’t stop us from doing as we please.”

The U.S. garnered UN support in the wake of 9/11 by exploiting sympathy, calling in debts, threats, and promises to get the votes to make the “mission” look international.

Just consider the NATO commitment, apart from Tony Blair’s abused Britain loyally carrying America’s gear. If it were such an important mission, of world significance, then you would not see 750 troops here and 2000 there, many of them under heavy restrictions about fighting. No, you would see the response of WWII. NATO counries cannot say it in public, but they do not believe in America’s “mission.” The size and very nature of their efforts speak eloquently for anyone listening.

It has been a fool’s mission from the beginning, and it remains a fool’s mission.

In the end, the Taleban, who are best described as a large segment of the country and not the phony term “insurgents’ must be part of any government. Karzai recognizes that. So what are you wasting lives and treasure over?

The great irony, of course, is that the Taleban need not have been our enemies. They are not pleasant or modern people, but their views are often no different to those of the Northern Alliance America has effectively put in their place, and the truth is their views are no more backward than those in many third-world countries, including India where savageries like bride-burning continue.

The Taleban did not cause 9/11. Saudis and some others, working abroad, quite possibly in a CIA black operation which backfired, did. They were not even the original ones to grant Osama bin Laden refuge, America’s Northern Alliance did.

And the Taleban still agreed after 9/11 to extradite bin Laden if only a bit of evidence were provided, the normal working procedure for extraditions all over the world. But the United States refused, and, to this day, it is interesting that bin Laden has never been included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

For some reason unbelievable resources have been put into defeating what cannot be defeated. The fight against the Taleban has been subsumed under that great and hazy thing called the War on Terror, which really is an absurd extension of Israel’s views of how you live in the Middle East. Insanity, pure and simple.
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So, even accepting your doubtful assumptions, the solution is to attack all of these places?

The war on terror is derived from Israel’s view of living in the Middle East. Israel sits, armed to teeth, with an armed forces and security establishment monstrously out of proportion to its size, and it has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once. It threatens every country within a thousand miles that demonstrates any independence of view, and it has used every dirty trick in the book to assault its perceived foes.

Nothing has been a more complete failure than Israel’s way of living with its neighbors.

It is a garrison state, constantly suffering from paranoia, reminding me much of the way people in Virginia in 1700s reacted to the circumstances of slavery, sleeping with guns and knives under their pillows and regularly being driven to excesses by fears of slave revolts.

It is not a model or an ideology to serve as anything of an example.

Indeed, a great deal of the discontent felt in Muslim countries relates to the great suppurating wound of Palestine/Israel, a natural human reaction to the great injustices and to the one-sidedness and injustice of American policy.

Solving a fundamental problem like that would go a great way towards reestablishing healthy relations with the world’s billion Muslims, but still, after decades of talk, we see no honest effort to do so. Instead we spend countless billions fighting phantoms.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY WESLEY WARK IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh I do think Wesley Wark has missed something very important, but that is not unusual in Wark’s pieces.

Richard Fadden can’t say it, but I’d bet serious money he was given a wink and nod by Harper for his earlier statement.

Traditionally, it is only with such approval that spy agency masters ever speak out in public.

Harper, of course, now cowardly denies having done so, leaving Fadden hanging out to dry, as they say.

No other explanation is plausible for those who understand anything about spy agencies.

As to Wesley Wark’s poorly chosen example of John Kennedy and Allen Dulles – poorly chosen both because the situations are not comparable, CSIS never enjoying the power and resources of CIA – and because Wark fails to offer the full story which involved in part Kennedy using Dulles as a fall guy for a stupid, blundering decision.

‘As JFK famously told CIA director Allen Dulles before forcing him to step down over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, “You might think the buck stops here, but it’s you, Allen, who is going to resign.” ‘

Yes, Mr. Wark, but it was Kennedy who ended up dead.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

I guess this is one group of CIA thugs who have tortured their last prisoner and guided their last Hellfire missile into some poor village in Pakistan.

This reminds me of reading a report about some group of Mafia guys killed during an internecine struggle for power and ill-gotten gains.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Nothing is at stake in Afghanistan.

That is, except for American pride in once more having invaded a country, killed a great many people and achieved nothing.

America didn’t know what it was doing from the beginning, and it still does not know.

But it sure knows how to kill people, and the American establishment is always ready to do more killing and bombing rather than be embarrassed at its own foolishness.

It chewed up human beings in Vietnam for ten years to no purpose whatsoever beyond regard for its own violent and stupid pride.

No one else regards Afghanistan as a serious threat, else why are NATO countries constantly browbeaten by American officials into making larger commitments?

The facts of Afghanistan are rather simple if you open your mind to them.

It is not a democracy – never was and still is not – and you can never create a democracy at the barrel of a gun. Moreover, America’s own problematic claim to genuine democratic government makes it among the least suitable of instructors.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions on earth, affording only a hard-scrabble existence to most of its people – it always has been poor and it remains so. America has done almost nothing to turn around its economy for a brighter future, but it sure has killed a lot of people and created a lot of damage.

Like all poor, backward countries, Afghanistan remains prisoner of ancient customs not understood by modern societies, and nothing, except long-term serious economic growth, America can do will change that.

Consider even a healthily growing third-world country like India. It still has bride burning, forced marriage, and horrid treatment of widows, plus many other ghastly ancient customs it will not shake until after generations of growth.

Imagine going to 17th century Spain and telling the people they must give up the Holy Inquisition, Jews and Arabs must be tolerated as full members of society, and nuns must stop wearing hideous gigantic habits? To pose the question is to know the answer.

How much more so Afghanistan?

The warlords that now are deemed the government of Afghanistan are, most of them, no better than the Taleban in terms of modern values. Horrible acts continue all over the country, and the burka is still worn in most of the country. Some, like General Dostum, are nothing but mass murders.

Rape of boys is common everywhere, often done by translators and other helpers of Americans right in front of the eyes of troops. The Americans and others tolerate these hideous acts, for the sake of keeping allies and helpers, acts which would earn their perpetrators long prison sentences and public hatred anywhere in the West.

Alliance with those warlords is the only thing that allowed America its cheap “victory.” Cheap in American blood, that is, not Afghan blood.

The Taleban never was America’s enemy, the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, and they were mostly in America on legitimate visas, being part of a secret CIA training scheme that backfired badly.

Most of the terrorist incidents since the invasions – like the London underground bombing – are just the work of homegrown men angry and frustrated at the injustice of what has happened, at the tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims killed with no thought or care.

The CIA never took any responsibility for 9/11. America never took any responsibility. But Afghanistan was invaded – according to experts, just the deaths in Kabul from bombing were at least 50,000 – and the Taleban was dispersed. Some achievement.

Now America bombs and kills regularly in Pakistan, claiming, just as it claimed about Cambodia during its bloodbath in Vietnam. People under no charges are regularly assassinated along with any family members and bystanders, a la Israel’s regular extra-judicial killings, activity indistinguishable from that of former South America juntas who regularly made people “disappear.”

America is only making enemies and de-stabilizing still another land.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

The government of the United States has only itself to blame for the beliefs of Charlie Sheen and, indeed, millions of other Americans if sites on the Internet are any indication.

For whatever reasons, the American government has withheld important information, and many understand that much. When a government chooses withholding information in such a dramatic event, it literally is inviting speculation and superstition to flare up.

The official version of 9/11 is certainly incomplete, and I say this without believing that government was involved in plots.

There are the clearest bits of evidence.

The towers‘ collapse is a completely unexplained matter: it resembled precisely the kind of controlled explosion and collapse used in tall-building demolition.

A number of engineers have also pointed out the melting point of the kind of steel used in construction: it is twice the temperature (3000 degrees versus 1500) at which aviation diesel fuel (aviation fuel is a refined diesel) burns.

There is a well known picture of a woman standing in the wreckage of the building façade a short time after a plane crashed. She shows no signs of heat discomfort, and stands right next to the building’s crumpled metal.

It is likely then that the scheme was larger than just the 19 or 20 on the four planes. After all, there had been a previous attempt to bring down the Trade Center with controlled demolition.

The authorities do not want to acknowledge the size and success of the scheme. It is a confession of the utter incompetence of intelligence and police services.

Little noted by the mainstream press is the fact that the skyjackers had valid American visas. One senior American diplomat, after 9/11, complained in the press about an inordinate number of visas issued abroad under pressure from the CIA for rapid issue.

It is virtually certain that there was some kind of CIA operation under way, training people from the Middle East for God knows what purposes. Mossad was aware of this, thus the involvement of a group of its agents (below) in following some of the skyjackers in the U.S. Also, former American intelligence agents use the term “blowback” to describe the entire set of events.

The fourth plane over Pennsylvania was certainly shot down – just the extensive nature of the wreckage field (spread about three miles) says this to a certainty.

Cheney undoubtedly ordered it shot down – he is a totally ruthless man – and naturally they do not want to tell the world this ugly fact and be deluged with law suits. So we get mythical nonsense about “Let’s roll.”

There is also the documented matter of a group of Mossad agents, under cover of a moving (removal) firm, who were aware of these plotters and were following them around inside the U.S. They were arrested, questioned, and deported a short time later.

Just the fact that there was a sizeable group of an ally’s agents operating inside the U.S. and that this group was on to the plotters further emphasizes the complete incompetence of an American intelligence establishment chewing its way through tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.

Of course, the entire thing could not have happened had the simplest precautions been taken in aviation security, such as cockpit doors that lock securely from inside and the upgrading of boarding procedures, too.

There had been years of skyjackings – many like that of D. B. Cooper still unsolved – and the U.S. Congress continued to refuse to spend this small amount of money on real security. It is only generous when it comes to bombing people in the colonies.

So now we suffer from a ridiculous degree of over-kill in American security. We all are paying a price for the incompetence of American government, and no government wants to be thought incompetent.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

The story of North Korea’s producing the so-called super-notes, one-hundred dollar notes of near perfect quality, is an old one, but it is not necessarily true, as the author of this piece assumes.There is another story that says it is the CIA manufacturing these super-notes.

Such an intelligence operation would serve two ends.

One, it is a new source of untraceable funds for the CIA. We know that in the past the CIA has used drugs and armaments as ways to obtain off-the-record funds.

Two, the notes, combined with the story this author repeats, provide one more excuse to beat-up on North Korea.

Just ask yourself whether it is likely that North Korea has the immensely complex technology for producing notes of this quality.

Then ask yourself whether this is the way the United States would behave if indeed it knew North Korea was the source of the bills.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

America is reduced to brutal savagery, no different to that of any terrorist.
What we have here is the deliberate murder of a family – with no charges, no trial, no defense, no legalities whatsoever.

Indeed, it is worse than that.

This is the work of buzz-cut employees of the Pentagon sitting at computer terminals, over coffee, murdering people on the other side of the planet by joy-stick remote control, as though they were playing a computer game.

I wonder do they go to lunch down in the cafeteria after a morning’s killing?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.

We know perfectly well that America has been using drones and Hellfire missiles to kill many people, without charge or trial or conviction of anything.

Remember, too, Rumsfeld’s bloody Nazi-like words about killing or walling away America’s al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan.

It wasn’t long after that that 3,000 prisoners disappeared.

They are said to have been loaded into trucks and driven out into the desert to suffocate, then being buried in mass graves. This was done by one of the warlord’s men while American soldiers watched and picked their noses.

And let’s not forget the war crime of the Iraq invasion. A million killed, a couple of million refugees created, a modern society set back for decades. Results no different to having used a few nuclear weapons against a people who did absolutely nothing against America.

So why would there be any hesitation over this? The American establishment has demonstrated a lawless disregard for international law for eight years.

Of course, there wasn’t, and I’d bet it was that ghastly Dick Cheney who headed the operation and perhaps the new commander in Afghanistan who managed it.

America has no claim to any kind of ethics or democratic values in light of recent years.

The election of Obama has not changed this position at all, other than offering a friendly smile and a good mind in place of a pathetic lump.

A great deal of effort will be required to restore America’s tattered reputation, and I see no efforts indicating that effort is underway.