Archive for the ‘WAR ON TERROR’ Tag
John Chuckman
COMMENT ON IRAN’S ADMISSION THAT IT ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED A UKRAINIAN AIRLINER
Iran has apologized for its terrible error, and it did so promptly. And in judging, everyone should keep in mind the terrifying pressure Iran has been put under by the United States (see footnote).
Has America apologized for any of the pain and death and destruction it has inflicted on the Middle East in recent years?
America’s Neocon Wars in the Middle East (2003 – present) have killed something like two million people, destroyed many treasured historic and religious sites, reduced millions to primitive living conditions (eg, to this day, much of Iraq’s electricity, deliberately destroyed by America in its 2003 invasion, still has not been restored), and created so many desperate refugees that Europe’s stability was threatened.
Going back before the Neocon Wars, we have the Iraq-Iran War (1980-88), an extremely bloody war facilitated by the United States to hurt Iran’s revolutionary government of 1979. In that war, America shot down an Iranian civilian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655), killing 290 people.
A United States warship, the USS Vincennes, was in Iranian waters of the Strait of Hormuz and fired missiles at the plane, claiming to mistake the airliner, flying a well-established route, for a hostile plane.
The Captain of the American warship was later actually awarded a medal, the Legion of Merit.
The United States absolutely refused to apologize or pay damages for its obvious destruction of a civilian airliner.
It wasn’t until the late 1990s, as the result of a lawsuit, that the United States properly acknowledged what it had done and paid damages to survivors.
WHAT IRAN FACED AT THE TIME OF ITS MISTAKEN DOWNING OF AN AIRLINER – INDEED WHAT IT FACES STILL
Iran has been under constant threat by the Trump White House, and for no good reason since Iran has started no wars in its modern history and is recognized as complying with its treaty obligations.
Trump started by suddenly ripping-up a valid international nuclear agreement, one which had been scrupulously kept for four years. He followed that by imposing war-like sanctions which seriously hurt millions of ordinary people. Iranian assets abroad have been seized, and every effort has been made to disrupt Iran’s economy.
Trump sent fleets of warships and nuclear-capable bombers to intimidate the country. He made many public threats, including the barbaric threat to destroy Iran’s national heritage sites. Trump even once bellowed he would “obliterate” Iran’s eighty million people.
Just before the airliner’s destruction, Trump had committed a set of murders in neighboring Iraq, including the murder of an Iranian national hero, General Qasem Soleimani. Iran had been put on the highest war alert.
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ROGER PUMPER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“‘Guess That’s It for Us,’ Islamist Terrorists Say
“They all give up now”
https://www.checkpointasia.net/guess-thats-it-for-us-islamist-terrorists-say/
Crap propaganda, very thinly disguised as satire.
As long as the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are willing to sign paychecks and supply goods, “Islamic terrorists” in the Middle East will be around.
They have served many useful purposes for the states supporting them.
Oh sure, “Islamic terrorists,” but you never saw any of them once attack Israeli interests of the interests of the fat corrupt princes of Saudi Arabia or indeed any Americans hanging around – all the obvious natural targets for any genuine “Islamic terrorists.”
They all busied themselves attacking what America and Israel wanted attacked, such as the government of Syria.
Gee, I wonder why that would be?
“You don’t bite the hand that feeds you” is the old cliché.
Al-Baghdadi was an American/Israeli asset from the start.
If he is dead, which I tend to doubt, it’s only because the states destroying so much of the Middle East had some change of plans. Such men are always regarded as expendable when they are no longer useful or there is some possibility for embarrassing revelations.
Even on the home front, look at Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein’s fate when his usefulness ended and threats existed through new legal proceedings for some truth being revealed.
Look at the doubtful death back in 1991, of British media tycoon, Robert Maxwell, a man acknowledged in Israel to be one of the country’s most important spies ever. And, by the way, his daughter, Ghislaine, was long-time companion and helper to Epstein.
Indeed, getting rid of a man like al-Baghdadi, or pretending to do so, gives idiotic Trump something to crow about.
Cui bono?
John Chuckman
COMMENT ON A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Information reported from northeastern Syria starkly displays the utter cynicism and cruelty of America’s position there.
The commander of [American partner] Syrian Kurdish forces in the area has apparently angrily told the United States, “You are not willing to protect [my] people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us. This is immoral.”
“I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these [Turkish] bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and [Syria] now and invite their planes to protect this region.”
The Turkish invasion has already killed many hundreds of Syrian Kurds. The Kurds are fighting the invading Turks, but the Kurds are comparatively lightly armed, and Turkey is coming on with fighter planes, tanks, and heavy artillery.
Several vicious incidents are reported of Turkish irregular groups shooting unarmed Kurds, prisoners and a well-known woman politician.
American forces sit back watching while the very people they have been working with, the Syrian Kurds, are bombed and shot by an American ally, Turkey, in an effort to make Turkey happy.
Turkey is being allowed to do just enough killing of Syrian Kurds to reassure itself about its own border security, because, after all, Turkey is a key ally in NATO and one with whom there have been some recent unpleasant disagreements, but don’t let the Syrian Kurds turn to the government of Syria and its Russian ally to fight against invasion from Turkey.
After all, America’s plan for hiving off this chunk of someone else’s country – to weaken Syria for Israel’s benefit, the main purpose of the long ugly proxy war killing half a million in Syria – are being changed only to the extent that a big slice of northeastern Syria will become effectively part of Turkey.
The various public threats the United States has been making against Turkey and sanctions it is calling for are intended only to limit the depth of Turkey’s invasion, not to stop it. They serve also as a public relations exercise so as to not seem to be doing what you are in fact doing.
Trump gets to make noise for the hometown election crowd about withdrawing some American forces while in fact doing virtually nothing, moving a few troops around in order to let Turkey come in and do some killing.
The Syrian Kurds, with whom the United States has been working illegally inside Syria, and whom it refers to as an “ally,” are left to absorb a Turkish invasion of their homes while being told not to seek help elsewhere.
Although it is hard to have too much sympathy for the Syrian Kurds because they have in fact betrayed what was their own country, Syria, by working with America to help break it up.
Such are the glorious realities of America’s fight for freedom in the Middle East.
NOTE:
I tend to doubt Trump will have much political success here because his belly-over-the-belt political base, the ones who wear red MAGA hats on shopping trips to Walmart, the border-wall crowd, are not the same people who supported him to get out of the Middle East wars.
He still has done nothing real about America’s vicious, cynical wars.
LATE DEVELOPMENT:
Later, the same day I wrote this piece, we have from Aljazeera:
“Syrian government troops will deploy along the border with Turkey to help Kurdish fighters fend off Ankara’s military offensive in northern Syria, the Kurdish-led administration in the region has announced.”
“The move, announced on Sunday, represents a major shift in alliance for Syria’s Kurds and came hours after the United States said it was withdrawing its troops from the area to avoid getting caught in the middle of the fast-escalating conflict.”
John Chuckman
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
I’m sorry, but to this moment, we do not know bin Laden plotted anything.
There’s never been a shred of proof.
The U.S. has always begged the question. When the Taleban government refused to extradite bin Laden, it was over completely correct procedure. The U.S. supplied not a jot of evidence with their demand, as is required for legal extraditions.
I thought you were in the news business, Independent, and disliked “conspiracy theories”?
And diesel fuel – jet fuel being a form of it – simply cannot burn hot enough to melt structural steel.
Moreover the designers of the twin towers over-built the buildings: they were designed to be able to take being hit by an airliner.
These are facts.
I’m not saying, and I don’t know, where they lead us, but I’ll always stick with facts as a foundation for thought.
The only certainty here is that the official story cannot be true.
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“… ISIS ideology stretches ‘deep into Muslim society…”
What a complete ass Tony Blair is.
First, he knows nothing about Muslim society, but that fact doesn’t stop him from making sweeping observations.
Second and most important, ISIS itself is an artificial construct, as the duplicitous Blair well knows. It includes many Westerners, even special forces under cover from several nations. It is supported and armed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and America. It is led by people associated with Western powers. It cannot be therefore an accurate representation of anything about Muslims.
Third, it is really important to remember that the Muslim world has been treated horribly in recent years, country after country having been attacked or destabilized by America and smarmy allies like Tony Blair. There is a wealth of abuse and grievances behind the decision of any young man who does join such an organization.
Drones are killing people in half a dozen countries.
Syria is under terrible attack from outside.
Yemen is under attack by the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia.
Libya is in a shambles.
Iraq is a broken rump state.
Egypt is back to a dictatorship.
Israel, as usual, abuses millions with no one even taking serious notice.
And the religion of more than a billion people is almost daily maligned in our press, as you have done in publishing Tony Blair’s malign musings.
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 RUSSIA TODAY
Civilized is not the point.
The United States mouths stuff about human rights and democracy while assassinating, stealing, and abusing people.
Monumental hypocrisy is the point.
The fact must be thrown into America’s face when it makes spurious claims.
The CIA Torture Gulag – of which Guantanamo is only part – is gross hypocrisy, all of it carefully kept offshore, as though that fact kept the spirit of the Constitution.
The U.S. has in truth been a bloody monster for half a century: 3 million killed in its Vietnam Holocaust; a million in Cambodia owing to its destabilizing; a million in Iraq; and more.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Peter MacKay, as always, talks as the fool he is, a fool who doesn’t understand the extent of his own foolishness.
Among the Harper government’s clearest achievements in international affairs is reducing the country to a length of soiled toilet paper trailing from the Pentagon’s rear end.
We have zero interests in Mali and zero interest in Mali.
There is nothing there for a rational state to fight over.
But the Pentagon is on a holy crusade, stretching over the face of the earth, for anything that might be in any way associated with what it perceives in its dim lights to be Islamic fundamentalism and terror.
It very much resembles an obsessed, insane Captain Ahab sailing the world’s seas to kill the white whale.
It is egged by the domestic lobby of America’s nasty little sidekick, Israel, a country whose mad leaders speak of nothing but war and assault and enemies and hatreds while they continue stealing the property of others and suppress 4.5 million people into utter hopelessness.
We are heading into a long period of senseless, pointless, and destructive conflicts inspired by the military-industrial complex and its Ahab-like search for the white whale.
Traditionally, Canada, a rational people with progressive views, would not even think of joining in such destructive stupidity.
But now this rational people are ruled by a 39% “majority” government of extreme ideology whose major goal is to play a role in international affairs as defined by the seething Captain Ahab.
We literally threw away billions of dollars and about a hundred and fifty lives to achieve absolutely nothing in Afghanistan.
And we wasted millions more in killing civilians and destroying property in Libya to help create a chaotic state whose leader the United States hated.
In state after state the United States is busy killing people, all innocent people by the standards of justice – in Yemen, in Bahrain, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and in Syria (through its paid and supplied proxies).
In Egypt, it encourages the government to impose an unjust constitution just to secure the cooperation of that government.
In Iran, it threatens and blusters daily over nothing.
Its achievement in Iraq – besides a million killed, thousands crippled, two million refugees, and an advanced society reduced to poverty – is a nation effectively divided into pieces and endless internal conflict.
Fortunately, Canada played no role in the filthy business.
Repeating what it achieved in Iraq is, of course, America’s aim in Syria.
Israel’s mad leaders are gleeful for such murderous assistance, but no person of democratic and humane principles can possibly agree.
But we do not have a government today dedicated to such principles, and the whole world knows it and treats us with shame in international forums.
Happy New Year, Canada.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
“Latest U.S. drone operation in Pakistan should be judged a success”
Surely, the words of an ethical and moral bankrupt.
A target or targets – uncharged and untried – is assassinated by a buzz-cut thug at a computer console.
In the process, a host of others, all innocents for certain, are murdered, and the cretin writing this editorial says it should be judged a success.
Have you lost all sense of values?
If we all nod and accept this absolutely criminal behavior by a great power, we will lose all claims to a free society which has laws and is organized to honor human rights.
If you do not live by the rule of the law, you are not a whit better than the junta generals who used to kidnap people off the streets of South America and fly them out over the ocean to throw out their drugged bodies.
They “disappeared” thousands in that fashion, and it is certain that the horrible governments committing such crimes believed they were every bit as justified as America in getting rid of people working against their interests.
Now, the apologists for Israel’s brutal excesses always support this kind of thing, and indeed Israel is the very model for this behavior. The word “terroriist” is used like a magic word to make any inhuman act perfectly okay.
It is one thing for an irresponsible state like Israel to behave this unacceptable way, but it quite another for the world’s mightiest nation to be reduced to the same behavior.
We are only protected by rule of law from having the violent barbarians and psychopaths of the world governing. If you abandon rule of law, you have abandoned civilization.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Poor al Qaeda has no imagination at all I guess.
All they have to do is mass produce their underpants – they could get them done cheaply in China – and label them as Stansfield’s or Fruit of the Loom.
Then flood the market with them at discount prices. Tens of thousands of unknowing guys wearing explosive underpants on airplanes.
But then we do have the word of a former British Foreign Minister, as well as several other well-known figures, that there is in fact no such thing as al Qaeda – the term is a American one used as a catch-all for “bad guys.”
But we do know the CIA exists and we know that it has done and does a lot of stupid and expensive stunts.
This entire farce is just another example of someone at Langley hitting the keys of their “great Wurlitzer,” as they are wont to call their set of contacts in the media for planting stories.
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/
http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/why-must-the-right-wing-sound-so-brutally-stupid/
___________________________________________
“http://www.islam-watch.org
“This is a good site.”
Good for what?
Confirming your prejudices?
_________________________________
“Karl Marx: everything happens twice. The first time is tragedy. The second time is farce.”
The person commenting seems unaware that here Marx sounds like the late wit, Oscar Levant, all cleverness and style with no real meaning.
And how very odd to see Right Wing extremist quoting Marx.
Of course, you didn’t get the quote quite right, but that’s okay.
Anyone educated in modern science knows that Marx had it completely wrong.
You can never repeat the same set of events.
The ancient quote – variously attributed – had it right: Time is like a river. You cannot touch the same water twice.
___________________________________
One simply cannot avoid the mental image of a man blowing off his own “vitals.”
It could well be that the CIA contrivers of this silly story intended that as a little inside joke.
Any clever twelve-year old could come up with several more damaging ways of doing harm to the West than fizzling underpants on a plane.
Please don’t forget that in the first Gulf War the United States government commissioned an ad agency to come up with the nonsense about Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their respirators.
That was to make people feel good about B-52s dropping 30-ton loads on poor Iraqi peasant recruits huddled in sand piles on the desert. The numbers killed – tens of thousands certainly – were never released, and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.
Of course there were the brave American jet jockeys who while they strafed retreating Iraqis outside Kuwait City gave us such memorable moments as our hearing pilot chatter along the lines of, “Wee, this is like shootin’ fish in barrel!”
And of course all of that was the direct result of the U.S. giving a deliberate false signal to Saddam to go ahead with his wishes. It doesn’t get more cynical and brutal.
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“Good of Obama to put his Nobel Peace Prize down for a minute so he could order a revenge assassination.
“I’m sure liberals are outraged at this Bush war mongering.”
No, it is not liberals who are outraged; it is all decent, ethical human beings.
You clearly exclude yourself from that group and try kicking up dirt with pointless talk of liberal versus conservative.
No, the distinction couldn’t be more clear: it is ethical, civilized people versus savages.
And Obama never had to put his Peace Prize down because he has demonstrated that he is in the complete control of the Pentagon/intelligence agency/Israeli Lobby from day one.
The most disappointing man in memory for certain.
He never deserved that prize. Its award was an act of futile hopes in Europe.
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Does a double-agent underwear bomber require two sets of underwear to use depending on which side he is at any time?
_____________________________________
“Now we know why they check children and the infirm, I wouldn’t put it past al Qaeda to use a bomb diaper or depends.”
Don’t you just love that “I wouldn’t put it past…?”
But then again, here’s a further development of my idea for a line of men’s explosive underwear to be sold to the unwitting at discount.
You could have a factory in China do a knock-off of Pampers or Depends complete with secret explosive formula.
Horrors, just imagine some poor souls like actors in a Depends ad – someone with the sweet smile of June Allyson – suddenly having their groins flash and smoke and fizzle?
What an evil plot.
Well, there’s just one answer for it: never use another Pamper or Depends diaper without taking it in for X-rays first.
Would Medicare cover the X-ray costs I wonder in the interests of health and safety?
This is a threat surely that outweighs all of Israel’s illicit arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons, wouldn’t you say?
The great threating shadow over our generation, exploding underpants and diapers!
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY COLIN FREEZE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
“The silent threat of the lone-wolf terrorist”
An utterly stupid piece of writing.
We have always, always had “lone wolf” monsters.
How do you think legends like vampires and other monsters became so fixed in people’s minds?
And what do you think the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson and Robert Picton and Clifford Olsen represent?
They are psychopathic serial and mass killers, one of nature’s many mistakes, from civilized society’s point of view, in its endless evolutionary experiments.
There may have been a time when such people served a purpose, as in wars in the times of walled cities.
So what purpose does it serve to call such people “terrorists”?
Or indeed to attribute any politics or ideology to their love of killing and torturing human beings?
Nothing, but it feeds the ignorant nightmarish fears being promoted by Islamophobics night and day.
This is “high class” garbage.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
In case anyone missed the fact, the Taleban need never have been an enemy.
None of them were involved in 9/11.
A bunch of Saudis were.
The Taleban are not the kind of people we like to see ruling anywhere in the world, but they are no worse than the members of the Northern Alliance who fought America’s ground invasion, supported by carpet bombing, and now serve as governors and officials all over Afghanistan.
And they are no worse than various fundamentalist groups which predominate in many corners of the world, including places like India or South America and great parts of Africa in their treatment of women and lack of regard for modern human rights.
The U.S. did not go to war over human rights, it never has done so in all its endless wars since WWII. It went there for other reasons, not completely clear, and it manipulatively used the plight of women there as truth-based propaganda, the most effective kind, to win over American soccer moms for the war, and the tactic worked beautifully.
It was not even the Taleban who first invited bin Laden to find refuge in Afghanistan, but when they threw out the various warring groups of the Northern Alliance (after the Russians were gone), they allowed him to stay. The Taleban originally was an alliance for the Afghan idea of clean government, and they did end a great deal of corruption and drug business.
After 9/11, the U.S. tried to extradite bin Laden. The Taleban government asked for some evidence of his guilt, a normal procedure in extraditions everywhere in the world. The U.S. refused in a huff.
So the U.S. used its immense leverage at the UN, where half the nations are in its pay and the other half fear its wrath, to get the invasion covered by a UN resolution-fig leaf. Everyone was also motivated to go along emotionally in the wake of 9/11.
All the NATO countries serving as allies have only given relatively token efforts to the U.S. cause. A few thousand troops here and there, many not even in fighting roles, is not a serious commitment. NATO countries have always appeared to know something that the general public does not.
That is not how nations act when there is a genuine threat of world importance, as the U.S. always insists there is. But that is how nations act when avoiding American reprisals and providing it with the fig-leaf fiction of a coalition.
Yet after each horrific bombing – in which thousands of innocents have been killed over ten years – we read “the coalition forces bombed this or that.” In almost all cases, that should read, the U.S. bombed this or that. And now the “this or that” includes Pakistan in a big way. Many hundreds of civilians have been killed in what are, in every respect, high-tech versions of death-squad murders by South American juntas.
I believe the U.S. carried off this murderous enterprise almost solely for vengeance – “We gonna show ya’ll can’t do that to ‘merica!” Never underestimate the reservoir of anger and vindictiveness in America’s belly-over-the-belt, flag-waving crowd – people who are in many cases just generally angry with the way things are going in their lives.
Once in there, America really did not know what to do because the place is a snakepit of tribalism and bloodfeuds and ancient customs.
It has all been a terrible, terrible waste.
I do wish the Nobel Committee could take back its Peace Prize from the charming, intelligent man whose hands are now covered with blood.
One thing Obama has proved is how little elections matter anymore in America. Except for the lack of laughable, stupid statements, you really wouldn’t know Bush wasn’t still president.
The War Machine can work with anyone.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Ridiculous.
How can any Arabic-speaking person have named his organization “the toilet,” which is what Al Qaeda translates?
This name was created by U. S. intelligence some years ago as a collective term for the various “bad guys” roaming around out there. There is no such organization.
We have the testimony of several very prominent people on that fact, including Britain’s Jack Straw.
Remember the supposed picture of Osama watching television released soon after his murder, a picture which still makes the rounds? That picture was positively identified as a neighboring man, as it should have been since it showed “Osama” using the wrong hand.
These “leaks” are, after all coming from the very people who assassinated bin Laden in cold blood with his family in the house, never mind taking him to The Hague for a fair trial.
The same people who never provided the public or other authorities with one shred of authentic evidence for bin Laden’s guilt of anything but disliking the United States.
The same people who invaded Afghanistan and still occupy it on flimsy excuses.
The same people who invaded Iraq, falsely making assertions about Hussein’s complicity, destroying a prosperous country and starting a terror that would see a million die.
They are the same people sending scores of drones into Pakistan killing hundreds of innocent people with their missiles.
They are the same people who have totally distorted a UN Resolution for a no-fly zone in Libya into an all-out effort to kill Qaddafi and his chief assistants.
This rubbish is just stuff to reinforce public acceptance of the moral filth of war without end, assassinations, and death squads.
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 IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Not much satisfaction in this.
He was killed by a far greater butcher, the one responsible for a million deaths in Iraq, three million in Vietnam, and who knows how many in Afghanistan, Somalia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Chile, and a dozen other places.
Only the pathetic Peace Prize President – who regularly has his drones killing people in Pakistan – takes any real satisfaction because he is looking forward to a difficult election.
Obama’s re-election is hardly something to celebrate, but that is what this unbelievably costly deed concerns.
By the way, there has never been one shred of proof offered of Bin Laden’s guilt of anything except not liking the United States.
The FBI never even put him on its Most Wanted List.
Justice has been done?
I truly believe the predatory United States has no concept of what justice is.
_____________________________
The excesses reflected in many comments simply prove the impact of propaganda and public gullibility.
Even if he was guilty as charged – and we have never, never been offered proof – his crime is smaller than many crimes of the same American military who killed him.
His crimes, if so they be, also are absolutely no greater than those of Israel, and just in recent years.
Here is a state which killed 400 children in Gaza and another 1,000 adults, about the same number in Southern Lebanon, who knows how many week-in-week-out in raids of various towns, and of course murdered about ten people on the high seas in an act of savage piracy.
There is no justice in any of this. Only more proof, if any were needed, that might makes right.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
The war on drugs is as meaningless as the war in Afghanistan.
Not that they both don’t hurt lots of innocent people, but neither can ever enjoy anything called success.
Indeed, in the last decade the two have become badly tangled.
The Taleban – a movement originally representing the Muslim fundamentalist idea of clean government – had virtually eliminated the opium business.
The American gangbusters invasion, which Canadians are supporting with the blood of soldiers and billions from the treasury, brought it back like a fury.
Even Russia has complained formally of America’s impact on the flow of drugs.
Prices actually fell on world markets, one of the surest marks of a flood of drugs.
Nice achievement there, America.
But of course what people like the silly author of this editorial completely ignore in blubbering about drugs – always – is that it is America itself, with less than five percent of the world’s population, that sucks up fully one-half of the world’s illicit drugs.
It’s just part of the “I want it all, and I want it now” philosophy that pretty much characterizes today’s American society, the same ungoverned lusts that gave the world its financial collapse.
America also has a monstrous appetite for wars, manufacturing them even where there is no good cause.
Basically , America cannot govern itself, yet insists on many fronts in telling others how to govern themselves. It is, if you will, the great dark joke of the century.
So how do you solve a serious human problem having those kinds of roots?
You don’t, ever.
And people like the editorial’s author should just stop blubbering. They are literally peeing against the wind.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
A fair trial for Khadr, or any other tortured captive for that matter, after eight years of illegal imprisonment is impossible.
Moreover, how can there be a trial in which no proper jurisdiction exists?
That is the very nature of war.
People invade the home of others – as the U.S. did in Afghanistan – and they get killed doing it.
You do not, afterward, “try” the people who may have killed your soldiers.
But topping it all was Khadr’s absolute status as a child soldier.
It is the U.S. who has broken many laws in arresting him (after shooting him in the back), abusing him, torturing him, and imprisoning him.
God, what a dreadful example to the world the U.S. has set.
But when you are as arrogant, ignorant, and rich as America, you just do not care about laws and what the world thinks.
__________________
“Was he fair by throwing that grenade?”
“He’ll get a fairer trial and more of a chance than the one that he gave to the soldier that he murdered.”
It really is too bad people do not even think for one second before writing such ignorant comments.
Yes, throwing grenades is part of war.
No, he murdered no one. Using a weapon in war is not murder.
You do not get tried for doing what’s part of war, only for atrocities, like the ones both Israel and the U.S. have committed by the score in recent years.
And, again, Khadr was a child soldier who, in the name of God, has suffered enough. Shot twice in the back, tortured, held with no rights, and in fact falsely accused of the very act he is said to have done.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Do the right thing?
And just when in his entire career – except for events in Haiti where he would have appeared a fiend had he not responded – has Mr Harper done the right thing?
The Supreme Court had no choice here, and I think their decision a wise one.
The government has been complicit in denying a boy his rights, and in so doing, they assisted the buzz-cut thugs at Guantanamo in torturing a boy. (I remind readers that this poor boy had been shot, twice in the back, by American soldiers. He was tortured while these ghastly wounds slowly healed.)
The ethical and legal issues are clear here. There are no ambiguities.
But legality and ethics mean little to power-driven, compulsive personality like Harper.
Had the Supreme Court attempted to order a remedy, it would have pitched the country into a constitutional crisis.
They have done what they can in making it as clear as it can be that Harper has denied a Canadian the most basic rights.
That’s the kind of man we call our prime minister, a politician who has done more than any other in memory to shame Canada and lower its former fine reputation in the world.
__________________
“Your boy’s buddies DELIBERATELY targeted their own children.”
That is simply ignorant beyond belief.
Since when are the acts of an accused judged by those of anyone else, whether known or unknown?
And, Good Lord, if we’re talking about targeting children, Israel just killed 400 of them. Has any Israeli soldier or general or politician been charged with anything?
This young man was fifteen when he was shot, arrested, and tortured.
And we now have evidence to a certainty that he did not even do what he was accused of.
But even if he had, so what?
America has sent thousands of mercenaries and idealists to various wars over the decades, going back to the Spanish Civil War.
Were they all to be tortured and held indefinitely in prison for their acts?
Moreover, he was a child, one pressed by ideological parents, and the United States and Canada are signatories to international conventions on child soldiers.
Clive G, no wonder you don’t sign your name to your opinions. That’s pretty well what one expects from the cowardly with savage ideas.
RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY RICHARD SPENCER IN THE TELEGRAPH
Richard Spencer,
Anyone who uses seriously the phrase “war on terror” immediately loses my attention as being someone with little worth saying.
You cannot have a war on ideas or techniques.
But you can very much have a war on a group of people whose religion or politics you do not like.
If people like you spent your time combing through the local mutterings of politicians and others in various countries, you could make just as superficially extreme-sounding a case.
Every day in the backward parts of that vast sprawl called America, you can find the most appalling things being said by local political or religious leaders.
In the backwoods of India or Africa, some of the statements made and practices done daily would curl your hair.
And in Israel, orthodox rabbis regularly say and do the most horrific things by the standards of the 21st century.
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 TO A COLUMN BY GORDON GIBSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Sorry, Mr. Gibson, there is no moral debate here.
I find it stunning that anyone living in a free country could even pose this question seriously.
The example of Israel is perfect. Israel has secretly, as well as in public, murdered those it calls enemies for decades.
And where has this taken Israel? Israel has no peace. Israel today has the worst reputation in the advanced world as a place of fairness and decency. And Israel gradually sinks lower and lower into a murky abyss of ghastly ethics and democratic values.
We have the witness of Israeli soldiers as to the horrible Nazi-like words with which they were prodded in advance of the Gaza invasion.
Indeed, it is a legitimate question whether Israel as we know it can long continue. The CIA only recently predicted that it would change in 20 years into something else, with many of American and European dual-nationals returning to the lands of their birth.
There is simply no question about these results. That’s why Israel’s defenders constantly today lash out at what they call anti-Semitism, calling the critics of human abuse haters.
You cannot have a society of laws and justice when you are unwilling to live by such laws yourself. The US has fallen into this same moral pit with its international torture gulags and its assassinations.
This kind of murder is absolutely no different to some rogue cops secretly executing the people they regard as criminals. It is no different to the ghastly work of death squads in Brazil going through poor areas of cities murdering children at night. And it is no different to the past several juntas in South America who made thousands “disappear” by kidnapping them and dumping them out of planes over the ocean.
God, the most precious thing we have achieved over countless centuries of ghastly murder and conflict is a society of laws and defined rights. How damnable that anyone would even toy with the idea of destroying that.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRVING COTLER AND DAVID GROSSMAN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAILThe real story behind the government’s disgraceful treatment of Mr. Abdelrazik is our government abasing itself for fear of offending the least American sensitivity.
We know there are high-level Americans who have even the basic facts of 9/11 wrong – both the Homeland Security Secretary and Senator John McCain spoke foolishly only recently.
There has been in America generally a big head of steam and lack of clear thinking over the crime of 9/11, but we do not have to accommodate America’s every whim and myth in these affairs.
America’s head of steam is why they are in Afghanistan, and it is why we are there.
America’s head of steam is why we’ve left a boy to rot in Guantanamo.
America’s head of steam is why we’ve quietly cooperated in the transport and torture of several Canadians.
And America’s head of steam is why we are doing irrational things like no-fly lists and bio-metric records of visitors.
It is time to act responsibly on at least this one matter of human rights.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Yes, indeed, a criminally stupid war on drugs.
Intelligent analysts have said this for many years. Milton Friedman wrote on this subject, fearing for the loss of basic freedoms in America with police crashing down doors and waving deadly weapons around in people’s homes on mere suspicion or the tips of others wishing “to get” someone.
But the intelligent analysts’ efforts have been all to no purpose.
Why?
Look at the stomach-turning television shows of a few years back, shows like ‘Cops,’ showing the clearest police brutality and disregard for human rights. These shows were actually very popular.
Consider the incarceration rate in the United States, the highest in the advanced world by far, although that clearly has not impacted the United States’ claims to the highest murder and violent crime rates in the advanced world.
The United States, with its obsessive/compulsive personality disorder, knows no other way of doing things.
The template for the war on drugs has been applied yet again to the mindless war on terror. Of course, you cannot have a war on methods or beliefs and, of course, the use of terror to strike back for injustices is as old as civilization, but those elemental facts do not in any way affect America’s current great crusade.
Oh, and we must not forget the decades-long war against godless communism in which the U.S squandered something on the order of 3 trillion dollars and countless lives in other countries, all while building the careers back home of monsters like J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover broke every rule of decency and human rights and democratic values, yet his name remains in big metal letters on the FBI building in Washington.
What other land speaks at the highest level about democracy and human rights while sending B-52s to carpet-bomb some vaguely threatening people abroad? Who else sends money and warehouses-full of armaments to an abusive state like Israel which uses them to kill children and women while enforcing apartheid and ethnic-cleansing?
But Israel, like the U.S., is a democracy, isn’t it? One, moreover, surrounded by evil too, just the way the U.S. sees itself in the world.
You cannot hope to change America’s insane war on drugs without changing an entire underlying way of thinking, full of lurid delusions, a quite insane way of thinking, actually.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY WESLEY WARK IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL
Wesley Wark’s piece is just intellectual Jello.
The very idea of a war on terror was an absurdity from the beginning.
You cannot have a war on a method.
Terror is the vengeance taken by the suppressed and voiceless as it is sometimes also the work of psychopaths with an ideal.
Terror is as old as organized warfare.
Indeed, today the word “terror” is pretty much become meaningless owing to the work of organized warfare.
Since WWII organized warfare always and everywhere kills more civilians than soldiers, and it uses ever more terrible weapons to do so.
I don’t know of any terror organization with a record one-tenth as appalling as, for example, the United States.
Two atomic bombs dropped on civilian targets. Terrible fire-bombings of civilian cities. Three million slaughtered in Vietnam and a legacy of Agent Orange and land mines left to kill and cripple for a century. A million killed in Iraq and a modern society reduced to poverty. Prisoners of war by thousands exterminated in Afghanistan.
Any thoughtful person might well say, what the hell is Mr. Wark talking about?
Well, he is in a business that makes its living through fear.
CHUCKMAN'S WORDS ON WORDPRESS: COMMENTS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS 