JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Terrorism?

What a joke.

The United States just murdered a number of innocent Yemenis with a drone strike.

That is indeed terror, state terror.
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There is not, and never has been, an organization called al Qaeda.

We have the words of several important statesmen, including a former British foreign minister, that the word was only used inside the American government as a catch-all for “bad guys” in certain regions of the world.

The word actually means “hole” or “sewer.” Can you imagine a secret fierce group calling itself “sewer”?

Yet the continued use of the term – repeated over and over in the press – undoubtedly lends weight to vague assertions about threats, and that is precisely why Washington continues to use this ridiculous language.

So why does the press keep repeating the nonsense?

The answer is found in the degree of genuine independence of thought and investigation exhibited by our mainline press, and that is simply not much.

It is not an organization. It does not send e-mails. It does not write press releases. If indeed it were an organization and it did these things from time to time, does any thinking person not understand that NSA and others would locate them quickly, causing the launch of drones in minutes?

But there are some pretty nasty people out there in the world. The United States has cynically used some of them again and again to get something it wants, the latest being the effort to topple the government of Syria.

It used them in Afghanistan – twice: once to fight the Russians in the 1980s, and a second time to defeat the Taleban government and carry out acts of terror like the murder of thousands of Taleban prisoners – and in Libya and in other places.

The United States in using these people and heavily assisting them – aided by its friends Israel and Turkey – is responsible for more terror in Syria alone than any so-called terrorist group could conceive of doing on its own anywhere.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

So they say.

Prove it.

But even then, what really is the Taleban?

It is not a dark terrorist force.

It had nothing to do with 9/11.

But it was, by Afghan standards, a reform political party with a conservative religious affiliation.

The only crime they are guilty of is fighting the invading Americans.

But from America’s establishment point of view, there is no greater crime.

And you must be regarded as one of Stalin’s “wreckers,” the vague word Stalin used when it was time for a bloody purge, working to oppose the benign work of America’s insanely militaristic government.
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Again, NATO strike?

These are always, always American strikes.

But America sure loves to hide under the skirts of NATO while doing its dirty work.

And papers like the Globe sadly go along with the fraud, doing their part for America’s beloved Pentagon.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Al-Qaeda said?

You certainly do not have to be a “conspiracy theorist” to look on such a statement with hard cynical eyes.

First, we have the word of former British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, as well as other distinguished people that there is no “Al-Qaeda,” the term being a made-up catch-all for “bad guys” in general.

Since the word literally means “toilet,” it has always seemed unlikely there is such an organization even without the testimony of people who know.

Second, we pick these things up off a supposed Al-Qaeda web site?

Please, how long do you think it would take – with the NSA and CIA and other agencies constantly monitoring the Internet – to have special forces breaking down your door if you had a web site designated as an official Al-Qaeda web site?

A day? Maybe hours?

This kind of report lacks journalistic credibility.
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Response to another reader who says:

“So really the threat is still there and all must be vigilant.”

Vigilant for what?

People-eating aliens from space?

The Rapture?

Anti-Christ?

Spores from space?

Asteroids on a collision course with earth?

That is a ridiculous mode of thought which the propagandists and powers that be exploit to the hilt.

People who do murderous things are always part of life, especially in places like the United States.

You don’t have call them terrorists, just criminals or violent mental cases.

And responsible citizens have always reported truly doubtful behaviors to authorities.

Today we have lunatics day and night seeing things that aren’t there.
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Response to another reader who asks:

“Was there ever a Bin Laden?”

Yes.

He was a son of a distinguished and rich Saudi family and he is known to have intensely disliked the ruling House of Saud, and that’s why he could not live in his own homeland.

He served in America’s proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

He is reputed to have been a brave man and a quite intelligent one.

Being an enemy of the House of Saud was itself a very dark mark against him for the United States after his being used in Afghanistan, but he also grew to dislike the United States.

He disliked the U.S. for manipulating his people over Afghanistan. They fought against the Soviets based on the notion that the Soviets were godless interlopers in Afghanistan, set on suppressing Muslims – that is the kind of line the CIA repeated endlessly while handing out Stinger missiles, rifle grenades, and packages of plastique.

After the Soviet defeat, he saw the U.S. beginning to do the very things they used to inflame hatred of the Soviets in a long series of events which saw Americans encroaching on what he and others regarded as sacred land. American troops in Saudi Arabia, land of the Prophet, and supported by the corrupt House of Saud, were especially detested.

Beyond that, our knowledge is pretty sketchy.

The U.S. never offered proof of his involvement in 9/11.

Indeed, the Taleban government in Afghanistan was willing to extradite him when the U.S. requested it after 9/11, if evidence were supplied, that being the normal international procedure in all extraditions.

It was the U.S. who refused, a fact never explained.

The U.S. made up its mind to invade Afghanistan and teach the world a lesson in the meaning of vengeance.

The odd fact is it was not the Taleban who even invited bin Laden to live in the country, it was the previous Northern Alliance government, the very same people the U.S. used to fight the Taleban, the very people who rule there today, and many of them are just as intolerant and backward as the Taleban.

The Taleban, while backward and nasty in their views, need never have been our actual enemies.

Many responsible people believe bin Laden was killed in the horrific bombing of Tora Bora a decade ago. If such were the case, it is reasonable the U.S. would want to keep it a secret to prevent the creation of a martyr.

I don’t know, but I was somewhat inclined to accept that.

This recent claim of his assassination, even if true, is so full of uncertainties and inconsistencies that great doubts exist as to what actually happened, and I am not referring to pictures or the lack of them.

It is quite possible that the Pakistani government actually gave him up to the CIA in return for some benefit – as perhaps a slowdown or halt to all the drone attacks and special forces assassinations.

There is a credible report from Pakistan that it was the Pakistani military who landed and entered the compound – this would have the effect of handing Obama a prize for his re-election – something which has not been at all certain.

Any government would be tired and angry about such high-handed treatment. But American activity’s impact on fundamentalist areas of Pakistan has been devastating in terms of terror incidents against the government for its silent cooperation. American arrogance has caused Pakistan to pay a high price in instability, literally tens of thousand of deaths.

On the other hand, Obama may just have staged a big show, a setting for announcing what may have been true for ten years.

I don’t see what gruesome pictures would settle since we can be sure there would have been pictures taken ten years ago in the mountains of Tora Bora.

Whatever is the case, I’m sure he is dead, but again we have no idea as to what his responsibility for 9/11 or other acts was. It does seem to me that he provided the United States with something of an Emmanuel Goldstein figure, the mythical arch villain with whom Oceana constantly frightened its citizens in Orwell’s 1984.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

The final chapter of our Afghan mission?

And just what was our “mission”?

I doubt anyone in Canada can give a coherent definition of that so-called mission.

The government has blubbered again and again, as have some of its supporters, about making the purpose clearer to people, but they never have.

That is simply because there is no purpose, at least in the conventional meaning of the word.

The United States went there for vengeance and to kill as many people it regards as hostile as it can. It dragged along all the “help” its vast resources of finance, aid, and military could extract from the world, hoping to make the business look like something other than it is.

Even then, most countries, except for Tony Blair’s Britain, sent only token help to this supposedly world-important “mission.”

There never has been any other meaning, except in the columns of propagandists.

Canada’s only purpose was to placate a mindlessly angry and paranoid United States with the knowledge that we’ll help hold your overcoat while you’re busy doing all that killing. We accidentally got assigned to a place where our troops suffered disproportionately

No other definition of our “mission” fits the facts. It is a dark and brutal and pointless chapter in our history.

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“…should have realized that the mission since the German Conference was to rebuilt Afghanistan and provide the necessary security for its people.”

It doesn’t get more unthinking and uninformed than that.

Afghanistan is not being “rebuilt.”

The place was never a country in the sense that we understand it. It is simply a remote place which is the home to a number of tribes. There is traditionally no central government – and there effectively still is not – and there are no roads to speak of, and relationships are governed by a set of ancient tribal rules.

You cannot undo that in even a lifetime.

Because the economy is so primitive, it is little more than window dressing to build a lot more schools too. There is no employment for more educated people in a tribal society like that.

If we could by a wave of the hand, suddenly educate all the people of Afghanistan, all we would achieve is producing a lot of people who want to go somewhere else. The primitive economy cannot absorb them.

The “German Conference” was just one more in a long line of American tools to manipulate world opinion.

Had America cared the least about developing Afghanistan, it would have dropped dollar bills, not bombs.

How few people are even aware that the Taleban originally was created to provide clean government, at a time when the country was under the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who in their internecine fights were killing tens of thousands of people after the Russians left.

The Taleban’s original purpose had absolutely nothing to do with fighting the West.

Yes, they granted Osama’s people a place to stay, but Osama had before that been someone who served American purposes, indeed, someone who visited the United States and received assistance.

After 9/11, the Taleban would have extradited Osama’s people had the US offered one shred of evidence concerning his guilt, something they refused, and to this day, we’ve still not seen any.

America has managed the feat of making an enemy of the Taleban. Pointless because, whether we like it or not, they are part of the fabric of that country.

America’s total achievement, apart from killing tens of thousands more, includes the poppies, which the Taleban had suppressed, now blooming like wildflowers, and the Northern Alliance warlords rule their respective areas with all the corruption and violence and anti-progressive behavior as always.

A total disaster.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

It’s about time.

The Taleban need never have been our enemy, regardless of what we think of their religious behavior.

No Taleban were involved in 9/11.

Saudis were. And they had valid U.S. visas.

The Taleban government would have extradited Osama had the U.S. supplied any genuine evidence of his involvement, but, no, the U.S. refused to supply any, in what is a universal practice for extradition requests.

No, America just had to invade and get some vengeance.

Well, you’ve had it. Time to go and let these people get on with their lives.

The Northern Alliance guys you put in place are mostly just as backward as the Taleban.

Only long-term economic growth will change Afghanistan, and you don’t get that from bombs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

It truly is dishonest to always write about “drone attacks.”

Drones don’t attack anyone. Gum-chewing thugs sitting in an office chair at a computer terminal do.

These drones are armed with American Hellfire missiles, the same ones Israel uses when it typically kills a dozen innocent people in a bloody horror trying to get one target, some man who has never been charged or tried or condemned.

The guy at the terminal somewhere in a locked room in the Pentagon basement undoubtedly pumps his arm as the missile explodes, killing God knows who.

Then he goes out for some lunch in Georgetown.

Disgusting.

An absolute lack of ethics, only praised by the apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.

Misery likes company, and the same goes for miserable criminal behavior.

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Carrying the Olympic Torch would sure be a suitable suggestion, although I doubt the writer making this suggestion even understands why.

Few Canadians seem aware that the Olympic Torch relay was invented for the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, invented by no less a figure than Doctor Joseph Goebbels to distract world attention in a very controversial Olympics from the stuff going on in Germany.

Yet we blindly carry on this stupid marketing scheme as though it were a hallowed tradition.

And we get brainless suggestions like this one concerning it.

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

 

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

I have heard Rick Hillier speak at some length recently on CBC Radio. Naturally, he is out promoting his book.I thought he largely came off as a whiner, rather naïve about the realities of war and politics.Hillier went into Afghanistan literally barking about doing some killing, arrogantly tossing aside Canada’s sense of itself as a peaceful and peacekeeping place.

His words rankled many people, and naturally a control-freak like Harper put limits on Hillier’s mouth.

I tend to agree with Chantal Hebert’s assessment that Hillier’s book, unintentionally on his part, will only contribute to Canada’s not continuing a military commitment in Afghanistan beyond its commitment.

The entire Afghanistan adventure is nothing more than a demonstration of America’s ability to behave much as it pleases in the world. In the aftermath of 9/11, it pulled out all the stops in finance and diplomacy to get UN and NATO recognition of what essentially was vengeance.

The invasion never made any sense, and after America’s superficial “victory,” it had no idea what to do, except to let its brutal special forces loose on villages all over Afghanistan. Its “victory” amounted to a pact with the devils of the Northern Alliance – monsters like the mass-murderer General Dostum being as bad or worse than the Taleban – and it achieved nothing but a great deal of killing and the dispersal of the Taleban.

No NATO country – especially powerful ones like France or Germany – has made a commitment of troops that is in keeping with America’s paranoid assessment of the world dangers of Afghanistan – that fact is telling beyond anything else.

Canadians should never forget that the only reason we sent troops to Afghanistan was a decision in Ottawa that “we owed one to the Pentagon” after having refused to participate in America’s missile shield and its even more disastrous and murderous adventure in Iraq.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESI stopped watching Frontline years ago.

There were too many tame programs with no real analysis, the documentary content-equivalent of PBS’s nature specials, as that on apes narrated by Charlie Sheen.

And, several times, more hard-hitting items were removed from their schedule. Shameful.

Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, PBS executives started wetting their pants and reducing the network to fluff. Their anchor news show, the News Hour, was reduced to arguments between political party chairmen saying nothing and tame news coverage.

However the scene you describe, Clive, is strong stuff, and should tell Americans something, but there are none so blind….

Of course, there is the reason why there can be no victory in Afghanistan.

I’m not even sure what the Military-Industrial bureaucrats mean by “victory.” Afghanistan reduced to an Illinois suburb with shopping centers and SUVs in the driveways of homes?

The U.S. went there for vengeance, and that is what it got. It killed tens of thousands, including an estimated 50,000 just in Kabul.

It did this with horrible weapons and carpet bombing, and to minimize American casualties on the ground, it let the nasty people in the Northern Alliance do most of the legwork. It also participated in horrible war crimes against Taleban prisoners, as the 3,000 who disappeared, buried in the desert after having been suffocated in vans, a la early Nazi experiments with mass killings.

Once the U.S. had a technical victory – actually nothing but dispersing the Taleban to the hills – it did not know what to do, and it still does not.

Its troops have used brutal techniques – never likely to be shown on Frontline or any other American television. Years of special forces thugs going from village to village, knocking down doors, holding guns on families, and taking away men from households.

And every time it calls an air strike, civilians die.

Now it is spreading its horror into Pakistan, having quietly intimidated the Pakistan government into cooperating in matters that are not really their interests.

I, of course, recall that wonderful achievement of America’s during its pointless holocaust in Vietnam of de-stabilizing the neutral government of Cambodia and helping pave the way for the “killing fields” which it did absolutely nothing to stop.

Indeed, when the brave Vietnamese went in and stopped the horror, American bureaucrats stood, arms folded, saying I told you so, it’s the domino theory at work.

Colonial wars are not legitimate “policy” in the 21st century, and, as good students of history know, wars generally solve nothing.

The great irony is that the Taleban never attacked anyone, had nothing to do with 9/11, yet the U.S. has made them into an enemy.

They are, of course, a major part of the population of Afghanistan, an absurdly poor and backward place, while the U.S. military with all their shiny G.I Joe equipment are occupiers. No one likes occupiers ever, except those who profit by trading with them, as the prostitutes of Paris in 1941.

Afghanistan is a hopeless disaster of America’s own making, and the soldier you describe, Clive, is a perfect symbol of the hopelessness of the entire crusade.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE ON A COLUMN BY LEWIS MACKENZIE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“NATO’s purpose, now long vanished into history, had been to exist as a counter to the WARSAW pact and the threat of Soviet hegemony.

But now the Soviet Union and the WARSAW are gone – and so should NATO have disappeared”

Absolutely.

But NATO has another important purpose, and it is this other purpose that keeps it going.

The U.S. uses NATO as a kind of theatrical costume for events like Afghanistan. Instead of the world’s seeing America acting as lone bomb-dropping lawgiver to the world, it sees the somewhat more benign face of NATO, benign only because the organization carries the suggestion of plausibility with a number of nations agreeing on some objective.

The reality is, of course, America’s NATO allies do not genuinely regard Afghanistan as a serious threat: their relatively small commitments and refusal to expand them effectively are screaming this truth at us.

NATO is also used by American policy to keep Europe from becoming a genuine competitor on the world stage, a role Europe’s economy, the largest in the world, fully justifies.

American policy uses all kinds of subterfuges towards this goal, as for example keeping alive the many decades out-of-date conception of “a special relationship” with Britain, a game, appealing to the feelings of a declined imperial power, which keeps Britain from fully integrating into the Europe which is clearly its destiny.

As for MacKenzie’s silly way of talking about the Taleban, let’s remember they are a major part of the population, not some foreign invader like the United States. And they never attacked anyone in the past. American policies have made them an enemy. Just as American policies are driving Pakistan towards disaster.

Remember what America achieved in Cambodia during its holocaust in Vietnam.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

More bilge from John Manley.

How does Manley have any idea of turnout to make the statements he makes? We haven’t had a single good report, except that it was very low.

We owe nothing to Afghanistan. It has a crooked government, despite seven years of occupation. Drugs flow like water. Women still wear the burka through most of the country.

Credible reports say that the government’s handling of the election was atrocious with ballot boxes removed from some areas and ballot boxes stuffed in others.

I heard an expert witness on CBC Radio, a woman AP reporter who has a couple of decades of experience in the area.

Considering she is from an American organization, her testimony takes on extra force.

She spent many days talking to people in the street. Many expressed utter disgust with the government. Others actually expressed the notion that if the Taleban came back, maybe they wouldn’t be so extreme.

The tone was overall one of the election really won’t change anything, and I am sure that is right.

Just before the election, the president brought back one of the world’s most evil blackguards, General Dostum, a mass murderer.

And the good General, among many other ghastly acts, is directly responsible for executing about three thousand prisoners early in the occupation, under American supervision.

3,000 men driven in groups in locked vans out to the desert to be suffocated and buried in mass graves, while American soldiers looked on.

And Dostum is not Taleban, he is one of America’s allies of the Northern Alliance.

And of course there is that wonderful piece of legislation passed by the government regarding women’s rights in marriage.

Afghanistan is no more a democracy than Cuba.

It is stuck in the 14th century.

Does the pathetic Manley actually believe we have accomplished anything except kill people – according to the expert AP reporter, 50,000 died in Kabul alone – and set up some Potemkin villages for photo-ops?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

“Afghanistan” and the word “prospects” in the same sentence are pretty much an oxymoron.

This is one of the poorest regions on earth, a vast sprawl of deserts and mountains with few valuable resources.

The U.S. always had the option of dropping dollar bills rather than bombs, but that’s just not the American way.

Afghanistan will have “prospects” after decades of economic growth and not before, if that ever comes to pass.

The U.S. went there to kill (something it did plenty of), not to help anyone, but the world’s press picked up on all the propaganda and seems to pretend it means something.

The culture and backward ways of the people are the natural adaptations of countless centuries and are, in that sense, normal.

What the U.S. is trying to impose is definitely abnormal, not fitting the land and its people at its stage of their development.

Of course, the stupidity of making the Taleban a bitter enemy was foolish.

No Taleban ever attacked the U.S., a point so easily glided over by the press in the last eight years.

Yes, they housed bin Laden (a Saudi) for a time, but then so did the U.S. for a time.

They offered, eight years ago, to comply with extradition if offered some evidence for the accused, the completely normal behavior of any government, but the U.S. rejected the request and proceeded to attack, as useless and mindless an act of destruction as Israel’s assault on the giant refugee camp called Gaza.

To this day, by the way, we have never been given a single piece of evidence that bin Laden himself was responsible for anything. I’m not claiming his innocence, just pointing out how irrational and lawless all this has been.

General McChrystal is a nasty killer, of the type that carried out that shameful Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, a man absolutely without a larger view. What else would he do but ask for more troops?

Well, there’s light at the end of the tunnel apparently.

Wait, now, I believe I heard that somewhere else. Was it Vietnam?

Good luck, Obama, you are now being squeezed on all sides by the Military-Industrial Complex.