John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO A (REPRINTED) ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“25 YEARS OF CN: ‘Obama’s Self-Deceit’—Sept. 29, 2015”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/08/25-years-of-cn-obamas-self-deceit-sept-29-2015/?unapproved=400210&moderation-hash=c04fb841d8867b4abfc930dd211bdd31#comment-400210

 

Yes, a good piece, vividly recalling what a dishonest man Obama was.

It’s remarkable to me that so many remember him with nostalgia.

In part it was his appealing boyish smile and baritone voice. In part it was a kind of credibility he had gained by becoming the first black President. In part it was the relief everyone had felt seeing the end of George Bush, an embarrassingly ignorant, awkward, and vicious man.

I was taken in by Obama during his first campaign. A guy who sometimes wore sandals and briefly eschewed a dorky American flag pin on his lapel sure caught my attention.

I even started a small Internet tribute site with some extraordinary photos of him I discovered here or there.

But it wasn’t long before I took the site down. Perhaps that experience is why I react strongly against efforts to portray him as an admirable leader.

He bombed people every day of his eight years as President.

Obama overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya, leaving behind chaos which remains to this day. Qaddafi’s was a government that actually took care of its people with free education and good water and healthcare. He also kept Libya out of wars.

His “sin,” for which he paid with his life and the destruction of his country, was in not adequately toeing the line of American imperial policy for the region.

Obama approved the ugly coup in Ukraine which still causes all kinds of unnecessary grief in the world, and that coup was against a democratically elected President. Indeed, it was under Obama that the whole Russo-phobia business was ignited. He’s the one who started running tanks up to Russia’s borders and creating unnecessary hostilities that fed off of the old Cold War fears, drummed into people’s heads for decades, fears which remain festering to this day.

I have no doubt he was secretly at the center of efforts to undo Trump’s election. Officials like the heads of the FBI and CIA do not speak out, as they did, without the President’s approval. It just does not happen.

Of course, Hillary was a close ally in the effort, keen on anything that explained away her embarrassing election loss. It is easy to say that Trump is such a horrible, incompetent man – and he is horrible and incompetent – that he deserved being unseated with secret plots, but that really is not the way to run a government with at least pretenses to democratic values and rule of law.

Obama supported the ugly, secret war against Syria, a pretend civil war using fake-jihadi mercenaries recruited from many places, a war that has killed almost three-quarters of a million people and destroyed much of one of our most beautiful and historic places. He even had Hillary Clinton running weapons and mercenaries from the smoldering ruins of Libya in a secret effort to introduce them into Syria, generally through Turkey.

Indeed, at one point, Obama talked about his “red line,” the use of chemical weapons by Syria. What he really was doing with those self-righteous words was setting the stage for a faked attack so he would have an excuse to declare a no-fly zone in Syria and bomb the crap out of it, the very approach he had used in Libya. Only Putin’s exceptional statesmanship saved the day for Syria.

By the way, a serious error of Obama’s was underestimating Putin. Obama treated Putin almost with disdain at times, speaking of Russia as producing nothing anyone wanted to buy but oil and gas. Judging from some photos, the two did not get along all that well in private.

The infamous incident at Benghazi, Libya, where an American ambassador was mysteriously killed by thugs – something never explained to Americans – happened as a part of the ambassador’s work on Hillary’s secret project to smuggle weapons and cutthroats into Syria. That is why it could not be explained.

We even know from one of our finest living investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, that she also had a small amount of Libya’s stock of poison nerve agent shipped for ultimate use in Syria. It was to provide Obama with his “red line.” Qaddafi, just as several Arab leaders had done, kept such stocks as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear threat.

The same charming Hillary who laughed when Qaddafi died an agonizing death – being bayoneted in the rectum while lying on the ground – “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha!” The words were recorded. It is not a myth that she said that. Just as it is not a myth that she once said of Julian Assange, “Can’t we just drone him or something?” She’s a very enlightened and humane politician, much like Obama but more outspoken.

Obama made minimal progress in repairing the horrors America had inflicted upon Iraq. Years after the “Shock and Awe” [Hitler’s Blitzkrieg concept re branded] delivered by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, millions of Iraqis still had no electricity and no decent water and no jobs. What had been the most advanced Arab country was a shambles.

Obama maintained America’s unwarranted hostilities against Iran. Later, he distinguished himself once with the nuclear weapons agreement (JCPOA), but that came only after Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, made an approach to talk, Iran suffering under heavy sanctions levied against a nuclear weapons program which in fact never existed.

Obama supported many other bloody adventures, as in Somalia.

He never did anything of consequence to help the Palestinians see even a modicum of justice or relief from brutal abuse.

After all the horrors in the Middle East, Obama spoke, much like an arrogant general, about “now making the pivot to Asia,” which was code for intense new hostilities against China and its interests.

Once he lightly “joked” in a meeting, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” A rather bizarre sense of humor, to say the least.

Obama holds the distinction of having created an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing system, incinerating people far away who were never legally charged or tried for anything. The method frequently kills bystanders, too, but even the targets are legally guilty of nothing.

Joe Biden was a big advocate for it at the time, perhaps just one of the reasons Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with tasks such as having served as Presidential proconsul in Ukraine to make sure America’s objectives in having staged a coup there against an elected government were adhered to. Biden is just another charmer from America’s supposed party of the Left.

It is notable that Obama never did one meaningful thing to help raise his own people back home, despite having campaigned to them on a “Yes, we can!” theme and often making speeches in the rhythms of traditional black preachers. He created that ugly, costly bureaucratic compromise with the corporate health industry, Obamacare, and that’s as close as he came to helping.

In addition to the immense amount of violence Obama oversaw as President, he had a compulsive need for secrecy and went after whistleblowers with a vengeance.

Poor dear Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under him, an ordeal she almost didn’t survive. Edward Snowden was forced into exile under his watch. John Kiriakou went to prison under him for revealing the CIA’s use of torture. And it was in his time as President that Julian Assange sought asylum from Ecuador.

The tight embrace of secrecy is also seen in the plots against Trump’s election.

The intelligence community’s massive new Utah Data Center, designed to hold frightening amounts of secret data about people everywhere was opened under this President.

I don’t think he did one thing to earn his Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded in the hope it would encourage and fortify him to go a different direction than George Bush, but it proved a sad, empty hope.

He campaigned on closing down Guantanamo, just one portion of America’s international torture gulag where people were “rendered” by the CIA – that is, kidnaped, flown far away to a “dark site,” and tortured – Gina Haspel, the present head of CIA, having headed one of the sites. Then after Obama was elected, he changed his mind.

A man absolutely as inhumane and brutal as Bush or Trump, judged by his actual deeds, although he never bellowed and used foul language and openly threatened others as Trump does and he never sounded like the moron George Bush is. He carried a somewhat graceful and dignified appearance in public, but appearances can be so deceiving.

And, as you can plainly see in some of his photos and hear from some of his words, he is an extremely arrogant man. The boyish smile was missing more times than not.

Of course, what the details of Obama’s dark work tell us – just as is the case with Trump, from the other end of the American political spectrum, who has flip-flopped numerous times in foreign policy and has kept no campaign promise about the military and wars to speak of – is that American Presidents really do not control foreign policy, do not control the dark work of American empire.

They can perhaps tweak it here or there, they can give it a pleasant or unpleasant public face, but they do not determine it. That is the work of the so-called Deep State, which is just a living reality of the American “republic” with its supposed Constitutional divisions of power.

So, while American Presidents hold, under the Constitution, the title of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, they are simply not free to command them. And while they head the Cabinet, they are not free to command such Deep State forces as the State Department and CIA, organizations which work intimately together in every American embassy in the world, CIA having its own side of the house in all of them and working under State Department cover with phony diplomatic passports.

Those are just part of the results in a country whose power establishment serves the wealthy, using the tools of the military and security services to run a global empire benefiting the wealthy.

In terms of ethical and moral responsibility, the fact that American Presidents do not determine foreign policy doesn’t remove their responsibility for crimes. Obama voluntarily joined the vast imperial machine and served it faithfully, being rewarded at the end of his political career with a fortune worth many tens of millions of dollars, not the kind of money a President earns –  which is precisely four hundred thousand per year plus fifty thousand in expenses – and certainly not what an nontenured young university lecturer in law makes.

All American Presidents of the modern era leave office wealthy. The fact can help assuage a conscience. But I suspect there generally is not much in the way of conscience because it is extreme narcissists and moderate psychopaths who are attracted to run for an office like the contemporary American Presidency, and lack of conscience is a defining characteristic of those psychological conditions.

It’s an immensely long journey from some men in frock coats pledging their sacred honors, but it is the American reality, and we should never confuse American brute power today with charming tales of the Founders.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“CNN Continues to Implode After RussiaHoax, It’s Much Worse Than People Realize

“They’re paying the price for lying relentlessly about the RussiaHoax, and a lot of other things”

 

CNN has always been both incompetent and dishonest.

I haven’t seen it in many years, but I can think of a number of prominent examples from the 1990s or the early 2000s.

As when it ran a truly idiotic piece of fraudulent video about Osama bin Laden’s supposed scientific laboratories in the mountain caves of Afghanistan where he was said to be developing poison agents for use as “weapons of mass destruction.”

It literally was a laughable piece of work by one intelligence outfit or another, and CNN’s using it showed no journalistic integrity or judgment at all. It was just gung-ho support for war.

Osama’s caves were, in fact, primitive, uncomfortable places of refuge and hiding, not fantastic and well-equipped places resembling scenes from Flash Gordon’s 1936 movie serial.

CNN did many such clownish stunts, and not just ones involving foreign affairs. Its work, for example, on the Richard Jewell affair, following the Atlanta Olympics bombing, was about as shabby and worthless as it comes. CNN always tried to fill airtime by spending almost no money or resources. Journalism had almost nothing to do with its activities of filling airtime and selling advertising spots, whose appeal was juiced-up with anything controversial.

For some reason, the network never was seriously attacked, as it is being attacked now, attacked for supposedly being part of the political Left, but CNN’s countless past idiocies had nothing to do with the political Left or Right. They stood on their own.

It seems that only with the failure of Special Counsel Mueller’s report to astonish anyone are CNN’s deficiencies being proclaimed, at least by a certain segment of those concerned with public affairs on the Internet. But of course, Mueller’s investigation was problematic from the start.

What Trump represented for many in America’s establishment had little to do with Russia, although the establishment’s enduring hatred of Russia provided a convenient tool for getting at him. I don’t know, but perhaps the people plotting the efforts against Trump were influenced in their choice of Russia by the fact that, long ago, Trump was helped through some of his real estate messes by Russian oligarchs extending financial assistance. It had nothing to do with politics or election campaigns.

The American public was, after all, brainwashed and harangued – in magazines, books, movies, television shows, speeches, and even prayers – about Russia for decades of the Cold War, and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, no effort was ever made to detoxify a poisoned environment. That environment remains a nurturing place for all things Russo-phobic, Russia-gate being just one example. America’s establishment wants it that way because America’s establishment hates Russia.

You do not have to be a Trump supporter or a conservative to see the fraud in Russia-gate. It has always been pretty clear from the early rhetoric of people like CIA Director John Brennan. His words were silly, and just the fact that a CIA Director would speak out in that fashion on a domestic political matter told you a big game was being played. CIA Directors simply don’t do that.

The so-called Steele Dossier lacked respectability and believability from the start, and the people who pushed it were insincere. After all, you don’t pay big fees to a private agency like Steele’s if you want reliable confidential information. What are America’s seventeen security agencies in the business of doing? Steele’s private agency resembles an international-intrigue version of a shabby, old-fashioned detective agency, manufacturing dirt for a living. Again, from the statements of various people, it was clear the FBI was involved in the big game.

Now, when senior people from the FBI and the CIA behave the way they did, it can only mean that the president himself is sitting back in approval. It could not happen otherwise. Obama had served the establishment faithfully for eight years and had been richly rewarded for doing so, leaving the White House a man worth tens of millions of dollars after having entered it as a man of fairly ordinary middle-class means.

He was serving the same interests again when Russia-gate was devised and implemented.

The Special Counsel’s Report continued the game to the end. It investigated nothing worth investigating, such as Julian Assange’s receipt of leaks or the death of Seth Rich or a number of other eyebrow-raising events, and it just assumed Russia had been at work in shadowy ways. It looked only for evidence connecting Trump to those shadowy efforts and found none.

As far as calling CNN liberal or Left because of the slant of this or that host or commentator on prospects for the Mueller Report in the months before its publication, that claim is no more accurate than CNN’s own reporting is. The hosts’ efforts were just the same cheap trick of juicing things up to sell ad spots for months and months.

The network is not from the political Left, but it has been anti-Trump. Lots of people in the political Center and even a number of traditional, sound conservatives hate Trump and regret his being in office.

And, as we saw with Obama’s CIA and FBI, some who disliked Trump tried to prevent him from ever taking office. That, of course, is a serious matter warranting investigation, but it will never happen. How can you investigate America’s establishment, the power behind the throne? It cannot be done, any more than troops in the field can investigate Pentagon brass.

Virtually the entire American corporate press in the United States has shared the same viewpoint. They are embarrassed by Trump, as they should be. But originally, and far more importantly, they feared a few things that he might attempt as a political maverick, although those are no longer a concern.

Please note that when Trump acts in the establishment’s clear interests, he is supported. And that includes very much activities against Russian and Chinese interests. For America’s establishment, Russia remains the hated thing that it was in 1952. Only the words used and the volume of the rhetoric have changed.

It cannot be overemphasized that the one country that can obliterate the United States – China not quite having arrived at that point, although it is fast approaching it with new weapons such as longer-range ICBMs – and necessarily stands in the way of America’s doing some things, is not going to be warmly embraced by a class of people trying to have their own way with everyone everywhere.

Trump has his own game that he has played, a game of survival. Whether it was ever genuine or just a vote-getter designed for segments of voters, he has abandoned entirely the role of political maverick, one who just might shake-up parts of the establishment. He has become instead its most ardent supporter. He’s noisy, rude, and gauche in the way he does it, but that’s just fine as long as he does the right things.

People will go a long way to get what they want in politics, to accommodate someone they believe will give it to them, a stunning example being Trump’s Christian fundamentalist supporters. They ignore the fact that the man is not a Christian, something usually important to evangelical Christians. They ignore his long record of immoral and treacherous behaviour with everyone from staff and business associates to his wife. They ignore his incessant lying in almost every task he undertakes. They ignore his rudeness and name-calling. They ignore his ready use of threats and violence. They ignore, in other words, much of what their own faith supposedly represents, just so that can obtain a few other things they value highly.

With the power establishment, as with any large group or organization, there are differences within their ranks, but those differences must never be confused with fundamental disagreements. When it comes to what it is that America actually represents today – maintaining or expanding its empire, conducting its colonial wars, supporting the Pentagon generously, never questioning the dirty operations of the CIA, and pursuing deep and destructive involvement in the Middle East – all individuals and parties are united and with no distinctions of liberal or conservative.

Oh, sure, Trump can still be seen as a maverick in his outbursts of outrageous language, but he cannot be seen that way in his actions. And he can be disliked for his words and manners, but words and manners aren’t what count where serious power is concerned. They can be tsk-tsked and effectively tolerated, so long as his actions are in keeping with the order of things, and with Trump, they very much are.

The Middle East remains on fire, hundreds of thousands having died and millions having been made refugees. America’s military and security services get their cups filled to overflowing. The Pentagon and CIA never had it so good. In the case of Obama’s massive extrajudicial killing enterprise with drones and missiles, for example, Trump even told the CIA that it can decide who dies. He doesn’t need to sign-off on “kill lists.” Countries like Venezuela that were under covert assault from Obama for years remain under assault, only the effort is even more intense and out in the open, as is so often the case with Trump. The mess Obama made of Ukraine remains a mess.

Some of the very people Trump has appointed, such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, are such loud and crude operators that they make little effort to hide what they do. They are proud of their ugly behavior, the kind of psychopathic behavior we see with serial killers keeping trophies of their victims.

The appointment of those men was directly influenced by the desires of Israel, as expressed through lobbyists and apologists in the United States to whom Trump turned for support against all the hostility he felt working against him. Israel now gets everything it asks for, including violent, unwarranted acts against Iran, and the genuine threat of war. And you don’t find Democrats opposing or criticizing any activities related to Israel. That just never happens.

And now, China very much shares in receiving hatred once mainly reserved for Russia, and that is owing to its new influence and prestige in the world, its increasing military might, its technological advances, its competitiveness, and its new associations with Russia. Those are all bad things in the eyes of people who work aggressively to tighten their hold on the world’s affairs, having experienced an unpleasant sense of impending loss through America’s relative economic decline over recent decades.

As he has amply demonstrated during his last two years in the spotlight, Trump is a loathsome man, a man without ethics or morals, a man of no principle beyond that of self-advancement, and a man without understanding in a great many matters, one who is literally at work disturbing the entire planet. But so long as he is disturbing it in ways that largely coincide with establishment interests, he is under no threat.

CNN has always been pro-establishment. Always been pro-American empire. Always been pro-Pentagon. To call it liberal or Left is absurd, but then much the same is true for any assertions about liberals and leftists in America. There are none. And when a few do appear, they are attacked tirelessly and viciously, as we see right now with a small group of junior Congresswomen.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY WHITNEY WEBB IN MINTPRESS

 

“The Trust Project: Big Media and Silicon Valley’s Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent

“Given the Trust Project’s rich-get-richer impact on the online news landscape, it is not surprising to find that it is funded by a confluence of tech oligarchs and powerful forces with a clear stake in controlling the flow of news.’

 

https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-trust-project-big-media-and-silicon-valleys-weaponized-algorithms-silence-dissent/259030/

 

Thanks, another solid piece from Whitney Webb.

Of course, America’s big hi-tech media companies and corporate press are not in the nasty business of misrepresenting what is true simply out of their convictions, although they are able to stage a rather impressive piece of mass theater with each of them having speaking parts claiming heroically otherwise.

Multi-billionaire companies and people are very little concerned with philosophical questions such as, “what is truth?” or with fundamental matters such as scrupulous honesty.

Oh, yes, they are much concerned over the appearance of honesty, the appearance of concern for truth, but that is another matter entirely.

Otherwise, they simply would not be billionaires. Becoming exceedingly wealthy requires a steady focus on very different matters. There are no high rates of financial return for honesty or principle.

I don’t see why anyone would doubt that, especially in light of America’s present extremely aggressive efforts to bend the entire planet to its will – in the Middle East, in Russia, in China, in South America, and in Europe.

Threats, illegal sanctions, wars, coups, proxy armies, lies, and a high general level of hostility and arrogance all play a role, day-in and day-out. America simply insists on applying American law to the entire planet, ignoring the laws of other nations and the laws of international organizations. Which, of course, in the end, comes down to gaining an immense benefit for America’s corporations and its power establishment.

America’s foreign policy now intimately serves its establishment in securing economic advantages through force and concessions, advantages the establishment seems unable to secure through traditional product excellence and fair competition. American foreign policy today has little to do with diplomacy.

After all, what is “the American power establishment” but a collection of America’s wealthy corporations and individuals, supported by a compliant Congress and such intimidating and powerful agencies as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA?

That combination of power is something many people struggle to find proper language to describe, using terms such as the Dark State, the unelected secret government, or even “the swamp.” Millions instinctively understand that something real is at work influencing events, though they may not have a good name or definition for it.

In the end, it comes down to America’s plutocracy supported by powerful agencies supplied by a completely accommodating national government.

Despite centuries of intellectual ferment and struggle and reform and revolution in the West around human rights, freedoms, and democracy, we remain pretty much ruled by wealth, just as people in 18^th century, pre-revolutionary France were.

The centuries of struggle have produced an elaborate stage play of democracy, not the actual thing. Oh, there have been gains, such as it no longer being acceptable for a nobleman’s carriage to run down a peasant in its way on the road or for a nobleman to rape a peasant’s daughter, claiming Droit du seigneur. The gains are about civility and behavior, not about governing.

 Money’s dominating politics, with the only serious source for that money being the wealthy, tells you who still calls the shots. The situation is identical for both political parties in America, and it is no different in Western Europe.

We really have no record of our corporate press ever deeply concerning itself over journalistic integrity. Lip service, yes, of course. But experience over time demonstrates the opposite in its normal practices.

There is clear self-interest in all the new schemes to certify “what is true and what is not” in the press and media, and the only truth about those schemes is that what ordinary people and philosophers mean by “truth” has nothing to do with any of it.

It’s sad how such schemes so readily gain a solid foothold in American society, gain a kind of ersatz reality, much as with Russophobia, which has been just another tactic in the power establishment’s efforts to secure global supremacy.

Please notice the complete contradiction between all the earnest stuff about truth and the quiet acquiescence in persecuting Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, people who gave us indisputable and great truths.

I have a personal theory as to why that is so, one I think with a good deal of substance.

It involves the role and influence of Puritanism in American history, which is extensive, going back at least to “the Pilgrim Fathers.” Now, those were people who always ferociously believed that they had the truth, and to the total exclusion of all others. They were also people who very much believed that wealth and material success were signs of God’s approval and special blessing.

Note the very terms used today, as “The Trust Project” or “News Guard” or “Election Guard” are dead giveaways of Twenty-First Century Puritanism.

Readers might enjoy this:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/john-chuckman-comment-some-history-of-puritanism-in-america-it-explains-a-lot-of-todays-wars-and-belligerence-and-close-mindedness-they-werent-quite-the-nice-folks-a-benign-name-like-pilgri/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK LAWRENCE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak

“A year has passed since highly credentialed intelligence professionals produced the first hard evidence that allegations of mail theft and other crimes attributed to Russia rested on purposeful falsification and subterfuge”

 

But this is just the way American politicians have learned to deal with any adverse finding about almost anything, especially in foreign affairs.

They just ignore it. The practice resembles the way they all have learned, when asked a question in an interview, just to repeat what it is they have been saying, perhaps in new words, without ever answering the question.

“How far will we allow our government to escalate against others without proof of anything?” is a reader question cited by the author.

But I ask, first, what the “allow” is doing in there?

Just what options, what real power, do average Americans have today? My best guess is that it is close to zero.

Yes, you’re still free, at least for a while, to write and speak words, words, and more words. But their net effect on the giant engine that is the American power establishment is close to zero also.

And perhaps before long – given events like the Alex Jones creepy stunts – you may not even be able to utter the words, at least in a way that anyone hears you.

The stupid, endless stuff about Russia and hacks is just one small battle front in a huge, multi-front war being waged by the American power establishment for world supremacy.

If you want to understand the engines driving this, read:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

A further thought.

We have, of course, someone who can precisely and accurately answer any question in the matter.

Unfortunately, he is more or less imprisoned at the behest of the American government.

And should he be turned out of his current situation, he faces certain extradition to the US where he also faces ugly treatment and a long prison term.

Such are the realities of American power in the world today.

His name, of course, is Julian Assange.

And the Democratic Party’s own candidate, Ms. Clinton, was quoted in her charming fashion, “Can’t we just drone him [Assange] or something?”

Of course, saying that was in line with many ugly statements by Clinton, as the one, after Qaddafi’s assassination – a man who did his very best for his people and kept them in peace – “We came, we saw, he died! Ha ha ha!”

It isn’t just Trump who has a filthy mouth and constantly tells lies.

It is the whole American power establishment.

There is no easy solution, at least not in our time.

Powerful people who are determined to do terrible things will do them.

As the American power establishment sees it, the total stakes are too big for any argument or evidence to turn it around.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE AND VIDEO IN THE INDEPENDENT

Here’s more propaganda from The Independent, so poorly disguised you cannot vouch for the source.

God, don’t you ever get tired of pushing this stuff out?

Even if you could account for the source, this is propaganda precisely because it has absolutely no perspective. The best propaganda always has a tiny bit of truth, and the truth here is that, yes, such weapons are used.

You absolutely cannot fairly take one small part of a huge destructive war and suggest that it explains what is going on. It cannot. It can horrify people though, and that would appear to be its purpose here because The Independent makes no practice of presenting such things in most situations.

I can’t recall any equivalent material being used by The Independent for Israel’s slaughters in Gaza, and such material does exist. Some very brave photographers took images of the rivers of blood and smashed children.

I don’t recall such material for America’s (and of course Britain’s) proud invasion of Iraq in which such ghastly weapons as cluster bombs and white phosphorus were used. Thousands of pictures exist of sliced-up children and smashed women, but you never ran any.

The creepy Saudis, whom Britain implicitly supports and with whom it explicitly does a handsome business, are, right now, killing masses of civilians in Yemen, and they are using America’s dreadful cluster bombs to tear them apart, maiming those not killed. Where are your terrifying images?

The horror in Syria did not start by the government’s barrel-bombing places. The barrel-bombing is a response to the infiltration and entrenchment of tens of thousands of heavily-armed terrorists trying to destroy the country from scattered and hidden positions all over it.

They were infiltrated into Syria by the lunatic now running Turkey. They are financed and supplied by the absolute princes of Saudi Arabia. They were assisted, advised, and even led in some cases by the same government of Israel which holds more than five million unwilling people as prisoners. Yet more money came from the absolute princes of Qatar.

And the United States has also supplied and trained elements. It clearly approves of what has been going on or it would be stopped. We know to a certainty that nothing happens anywhere near its Middle East colony of which it does not approve.

Britain under David Cameron, as one of America’s most groveling allies, has also done its dirty bit to help.

This entire misery could be ended if outside help and support for thugs were ended, but that help and support, by the above-named parties, will not stop. Because those countries want Syria destroyed just the way Iraq was destroyed, reduced to a meaningless set of rump states with a population left to suffer for a generation.

And they want to achieve that in the most cowardly of fashions, giving the bloody work over to hired mercenaries and ideological maniacs while standing off – tsk-tsking at the horrors as Cameron is wont to do – pretending they have nothing to do with it.

I simply do not understand how anyone can think human trash like ISIS and al-Nusra Front should prevail over a reasonable, highly-educated man like Assad, a leader who has always protected a secular and diverse society and who keeps the support of large parts of that society.

It is a totally absurd situation, and it can only be explained in light of American policy. It is the policy that destroyed Iraq and Libya and sparked in large covert operations the whole pointless and wrongly-named Arab Spring. There was nothing spring-like in what happened.

A brief experiment with democratic government in Egypt was smothered following Israel’s complaints about the threat it represented. Egypt was returned to a decades-old dictatorship much to Israel’s liking. In other places, like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, potential uprisings were violently suppressed by absolute governments.

It was all an effort to re-mold the region to the liking of America and its Middle East colony under a façade of popular revolt and never mind all the inconvenience of death, destruction, and misery. The region’s authoritarian governments were overthrown only where they disagreed with America and/or Israel while in all other cases they were left to flourish, and the authoritarian governments overthrown were only replaced by others. Democracy flourishes nowhere.

Well, Mr. Putin understands that, and if the nations doing the deadly supplying aren’t going to stop, he’ll destroy what they’ve supplied. The Syrian army will do the rest.

NOTE:

Julian Assange has said that the massive influx of refugees into Europe is, in fact, part of the American strategy to de-stabilize Syria, and I don’t doubt that he is right. Emptying Syria of good parts of its professionals and technicians only further weakens it.

This, of course, puts in quite a different light Ms. Merkel’s controversial, open-arms support for unlimited refugees in Germany. She, rather than speaking from a heart larger than we would have credited her from past behaviors, is just once again supporting American policy, a much more familiar stance for her.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Anything which could possibly endanger the interests of the military-intelligence-security apparatus of the United States is not necessarily a bad thing.

Indeed, America’s government within a government deserves all the sunlight cast upon it possible.

Every inadvertent negative that can come out of something like this is more than offset by increased public awareness of the extent to which the contemporary United States Establishment works actively against democratic and human values in the world.

There is a dark engine throbbing away in the basements of the American military-intelligence-security apparatus today that relatively few fully appreciate, and it works only for the imperial interests of corporate America and no one else.
__________________________________

“Julian Assange: psychopath who uses the Internet to endanger peoples’ lives and livelihoods without any empathy or remorse.”

A list of some genuine psychopaths:

George Bush

Donald Rumsfeld

Dick Cheney

Condi Rice

Henry Kissinger

Richard Nixon

Hillary Clinton

Half the employees of the CIA and related agencies

Most of the members of American Special Forces

Many of the leaders of American corporations (a recent study actually shows this)

Whether Assange should be included, I don’t know, but you know the old argument of fighting fire with fire.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MATTHEW NORMAN IN THE TELEGRAPH

But most heroes are glamorous only for now.

That has always been the case.

It is called celebrity, and it has the lasting qualities of the froth on a beer.

There are a few genuine heroes here and there, and most go uncelebrated.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Globe’s editorials just get dumber and dumber.

They are beginning to remind me of “new sound” of CBC Radio, uninformed and half-baked.

Assange wants a world without secrets?

First, you have no basis for that assertion, none whatever.

Second, as any informed person understands, there are secrets and then there are secrets.

No one, absolutely no one, wants a world with no secrets.

But the fact seems to have eluded the writer of this intellectual mush that for decades we have been victims of unwarranted official secrets and just plain lies.

So much so that when the Globe or anyone else presents the news, none of us, including the Globe, even knows whether it is genuine news, and if it is genuine news, whether it is predicated upon false antecedents.

How can you have an informed democracy in that kind of environment? You cannot. And America very much does not, and with a man like Harper as leader Canada creeps off slowly in that same direction.

Take any example you like from history since WWII.

The invasion of Iraq was based on lies, began other lies, and to this day most people do not understand why countless billions were spent and upwards of half a million people killed.

The same analysis applies to the foolish crusade in Afghanistan. Only yesterday we had two reports on progress there: an official one, from the president, saying things were going okay, and an intelligence leak saying things weren’t going fine at all. This is absolutely typical of America’s world of imperial secrets today.

One could provide an astounding list of the cost in lives and treasure official lies and secrets have caused.

And people cast ballots for people who tell them no truth, intending to do things the voters would never support if they knew the truth. Broken campaign promises are pretty small change compared to this systematic distortion of democracy.

Ten years of Vietnam, killing about 3 million innocent people and leaving a landscape devastated? All started with a big fat lie, and an endless series of lies saw the horror through.

The genocide of Cambodia with a million or so killed? All started with a big fat lie: the American bombing and mini-invasions destabilized a decent neutral government, handing power off to the likes of Pol Pot.

I am genuinely tired of the kind of smug, self-righteousness of right-wing people like the author of this editorial. They have done nothing for the decades of my life but lead us into mass murder and destruction, time after time after time.

There is no possible effect of leaks like those of WikiLeaks that can be remotely so damaging as the real big-power world of lies, deceptions, and secrets.

We truly are approaching, and I think Americans have virtually reached, a world where your vote does not matter at all because you have no idea what it is you are voting for. The immense excitement over Obama two years ago has all been ground into the dust as he carries on killing and lying just like George Bush.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

“He’s more like Ted Kaczynski, who didn’t care what he blew up…”

That is simply appalling, Ms Wente. It is both uninformed and ignores the elephant in the room.

Assange’s organization combed through the material and did not release names in highly sensitive cases.

The biggest chunk of missing material is from communications with Israel.

There are two theories for this.

First, that Assange made a deal with Israeli authorities ahead of time to withhold material.

Second, that WikiLeaks is being used by Mossad to “get out” certain messages.

And we know from history there is tons of material on Israel.

The embarrassment and hurt to the United States is nothing new for the Israelis.

For decades, they have done as they please regardless of what the U.S. thinks.

Just consider the 1967 war, whose ghastly results persist to this day.

And consider Israel’s two hour all-out attack on the USS Liberty, a spy ship, during that war. Israel did everything it could to sink it, killing a large portion of the crew. It made lame excuses afterward for the attacking the well-marked ship which it had been advised would be on station to keep Israel to its secret promises around the war.

The attack was covering General Dayan’s movement northward from the Sinai of armor – something it had previously told the U.S. in private it would not do. The resulting conquest mess we live with to this day. Those conquests were Israel’s entire secret purpose in making that war happen as a big black operation.

There are countless other instances, including Israel’s duplicitous nuclear program, something Kennedy was totally against when he discovered it. Well, the program is still there, but Kennedy isn’t.

How about Israel’s participation in the Suez Crisis with Britain and France, something Eisenhower put an end to?

How about the many insults like that offered the Vice President recently?

The icing on the cake, as it were, was the most damaging spy in American history, Israeli hero, Jonathon Pollard. Some of what he stole was sold to Russia.

Israel never even blushes over Pollard, and to this day, they continue to beg and plead for his release, despite the fact that a quarter of the senior American intelligence agents would tender their resignations were that to happen. There have been dozens of formal and informal requests – immense pressure – to release a man that under other circumstances would have been shot.

And there have been many spying instances, right down to a group of Mossad spies who were right behind the 9/11 guys, a group of phony “house movers” arrested in New York and deported and a group of “art students.” None of it ever explained.

It is well known that the United States is more intensively spied on by Israel than it is by any other ally.

Note: for those not familiar, Ms Wente is one of Canada’s most persistent and blind defenders of Israel’s bloody excesses.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

There is nothing new in learning anything which confirms that Tom Flanagan is a nasty piece of work.

The man is pure, unadulterated American Right-Wing, a thrust-the-imperial-flag-into-the-chests-of-those-working-against-America’s-sacred-interests man, without a trace of decent traditional conservative.

He literally represents in Canada everything you find in that ugly mob which includes Dick “kill the turbanhead scum” Cheney, Tom “the money launderer” DeLay, Sarah “the idiot witth super-sized glands” Palin, Newt “I divorced my wife dying of cancer” Gingrich, and all the other charming Washington folks who work tirelessly for war and imperial interests. The influence and the money for promoting Right-Wing values come up alongside the same pipelines which carry Alberta’s crude and natural gas South.

I have never understood why the Globe gives him column-inches periodically, other than the well-know fact that he has been adviser to Harper, truly the most divisive politician in living memory and a man who already has succeeded in corroding away like spilled battery acid a great deal of Canada’s past wonderful international reputation.

Flanagan’s columns have never demonstrated anything beyond the academic quality or interest of just another second-rate social scientist. He is in academic terms a truly undistinguished thinker.

But there is nothing second rate or undistinguished about his visceral instincts for plotting against and trying to destroy traditional Canadian values. The man is an instinctive predator, a perfect hunting-mate for Harper.

I note the comment that Flanagan’s comment about killing Assange was made in the form of a joke, but then only rather sick people make such jokes or laugh at them.

Shouldn’t people who say such things be treated as terrorists, or at least as people having made a criminal threat?

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

We have no way to determine whether WikiLeaks itself is genuine.

But we do have enough information in the nature of the leaks to reach some tentative conclusions.

The leaked material is almost certainly all genuine.

But it is highly selective, a crucial fact.

There is nothing terrible about America and its wars abroad, and any clear-thinking person knows perfectly well there are terrible tales to tell about wars abroad. That is the history of wars.

There is no dirt on Israel or Israeli-related matters.

Yet we know Israel is, realistically, today likely the world’s single greatest danger to international peace. It constantly practices assassinations and black operations, and almost every word coming from its foreign ministry is dishonest.

North Korea’s much-publicized attacks are almost insignificant compared to Israel’s attacks on innocent people in Southern Lebanon and Gaza and on the high seas.

Tons of American documents on Israel’s many insults, brutalities and non-cooperation must exist, but we see nothing.

There is tons of stuff about Iran, all of seeming to say that much of the world agrees Iran is a problem.

There are thousands of anecdotes by and about diplomats – all interesting, some fairly juicy, but none of them terribly damaging.

One must remember that an outfit like the U.S. State Department keeps countless millions of documents. There are unquestionably embarrassing opinions about anything you care to mention.

But there are far more consequential documents dealing with things like secret nuclear weapons and what happened to all the South African bombs, assassinations like that of Dr Kelly in Britain, and spying including the terrible case of Jonathon Pollard, the most compromising spy in American history and someone the Israeli government puts almost constant pressure on Washington to release, having made him a national hero with a holiday named for him.

One cannot help but think the leaks are serving Pentagon/Israeli interests.

And, of course, the classic technique for giving interest and believability to the material an agency does want to disseminate is to wrap it up in lots of other stuff that keeps people amused and fascinated.

WikiLeaks does not have to be aware of any of this. I don’t say for certain that they are not, but please remember the sensational case of the C.I.A. plant at the New York Times, Judith Miller. If the New York Times can be fooled – and they have been on numerous occasions – anyone can.

There have been many others. Robert Novak was used a number of times to disseminate material, as in the case of unmasked C.I. A. spy Valerie Plame. American journalism literally is saturated with such connections, some voluntary and malicious, some unknowing but still damaging.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GEORGE GRANT IN THE TELEGRAPH

“Why is Julian Assange picking on the United States?”

Had I known what is written at the bottom of the piece – that George Grant is Global Security & Terrorism Director at The Henry Jackson Society, a Foreign Policy Think Tank based in London – I would have read George Grant’s words with less sense of perplexity about the man not knowing what he is talking about.

For clearly, he does not.

But in the United States where there are many think-tanks it is typical of their directors, associates, and fellows to write nonsense.

Think-tanks in the U. S. are basically propaganda mills styling themselves as institutions of higher learning.

They are in most cases funded by right-wing extremists with lots of money.

And their “fellows” consist of educated hacks who have loyally served right-wing causes in government, receiving their places as comfortable sinecures, much as some of the sinecures in America’s gift that have been showered upon Tony Blair as reward for his bloody work with Bush.

The “fellows” always remind me of actors on television commercials wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, letting viewers assume they are doctors advising them to buy some over-the-counter headache remedy.

I should have thought it was obvious that Assange, as someone running a whistle-blower internet site, takes gratefully the significant material offered him. He did not hack American government computers to get the stuff: his supplier or suppliers did. He may not even know who the person supplying him is.

I should have thought it was also highly likely that were some juicy inside material to come from Russia or Israel, Assange would be happy to run it. But then we are not very likely to see that coming from such tightly-controlled and secretive governments, are we?

As far as Grant’s underlying assumption about a focus on America, please consider that America’s military now spends more annually than all the other governments on the planet combined.

Consider also that the American intelligence apparatus now consists of about 16 agencies, and their spending is thought to exceed $80 billion a year.

Add to those considerations that since World War II America has fought a huge number of dirty colonial wars – Vietnam, Cambodia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq – killing literally millions of people for no good purpose and has participated in countless coups and overthrows of legitimate governments, including democratic ones – Iran, Chile, Guatemala, and others – and you do get a real sense of what Lord Acton said follows as we approach absolute power.

Grant’s piece is just a slightly disguised ad hominem attack, and a rather silly one. It contains no analysis whatsoever. So I guess Grant may return to his think-tank office this morning and lean back in his swiveled leather chair, gazing out the window and dreamily thinking he has earned his salary for this month fighting the good fight for America’s interests.