John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RALPH RAICO IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“The Taboo Against Truth”

“Speaking truth to power” is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century.”

“In fact, all great states in this century have been killer states, to a greater or lesser degree.”

 

https://www.unz.com/article/the-taboo-against-truth/#comment-3600137

 

Indeed.

And I wonder how many Americans know the postwar record of their own country in the world?

You know, the bloody work America busied itself with during its golden age of postwar dominance, the period of “the American Dream,” while American families watched “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Mary Tyler Moore” and “Seinfeld” and “Friends”?

One-fifth of the entire population of North Korea exterminated in three years of carpet bombing? That’s a Pentagon number, too.

How many Americans know their country conducted a true holocaust in Vietnam?  3 million Vietnamese killed. Carpet bombing. Napalm. Early cluster bombs.

A huge legacy of landmines and Agent Orange left behind to keep killing and maiming for decades.

At least a million died in the “killing fields” of Cambodia. The United states had an important role in bringing that about. A neutral government was constantly pressured and harassed and secretly bombed and periodically invaded on a small scale until it collapsed and the Khmer Rouge took over.

The US then did not lift a finger to stop the butchery by the Khmer Rouge.

In Iraq, the illegal US invasion killed about a million people and so set back one of the most advanced Arab states that it still has not recovered. Millions lack such basics as clean water and electricity.

Libya was the best-run government on the continent of Africa. Everything from clean water to good education was provided free to its people, and the country was kept at peace. Today it is in ruins, and fighting over its future continues.

The horrors of the proxy war in Syria, the covert work of the US and some allies, has killed over 600,000 people and destroyed great parts of a truly beautiful and historic land.

The millions of refugees that came close to de-stabilizing parts of Europe were the result of people desperately seeking safety from America’s bombing in its destructive series of Mideast wars.

During the coup in Indonesia after President Sukarno, there was a huge bloodbath as anyone even thought to be a communist had his throat cut. The rivers were said to run red with blood from hundreds of thousands of victims thrown in.

During the horror, the US State Department burned up the phone lines submitting the names of communists or communist suspects.

Apart from the big events, there have been just dozens of coups and interventions and dirty wars over the postwar period – from those in Iran and Guatemala to Chile and Ukraine and Bolivia – all democratic governments overthrown, just ones the US didn’t like.

The ugly suppurating wounds of Palestine never stopped leaking over the decades, and America never made the effort to stop what it could have easily stopped.
 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Salisbury attack: Authorities deny giving mixed messages after official says ‘toxic’ nerve agent still present

“’City is safe for residents and visitors,’ officials say amid preparations for decontamination”

 

Of course, Salisbury is safe.

It was never in danger from this fraud.

Had there been any genuine nerve agent discovered in a public place, the entire area would have been promptly evacuated and cordoned off.

This was done in a British town in recent memory over an anthrax scare.

Well, anthrax is nasty, but real nerve agents are 100% fatal.

And, please, where did the antidote to this supposed nerve agent come from? How was it administered? It absolutely must be administered within minutes to those exposed. Yet again, how was the nerve agent identified without a reference sample in Britain? That’s the way labs work. So, if the material existed in Britain, and who knows where else, why is Russia the certain suspect?

The fact that the Skripals survived tells us either they were not exposed to nerve agent or that they were quickly given an antidote, but the time-line of events and the place where the Skripals were found a considerable time after supposed exposure does not fit in with that last possibility at all.

I can accept anything, so long as we’re talking about facts, not government’s unsupported claims. You know those high-power public relations agencies which are sometimes called upon by corporations when there is a disaster, such as the Tylenol poisonings of the 1980s. Well, one of their first pieces of advice to senior executives always is to own up to what has happened. Credibility with, and future trust by, the public is built on freely offering truth from the start.

It is no different for the affairs of governments. The approach of Theresa May and Boris Johnson has been precisely the opposite.

My God, on a very small scale, this whole Skripal Affair reminds me of the blind insistence by official America that Oswald – a man with past intelligence associations, a poor shot in the Marines, someone who expressed admiration for the President, a man associated with a cheap rifle from hell – killed John Kennedy. And, of course, all that always ignores the numerous bits of powerful evidence we have for shots from the front, “the grassy knoll.”

American officials even built a legend around Oswald’s supposed communism – of course, this was at a time in America when being labelled a communist was received the same way as being labelled a witch in 1600. If you study even a few facts of his life, the claim is preposterous. He did do some posing as a communist sympathizer while working with right-wing groups, but it was a pretty obvious pose, perhaps part of his role as a paid FBI informant (we even have his FBI informant number and there was an uncashed FBI voucher in his belongings). But, no, America officially asserts always that he was a communist, and a communist who hated something about America and President Kennedy.

Thinking people will recognize in that, the pattern of the old witch trials. It’s an ancient gimmick, but it still works on many human minds, at times, quite powerfully. The boys at MI6 and CIA understand that perfectly.

All of this is ridiculous, but it does show what governments can achieve if they lie and manipulate in a determined way and stick to the same implausible story over and over.

_____________________

Response to another comment, addressing events around Dr Kelly’s death in Britain near the invasion of Iraq:

Well said, and it is virtually certain Kelly was killed.

Perhaps not by British agents but others who feared that this international weapons expert had become a “loose cannon”

Kelly knew where a lot of “bodies” were buried, including the destination of the former Nationalist South Africa’s nuclear fissile material (they had at least half-a-dozen nuclear warheads at the time of the apartheid government’s collapse).

Kelly’s public comments about claims of Tony Blair’s government concerning Iraq’s weapons had made him a threat for disclosure, at the very least, to the recipient of that South African fissile material. At least, that’s my best guess. Of course, perhaps equally, a party who was desperate not to see the Iraq invasion derailed through expert testimony about what was really going on, had strong motives for killing him. It does just happen that there was a party matching both those criteria.

Again, in the Kelly case, there were all kinds of bits of evidence which render the verdict of suicide extremely unlikely.

You may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/john-chuckman-comment-revelation-of-tony-blairs-bloody-pact-with-bush-a-full-year-before-iraq-invasion-dr-kellys-murder-the-nightmare-toll-of-the-iraq-invasion-like-nothing-saddam-did/

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

I think we all instinctively knew this, but it is always nice to have hard supporting evidence.

Blair is so clearly an extreme narcissist, perhaps even a full-blown psychopath.

His personal ambitions could only be fulfilled in partnership with the United States, Britain not truly having any longer sufficient weight to throw around in the world.

George Bush offered Tony Blair, given Blair’s personality, the opportunity of a lifetime: be a genuine war prime minister, get to portray yourself as an opponent of tyrants, experience the gratitude afterwards of America and its satraps (millions flowing in still), hear your name rung out with praise, and feel very consequential.

The dark eccentricity of Tony Blair seems as though it should have been obvious to the public from the start.

He and his wife are genuinely bizarre figures. But we all have political systems full of glitches which do not serve genuine democracy, Mr. Cameron for example now serving with 35% of the vote.

To see good examples of the weird Blairs:

http://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.ca/2010/10/blairs-tony-and-cherie-looking.html

http://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.ca/2008/09/blog-post_7098.html

____________________________________

Response to another comment about being time to look into Doctor Kelly’s mysterious death in those days:

Doctor Kelly, indeed.

But I doubt that was Blair’s work, although he certainly helped cover it up.

Kelly made the mistake of being honest with BBC and others. Recall how BBC got its wings clipped, essentially for telling some truth, a commodity with which Tony Blair was never comfortable. These events suggested to other parties that Kelly might spill some seriously embarrassing additional knowledge.

Israel certainly is a possible candidate for his murder, because Kelly, the arms expert, knew where the nuclear bodies were buried, including what happened to the fissile material from South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal after apartheid’s collapse, which some speculate covertly went to Israel.

________________________________

Response to a reader comment:

 

“…murderous regimes like Saddam’s”?

You condemn yourself out of your own mouth for lack of knowledge and meaningful perspective.

Saddam was a nasty piece of work, but the world has many such men including the often overlooked, blood-drenched Netanyahu, and Saddam’s acts were nothing compared to Tony and George’s handiwork.

The invasion of Iraq murdered about a million people, destroyed the most advanced society in the Arab world, created two or three million refugees, has close to split the country into rump states, and left millions for years without jobs, electricity, and even clean water.

It also left countless long-lived dangers behind like tons of depleted uranium dust and cluster-bomb bomblets. The invasion of Iraq was horror on a colossal scale.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a classic case of doing bad by trying to do good. We can’t rescue people from themselves.”

Another thoughtless piece, packed with frightful ethical concepts, from Ms Wente, the Globe’s reigning champion in churning out such stuff.

“Liberal interventionism” is a created term to make America’s unacceptable behavior seem more appropriate.

There can never be anything “liberal” – in the truest historic meaning of the word – about dropping cluster bombs on people or using white phosphorus on people or torturing prisoners.

You cannot bomb people into democracy. Just steady economic growth and a growing middle class are the requirements for democracy as centuries of history clearly demonstrate, and Iraq was on that path with one of the most prosperous and advanced economies in the Arab world. Now, instead, it is a shambles.

America’s intention never was to “rescue” Iraqis.

Iraq was invaded to eliminate Israel’s most implacable foe, hardly the business of the United States. The invasion decision was unquestionably influenced too by Bush Junior’s psychological need to top what Bush pere had done – a lifelong theme for the pathetic Bush and the kind of motivation that all serious readers of history know plays a role in events.

There was the matchless opportunity of the cover provided by the invasion of Afghanistan too, offering an opportunity to blur facts and operate in public confusion. After all, Hitler used the chaos of the invasion of Russia to begin the Holocaust.

The invasion was covered also by the Nazi-like ideas of Condi Rice with her “We’re hearing the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” amidst the screams of hundreds of thousands dying and their country and culture being destroyed.

An entire generation of Iraqis are doomed to live with no jobs, little electricity, and poor water plus a million pounds of depleted uranium dust.

All thoughtful people knew they were being lied to at the time.

Ms. Wente herself was very much a booster for the bloody effort, a big booster, and you’d be hard put to find any columnist who like her is a regular apologist for Israel’s excesses who didn’t sing hymns to America’s blood bath.

All as pointless as the three million murdered in Vietnam.

Again, for readers who’ve nor seen it, here is the reality of Ms. Wente at the time of the mass murder in Iraq:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Omar Khadr is a lucky young man. He is lucky to be entitled to Western justice…”

Even for Margaret Wente, this is perhaps a new low.

Lucky young man?

Ideologue parents push him into war at fifteen?

Shot twice, in the back, by Americans?

Taken to Guantanamo against all international conventions?

His first years in isolation without any contact or representation?

Tortured many times?

Part of his torture consisted of making him sit in uncomfortable positions with raw wounds?

Being forced to appear before a kangaroo court, which has no proper jurisdiction?

Being forced into confessing to something he did not do?

More than one-third of his life in that hellhole?

A bright boy deprived of education?

His country’s government too afraid of Washington to insist on his rights?

Ms Wente has a very odd idea of lucky.

I should remind readers of how bizarre Ms Wente’s thoughts about children have been in the past, just so long as they were Islamic children:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/the-iraq-wars-trashiest-piece-of-propaganda/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

You do not have to be “conspiracy-minded” to believe that Doctor Kelly did not kill himself.

The associate of Doctor Kelly’s, Mai Pederson a military interpreter, who recently revealed facts about his physical state – some injured part of his arm meant he could not wield a knife and made it impossible for him to cut his own wrist –  is not a “conspiracy-minded.” She says he also had been advised quietly he was on a hit list. She also tells the story of the red laser site which appeared on his forehead on a walk together in Baghdad, something which made him take the threat seriously.

The relative of Doctor Kelly who said absolutely that that just was not his temperament is not a “conspiracy-minded.”

The expert doctors who’ve said he could not have died the way it is said that he died are not “conspiracy-minded.” The vessel cut could not even have bleed him to death.

The term “conspiracy theorist” often used instead of “conspiracy-minded” is actually one that, in my view, automatically marks out its user as dishonest.

It is a way to condemn all people who question the facts of something as borderline paranoids.

It truly is a term without meaning too, displaying for those who are careful of words its user’s lack of thinking.

We do, after all, have genuine conspiracies by governments with large interests. To say otherwise is to display ignorance.

This has always been true in history, but today the stakes are higher than ever in matters of international affairs for some countries.

It is, for example, open knowledge that Israel sends dozens of agents abroad in elaborate schemes to murder those deemed enemies.

And what of the years-long cover-up in Britain of the true events around Bloody Sunday?

What of the case, a few years ago, of a half-dozen American nuclear warheads being shipped across the country? Every outside expert says that the checks and balances make such an “accident” impossible?

What of the downing of the fourth hi-jacked plane on 9/11 over Pennsylvania? It was almost certainly shot down, likely on Cheney’s orders, because multiple debris fields stretched for miles, something impossible in the kind of crash claimed.

What of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, spy ship, during the Six Day War? When Israel finally got around to explaining it, it claimed an “accident”? A two-hour attack against a well-marked ship, one Israel had been advised would be on station and when the lead Israeli pilot made an initial low enough pass slowly to acknowledge crew members waves? Taking the ship out of commission cut off American information of the battle field and gave General Dayan the time to turn around his armor to complete the conquests of the Six Day War, the effort to secure Greater Israel, the results of which we suffer to this day.

What of Israel’s nuclear weapons program? Years of intense, high-level deception.

What of South Africa’s nuclear weapons program?

By the way, I wonder how many readers know that Doctor Kelly was one of the technical team assigned to take possession of South Africa’s nuclear warheads when the apartheid regime ended? Doctor Kelly knew many damaging secrets.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

Doctor Kelly was almost certainly assassinated.

And who benefited?

The Iraq invasion served Israeli purposes hugely.

Its most implacable opponent was eliminated, his country reduced to ruins.

And the doctor was a threat to the lies that helped create that vast war crime.

Israel has bragged of its many assassinations – scores of them – in the past. It has been shameless on this utterly unethical behavior.

A truly disgusting record for those who care about human rights or justice.