John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SAM HUSSEINI IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Biden Has Been Lying About His Record on Iraq for Years

“Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his surrogates such as former Secretary of State John Kerry continue to falsely claim that he did not favor the Iraq invasion”

 

Biden has always been a pretty sleazy operator. And not just in his lying about his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Look back at his record as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the matter of Anita Hill’s charges about a Supreme Court nominee. Shabby.

He consistently supported wars and coups through his career. He worked closely with Obama on carrying some of them out. He served as Obama’s proconsul in Ukraine for a coup against an elected government, and appears to have gained financially from the work.

All the wars and coups, of course, involve deceit about what is actually taking place. So, he’s had a lot of practice with avoiding truth.

Biden is credited with helping convince Obama to start America’s extrajudicial killing industry. A hi-tech update of the old Argentine Junta’s “disappearing” people by the thousands without any charge or trial or defense. Now, a nameless operator sits at a screen playing computer games with real human beings.

Remember, he received the Medal of Freedom from Obama – that’s Obama of the jocular statement, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” – and you don’t get that award without doing some seriously dirty work for America’s empire. Just ask Madeline Albright.

Somehow, Biden’s smile and folksy way of talking fool a lot of people.

Same phenomenon we saw with Obama.

___________________

Response to a comment saying, “Trump will be laughing his head off if Biden is the nominee”

Unless external events intervene – real possibilities include economic collapse or war with Iran – Trump will likely be re-elected. He’s the devil they know, and he has many bamboozled into thinking he has achieved something. It is not hard to bamboozle large portions of America, the land of P. T. Barnum and Hollywood and Madison Avenue. If the impeachment fails, as seems likely, he will have come through an ordeal, gaining some sympathy and receiving, as it were, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

News services are so manipulated in the United States that most people have no real understanding of what is going on in the world. A war might even help Trump if enough people believe Iran is evil and a threat to dear old America, and that he is there with his absurdly posed faces and bellowing to protect them. Americans have heard the claim that Iran is somehow malign repeated in the press in one form or another for forty years, and you would not find any Democratic candidate saying otherwise for fear of losing special-interest campaign funding.

Money replaces information in telling your story and getting it “out there.” Always remembering that owing to America’s antiquated, anti-democratic Electoral College system, only some people in certain marginal or swing locations need to be convinced of any such story. Those places receive intense campaigns of market research and polls and then advertising regurgitating what the polls say people want to hear. You can win with a minority, as Trump did in 2016 and as George Bush did in 2000. Trump, by virtue of his various services to special interests, some in complete violation of international law, will have the mother lode of cash.

The Democrats just do not have good material on offer. No spark. No heroism. Dull establishment views.

Bernie Sanders has his strong points, but he is old, has had a heart attack, and showed serious weakness vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and her theft of the nomination in 2016.

Tulsi Gabbard, a really promising politician, is simply ignored by the Democratic establishment and the press.

It really doesn’t matter which of the candidates wins. They are all married to the Pentagon and war and empire, and with the United States spending about a trillion dollars a year, of borrowed money, for the military/security establishment, no social program of any consequence can possibly be enacted.

All the leading Democratic candidates worship at the altar of the Pentagon and CIA and special interests in the Middle East, just as Trump does.

American “democracy” is looking more threadbare and meagre than ever.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS VALENTINE IN COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE

“Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA”

__________________

Response to a comment which said, “Of course if he did get too close to certain truths, he would be committing suicide.

“Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam war involved murdering people on some of those lists, and they even deployed military hit-men to pull off these murders.

“Something also not mentioned in this review was the opium trade going on involving the CIA in Vietnam, Thailand, in the area known as the golden triangle.”

 

Yes, Operation Phoenix was a secret American mass-assassination operation that continued for many years during the Vietnam War.

We first learned of it in the 1970s from CIA Director William Colby who himself had earlier administered it.

The name of the program came up again briefly when it was learned that Senator Bob Kerrey, a fairly well-regarded politician running for the 1992 Democratic nomination, had served under the program as a Navy SEAL. He withdrew from the race.

Somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people were butchered in Operation Phoenix.

And “butchered” is the right word.

They generally had their throats slashed (for silence) by special-forces troops assigned to work under CIA. They would crawl into villages in the night to attack innocent civilians whom CIA previously had identified.

The people selected for death were those who held administrative jobs such as village mayors or just influential figures, not soldiers.

The concept was just plain terror, intended to make America’s opponents lose their capacity for resistance.

Nothing ISIS or al Qaeda ever did was more loathsome.

And, yes, CIA was in the drug business during the Vietnam War. Drugs were moved by the Agency’s private airline of the time, Air America, used for many dark operations and, of course, never stopped or questioned or searched by American officials.

The Agency often earns off-the-books money during conflicts by dealing in drugs and/or weapons. The money is good, and there are no official budget records with which to be concerned.

They likely have been part of the flood of drugs coming from Afghanistan since the US toppled the Taliban government there, a government which had banned growing opium poppies.

But the trade has flourished since the American invasion, contributing to the many gang killings over sales turf of recent years in American cities. Such volumes of opioids were flowing out of Afghanistan that prices declined on the streets, much intensifying competition.

Your American tax dollars at work.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON THE STILL-SWIRLING SCANDALS AROUND AMERICA’S 2016 NATIONAL ELECTION

 

While I am not a political partisan of any party, I believe there can be little doubt that important American agency heads and senior Democratic figures plotted along several lines either to discredit Trump before the election or to deprive him of office after the election.

He was viewed as a political outsider, a maverick, an unwelcome, intrusive figure whose entrance on the national stage might upset a lot of people’s relationships and plans. And it didn’t help that he was a rude and awkward man, given to expressing himself at times in words you might expect to see scratched inside a stall door at a public toilet.

All indications suggest that Obama – the always-smiling but taciturn and secrecy-embracing Obama, his record on whistleblowers and leakers as well as his eight-year record of bombing countless people demonstrating him as being quite ruthless – led this effort, closely allied with Hillary Clinton, the woman, we know from documents, who cheated repeatedly in the Democratic primary campaign to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.

These are ruthless people, although most of the public is not used to thinking of American political figures in that way. It is a hard thing perhaps for ordinary Americans to absorb the idea that their own country, “sweet land of liberty” as it’s termed in the national theology, is run along lines, not of respect for democracy and rule of law, but of what is sniggered at in Third-world lands.

The totality of the Democrats’ efforts – consulting with discreditable people abroad, paying an ex-spy to create a false dossier on a political candidate, spying on a political campaign, making outrageous public charges, and still other acts – does seriously flirt with subverting democracy and Constitutional government, and that actually approaches the definition of treason.

However, I cannot find myself entirely outraged by the dark series of events because, for me, Trump’s own behaviors are so outrageous and extremely dangerous that they tend to overshadow what the others did. I don’t exonerate them, but we are now faced with terrifying new dangers both to peace and to the health and stability of the world’s economy.

And it is not to be said that the Democrats understood and anticipated such developments and are at least to be partly excused for that reason. No, indeed, they very much contributed to bringing it all on.

The Democrats’ activity reflects the heightened sense of privilege and exceptionalism we now see in so many – indeed in most – of the words and deeds coming from Washington. America’s establishment has comfortably assumed a belief in its being God’s contemporary chosen people, or, in the outrageously self-serving words of Madeline Albright, the “indispensable nation.” Well, considering yourself as indispensable and chosen by God has always had some terrible consequences for those wielding great power. We have the eloquent testimony of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories to just that effect.

Trump was targeted because he was something of an outsider, someone who hi-jacked, in effect, one of the two old-line political parties, depriving other establishment figures, old-line Republicans like the Bushes or Romneys, of a nomination that “should” have belonged to one of them.

That sense of things does come with something of a threat to the prevailing system of the American power establishment, a system where both parties, no matter what their campaign words, always end by closely supporting the American plutocracy, its empire, and all of the agencies of government concerned with maintaining and extending the empire, especially the Pentagon and the CIA. Even a suggestion that an outsider might represent a threat to that established order was enough to drive a number of insiders to distraction.

Normally, those who challenge the establishment in any fashion are simply allowed to say their piece while being largely ignored by the press and other politicians, having few of their words reach most Americans, as well as suffering the tremendous impact of a campaign-finance drought, those funds always overwhelmingly being gifts from the wealthy. Tulsi Gabbard is the best contemporary example of that approach. There have been others, people with various points of view, from Ralph Nader to Ron Paul.

But a unique set of circumstances in 2016, enabled an “outsider” to get inside under the edge of the big-top tent and assume a position at center ring under the spotlights. The main contributing circumstance, I believe, was the nature of the Democrat’s own candidate, Hillary Clinton, a woman who inspires a great deal of fear and hostility, both outside and inside her own party. But the Democrats were stuck with her because her husband, Bill, has been the key link for years in a supply chain of large campaign-fund donors. No one ignores money in American politics. Had someone else run, most of these events likely would not have happened, and Trump would not now be President.

The new dangers to peace to which I referred can also be at least partly attributed to the work of the Democrats and their senior agency heads. Here is the reason. Trump felt seriously threatened at various points, as we know from reports. One of his ways of dealing with the threat was to approach some powerful and influential people for support and money, people whose primary focus was not the American political establishment but Israel.

The money would provide a war chest for the 2020 election campaign as well as against the threat of a costly impeachment. We’ve only learned recently from an analysis of old tax records that Trump is far less wealthy than anyone had imagined, having been burdened with huge debts for years.

Trump got what he wanted, increasing his sense of security, but the price demanded saw him give away things in the Middle East that were not his to give and begin a seriously threatening campaign against Iran, a country which Israel detests but one which had followed the letter of the law scrupulously in its multi-party nuclear agreement as well as being a country which has started no war in its modern history, despite having had a vicious war launched against it in the 1980s. Its record in wars and strife, despite the rhetoric of Trump or Bolton or Pompeo, compares immensely favorably with those of the United States and Israel.

The new dangers to economic stability are largely Trump’s work, his constant noisy haranguing, his many threats, his arbitrary imposition of large new tariffs, and his creation of an entire new branch of public service, one dedicated to illegally sanctioning people all over the world. I say “illegally” because all of the sanctions represent efforts to enforce American law on other people, ignoring the rule of law in other countries and ignoring virtually all international law and diplomatic protocol.

But while Trump is particularly rude and loud about the way he approaches other countries, the essence of what he tries to do is supported quietly by the American establishment, all of them from both parties. Big matters such as the rise of China and new relationships between Germany and Russia have been establishment concerns for decades. They foreshadow the emergence of a brave new world order, one very much not welcomed by America’s establishment.

The American establishment dreads its relative decline in importance to the world’s economy and its geopolitics. So, they appear, all of them, willing to support, at least for now, Trump’s crude efforts to extract concessions from countries like China by methods which really do reflect traditional mafia methods of gaining footholds in other people’s businesses, with “offers they can’t refuse.”

In the 1950s and 1960s Chicago where I grew up, restaurants and other businesses periodically burnt down for no explained reason. It was widely understood that it was the price of having refused to cooperate with “The Outfit,” to pay the required fees for services such as “protection,” that they offered.

So, we have an extremely complex and devious situation in Washington. Senior members of one major party came close to treason in their opposition to a newcomer. However, at the same time, the newcomer has proved himself so destructive in world affairs, in matters of trade and war, that some might almost be tempted to say that the efforts by Democrats and their senior agency heads were warranted.

But no reasonable person can say that. Rule of law is civilization’s greatest founding principle. Take that away, and you have the rule of the strongest, but it so happens that that is something both parties have long worked towards in America’s foreign affairs. There’s nothing of law or principle involved in any of America’s long string of colonial wars and coups and interventions since the end of WWII. They all involved forcing others to do as they were told. They all involved breaking innumerable laws and conventions and treaties. And they involved a great deal of killing and destruction. Now, that same long-accustomed approach has found a home at the very center of American power in Washington.

We were all treated to the most arrogant display of power and abuse and contempt for law with recent events in Venezuela. It’s never been so plainly on display, almost resembling the free summertime performance of a play in a neighborhood city park, even though it represented immoral and illegal practices America has used many times, perhaps with variations, such as more killing, here or there – in Ukraine, in Cuba, in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in other places. Maybe it is just a reflection of the incompetence of those in charge today that we saw the failed efforts so plainly, but that is just the kind of thing immense and unwarranted arrogance produces, a bizarre belief that if you say something should happen, it must happen.

The center of the American empire is in an unprecedented tangle of downright criminal behavior and fears, on all sides, and represents the greatest possible danger both to the world’s peace and its economic stability. I do not see how it all can end well, even if this or that particular crisis is diffused.

It really does remind one of tales of the last days of Rome, but if you find that an excessive comparison, there’s no escaping the fact that what we are seeing is the close-to-absolute corruption that accompanies close-to-absolute power.