The impeachment frenzy is the result of an intervention by the intelligence community into the domestic political affairs of the United States. The ongoing impeachment proceedings is predicated upon a politicized CIA agent’s (whistleblower?) complaint. This is the issue that should be deeply concerning, not some expansive definition of a quip pro quo.

The attempted removal of an elected president from office, initiated in secrecy, by a member of the intelligence community acting well outside his legal responsibilities threatens the viability of the American constitutional republic.

The issues being investigated by the House Intelligence Committee is the smokescreen used to conceal the shady, if not criminal, process by which these proceedings have been initiated. The whistleblower should be identified, called before the House Intelligence Committee, and other relevant Congressional committees, and be compelled to answer for his actions.

“Impeachment is a constitutional remedy afforded to the U.S. Congress to deal with the political issues surrounding the conduct of a sitting president. If this constitutional remedy can be triggered by the intelligence community in a manner which obviates laws prohibiting the intrusion of intelligence agencies into the domestic political affairs of the United States, and done so in a manner where the identities of the persons and organizations involved, along with their possible motives, are shielded from both American people and those whom they elect to represent them in Congress, then a precedent will have been set for future interventions of this nature which undermine the very foundation of American democracy.” Scott Ritter

Honest investigative journalism should be the narrative of our mainstream media, not the sophomoric infatuation and naive compliance with the cretinous intelligence community that exists today.

Oh, here’s one to be Thankful:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/27/scott-ritter-the-whistleblower-and-the-politicization-of-intelligence/

It’s the Narrative – Stupid

Readers look for writers who reinforce their beliefs but if the king kills the messenger, of unwanted news, only an agenda of those who control the explanations dominate. Well paid empire loyal propagandist carefully constructed narratives and the compliant mainstream media blindly recite them.

ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all cover the same narrative spun through different prisms. They condition their audiences for the sake of ratings by fostering tribalism. The media-politico complex program their audience like Pavlov’s dog while giving cover to injustice. “The media-politico complex is an incestuous cesspool that is populated by charlatans and shysters.”

Today’s media-politico complex have perfected Joseph Goebbels’ policy of propaganda. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, thus the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Government and Media

Facts often prove one thing but the narrative says another. Why does the narrative takes precedence over fact? Could it be because a plutocratic class funnels money into buying up media influence, funding think tanks, and other means of narrative control? When you control the narrative, no amount of facts will deter the public from going along with your agendas.

In this environment, explanations contrary to the narrative is portrayed as a justification. For example, if one provides an explanation of slavery the assumption is that the writer approves of slavery. Congresswomen Ilhan Omar’s criticism of an Israel Lobby group made her an “anti-Semite.”  The defense of white people from the propagandistic accusations leveled at them by Identity Politics, makes you a “white supremacist .”

Narratives are powerful. You see it in the social media users, you see it in the behavior of governments, you see it in religions and politics. Honest ordinary language becomes risky as many are not attending to the validity of the analysis but are looking for indications of racism and sexism. Consequently, the people cling more tightly to the lie that deceives them.

Exposure of government deceptions gets branded as “anti-American.” The accepted narrative is that American patriots do not criticism US policies. To criticize war is to take the side of the enemy and be against one’s own country interests. The Bush regime even created the, “Support the Troops” slogan campaign to reinforce this narrative.

Kill the Messenger

So, when US Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of two deployment to Iraq, met with Assad of Syria she was accused of supporting a Middle East dictatorship. She was immediately criticized for not supporting the troops and aligned with the enemy.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only 2020 Presidential candidate promoting peace and non-intervention. She has challenged the core policy of US exceptionalism. Ever since she announced her candidacy narratives against her candidacy have been leveled against her. The establishment narrative engineers have been scrambling to kill her message. Gabbard has fought back and has been shaking the establishment matrix.

Interviewers and show hosts have continued to employ the “Gabbard is loyal to Assad” narrative. This has been a high-priority agenda of the mainstream media ever since her announcement. She, the adult in the room, explained “In the pursuit of peace and security. If we are not willing to meet with adversaries, potential adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and security, the only alternative is more war. That’s why I took that meeting with Assad. In pursuit of peace and security.”

Gabbard recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the show’s host solemnly ran down a list of textbook beltway smears against Gabbard and immediately put her on the defensive. She adroitly defended her foreign policy views and answered Colbert’s loaded questions.

Colbert twice interjected the State Department’s line about the alleged Assad chemical attack on his own people. Tulsi then corrected him saying several of the groups, including al Qaeda & ISIS, had been trained by the US and had been reported as being a part of those alleged chemical attacks.

On intervention for the “good of the people,” Gabbard, had to explain to Colbert that for the United States to be a force for good in the world it must do good. Then she made it clear that her definition of good is not raining fire upon every nation it dislikes. It is an undeniable fact that US military interventionism is consistently disastrous, never helpful and robs the US public of resources that are rightfully theirs.

Colbert, in trouble at this point, responded by reading off his blue index card to repeat yet another anti-Gabbard narrative, “You’ve gotten some fans in the Trump supporter world: David Duke, Steve Bannon, and, uh, Matt, uh, Gaetz, is that his name? Matt Gaetz? What do you make of how much they like you?”

It boggles my mind how politians and their tools are so child-like, the word vindictive comes to mind. If you are losing or have lost an argument, call in some divisive, mainstream narrative like Russia, Trump, racism, sexism or any other diversion, just don’t acknowledge defeat.

Late night comedy shows, are usually very friendly to presidential candidates and are treated to light, jokey banter about politics. Not so for Ms. Gabbard, because she speaks out against bad policies; “self-serving politicians, greedy corporations and special interests,” the military-industrial complex and decries the “powerful forces that have ruled over both parties in Washington for far too long.”

These types of ambushes have been common on the mainstream media. in an appearance on The View, John McCain’s sociopathic daughter called her an “Assad apologist”. We saw it on a CNN town hall, where a consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign was presented as an ordinary audience member to help CNN’s Dana Bash paint Gabbard’s skepticism of intelligence reports about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government. We saw it in her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month, where the entire panel piled on her in outrage that she wouldn’t call Assad an enemy of the United States.

An example of how narratives become common propaganda talking points was recently demonstrated by New York Times writer, Bari Weiss, when she made a laughingstock of herself by repeating “a self-evident truth” on The Joe Rogan Experience.  When Mr. Rogan questioned her usage of the word toady, it became clear that she did not have the faintest clue of what the word meant and the specific facts it was meant to refer to. She heard the establishment pundits saying it and she just repeated it.

This is an organized narrative by the mass media attempting to publicly marry Gabbard to a child-murdering monster that “gases his own people”, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, a mass murderer or any other unsavory character. The fact is that some distasteful ideologies just happen to oppose US interventionism for their own reasons.

Gabbard has encounter this smear campaign at every mainstream media appearance because she contests empire-serving narratives and challenges US political orthodoxy on military violence.  No amount of capitulation will keep them from trying to prevent the public from trusting her words.

Narratives Camouflage Reality

The narratives were in full force after a recent Tulsi Gabbard tweet: “Short-sighted politicians & media pundits who’ve spent last 2 years accusing Trump as a Putin puppet have brought us the expensive new Cold War & arms race. How? Because Trump now does everything he can to prove he’s not Putin’s puppet—even if it brings us closer to nuclear war.”

The Democratic establishment loyalists responded against her assessment as follows: “Gabbard staking out a bold ‘Trump is *too* tough on Putin’ lane in the Democratic primary; “As predictable as it is absurd”; “Tulsi Gabbard’s is the only Twitter account other than Trump’s that I routinely have to check to make sure it’s actually hers, because the tweet is so absurdly ridiculous”; “Now she’s defending Trump on Russia. Why is she a Democrat? And she’s actually using Kremlin talking points (nuclear war!). Unbelievable”; “Tulsi, you aren’t the first American politician to cozy up to foreign dictators and to serve as a Putin mouthpiece” ; “While you, Putin and Trump fear monger about nuclear war, we’ll protect our democracy and hold corrupted politicians accountable.”

 The indisputable fact is that Donald Trump has escalated nuclear tensions with Russia more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Russia-gate, Hillary’s revenge, has allowed Trump to advance an insanely aggressive escalations policy against Russia and its allies, His administration has endangering the life of every organism on this planet by escalating nuclear tensions with Russia.

In an article published by Moon of Alabama: “List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia” https://www.moonofalabama.org lists over 30 mainstream articles from April 2017 to today that document Trump’s bellicose position against Russia. When facts challenge a narrative, they become a lie.

“Pay attention to the media-politico complex and you will see the devil’s foot-soldiers doing his bidding as they bend justice and break humanity.”  WolvesNFoxes

Divide and Conquer – Tribalism

Divide the people, empower demagogues to convince each subgroup that their pains are different and get those groups to turn on each other. This is how a few thousand colonizers subdued a billion people on the African continent during the hay-day of Imperial colonization.

Colonizers pulled off this stunning feat by elevating one tribe above the rest and then telling the marginalized tribes that their enemies were the elevated tribe. Status, money and privilege were given to the elevated tribe while grief, tribulation and hopelessness were doled out to the marginalized tribe.

The elevated tribe, so leery of the out groups, fought like hell to keep their status even though most within that elevated tribe suffered along with the rest. The marginalized tribe, so convinced that their foes were the elevated tribe, seethed and could not wait to have their turn at the seat of power. Within this paradigm, social strife became the norm as colonizers turn a once free people into prisoners in their own land.

The West’s tribalism scheme has been professional marketed, it has been camouflaged much better than the one sowed in Africa. The tribes here are based on color, ideologies, gender, orientation, religion and an endless procession of adjectives that forces people to focus on our differences. Division makes it hard to form a coalition to defend our common interests. It has gotten to the point where people say four or five descriptors of what they are before they say who they are.

It’s easy to whip everyone up into two camps of highly polarized and radicalized camps across multiple political vectors: Trump vs. Liberals; Open borders vs. Immigration control; Global warming alarmists vs. Skeptics; Gun Control vs The Deplorables.

Conclusion – Eye on the Prize

Our founders established some common interests; secure the blessings of liberty and posterity, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility by providing a common defense and promote the general welfare of our citizens. These all seem to be reasonable and obtainable but only if we keep an eye on the prize.

The current media-politico complex distracts us from our common interest. They wage informational warfare that divides society and pushes us closer and closer to tribal conflict. Tribal conflict just makes our oppressor more powerful. It’s the narrative – stupid.

 

#FreeAhed

AhedTamimi is a sixteen-year-old Palestinian girl. Her case is one of the more important events in recent years because it expose to the world the difference in moral tone between the two sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The 16-year-old Ahed a blue eyed, long blonde haired, Palestinian girl, slapped a heavily-armed Israeli soldier who was occupying her back yard. This incident took place shortly after another Israeli soldier had shot Tamimi’s cousin in the face. When a video recording of this slapping hit the internet, it went viral.

Upon the release of the video showing the slapping, many in Israeli society called for the girl’s arrest, and many were enraged that the soldier was passive and did not react. The next night after the slapping Ahed Tamimi was arrested in a midnight raid; she is presently being held “without” charges, as leading Israelis urge that the key be thrown away, and worse.

Yesterday, an Israeli judge ruled for the third time that her detention is to be extended, this time for another five days. The reasoning for the judge’s rulings to extend her detention are that she “poses a risk “.

Over the past week and a half, Ahed has been shuffled between numerous Israeli prisons and police stations. She has been held in painfully cold isolation cells with cameras pointing at her 24 hours a day. Without a parent or lawyer present, the Israeli authorities have attempted to interrogate her. This is common treatment for Palestinian minors that are arrested for protesting.

History of the Tamimi Family Protest

The Tamimi family has been demonstrating every Friday for about a decade. Their protest is against the takeover of Nabi Saleh’s (a Palestinian Village) natural water spring by a nearby illegal Israeli settlement. As Bassem Tamimi, Ahed’s father explained, the villagers said nothing when the army built the settlement of Halamish (originally Neve Tzuf) on Palestinian land but when the settlers confiscated their fresh water spring, and the army then prevented the Tamimis from accessing it, Bassem and his extended family decided to draw a red line.

Every week the Tamimis family gather at the top of the hill inside their village, carrying flags and banners, and walk toward the road that separates them from the spring. The goal is simply to cross the road and walk to the spring. And every week, the army deploys security forces inside and around the village to stop the protesters from reaching their destination.

The way it works is something like this: at around noon, Israeli military vehicles enter the village and park at the bottom of its bisecting road. Security forces, heavily armed and wearing combat gear, descend from the vehicles, load their weapons, and wait. Sometimes they start shooting as soon as the demonstration begins, and sometimes they wait for a teenager to throw a stone in their direction before opening fire.

On Friday, December 15, during the protest, Ahed’s 14-year-old cousin Mohammed Tamimi was shot in the face with a rubber bullet. He was taken to the hospital where he required surgery and a was placed in a medically-induced coma.

A few hours after the shooting, armed soldiers came to Ahed’s home demanding to enter. The Israeli soldiers apparently parked themselves on Tamimi’s family’s land and fired tear gas at their house, smashing windows.

Ahed did what any brave young woman would, she pushed back. She slapped and kicked them, and screamed that they could not come in. Her family says she was expressing a legitimate protest at this treatment.

Situations like this are common in Israeli occupied Palestine. The IDF (Israeli Defense Force) regularly detains Palestinian teens, on an average of two a night but due to the riots of the past few weeks, (Trump’s Embassy move to Jerusalem) the number is unusually high. As part of the ongoing operations of the Israeli military’s support of the illegal settlers, IDF gunman fire rubber-coated bullet into crowds of protesters.

Payback

On Friday, December 15, in Nabi Saleh, the IDF was embarrassed. Their pride was mortally wounded when an unarmed girl managed to drive away an Israeli gunman with yells and a few slaps. When the IDF is embarrassed someone must pay. Ahed, a sixteen-year old Palestinian girl is paying for her brave action against an Israeli occupational force.

The Israeli media likes to call these incidents “provocations”.  The Jim Crow era had its provocation too. In a governmental enforced, apartheid society, the actions of a “downtrodden” person who dares to publicly oppose his persecutors will be considered as “posing a risk “.

The established Israeli order is that IDF gunmen may shoot Tamimi’s relative in the head, and then invade their houses. But standing up to the gunmen – that’s the provocation. That is the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian existence and the Israeli courts back it up.

Living in fear of this sort of treatment for 21st century Palestinians is common. Their lives are deprived of healthcare, an economy, a justice system, living in abject poverty with no food or water security and military violence against them and their children.

While most of the West seems indifferent to Ahed’s plight, Israel is hell-bent with hatred against this girl. Israeli Education Minister Neftali Bennett called for Ahed and her family to “spend the rest of their lives in prison.” Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman said she and her family should “get what they deserve,” and the prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit said that Israel should “exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras.” Really, what is he advocating?

Stand-up Against Israel “anti-Semite”

Israel has a powerful billion-dollar lobby in Washington DC that has its hooks so deeply embedded in the American political system and in the national media that the Jewish state is virtually bullet-proof. Any critic of Israel is immediately labeled an “anti-Semite.” This makes it difficult for the less courageous to criticize Israel especially the gutless U.S. Senators and Congressmen that drink from the Israeli lobby’s trough.

Supporting Ahed would be considered a condemnation of the state of Israel. It would be a condemnation of Israel’s military court system which allows children to be held in isolation and denied access to their parents during interrogation. It would be a condemnation of Israel’s settlement enterprise and stealing of Palestinian land and water.

To support Ahed is to rebuke Israel’s assertion that Palestinians must comply with their occupiers, that they must open the doors for the soldiers who enter their homes. To support Ahed would challenge the “only democracy in the Middle East” fallacy.

Mainstream media does not have the integrity nor the will to criticize Israel. They have witnessed the power of the Israeli lobby. As the New York Times put it in December of last year, “Israeli security agencies monitor Facebook and send the company posts they consider incitement. Facebook has responded by removing most of them.”

The NBA had to apologize and remove wording from its website referring to “Palestine-occupied territory” after complaints by an Israeli minister. The Israeli sports minister Miri Regev had sent a letter to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver calling Palestine “an imaginary ‘state’,” and asking for the reference to be removed from the basketball league’s website. The NBA “corrected it.”

Ahed – A  Warrior That Feminist Should Know

Ahed Tamimi risked her life to fight off predators. For her bravery, she will sit in an Israeli jail for another five days. I would think that slapping a powerful man in army gear equipped with a loaded gun to prevent an invasion of her property would get the attention from the #MeToo crowd and other woman rights groups.

I encourage the very powerful women advocacy groups to help expose the dehumanization that submission invokes when living under occupation. There exists an opportunity to embrace, promote and support a strong, proactive, young woman who is sitting in jail, in Israel, for standing up to the authority. Ahed Tamimi choose not to be a victim, she refused to submit, she is a heroine.

Maybe a 16-year-old young woman armed with courage and fueled by a vision of justice can become the poster child to end oppression in Israel. Then again, maybe young Palestinian women must not raise an arm against the abusive and just submit to the Zionist state.

Winner – Nikki Haley – The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation on Iraq to the United Nations Security Council Powell’s was impressive. His speech was a standard for the misuse of intelligence to sell the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nikki Haley may be as deceitful as Mr. Powell was on that February day.

Nikki Haley has provided the closest replication yet of that notorious performance in 2003. Haley is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations but recently did her show-and-tell at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington.

Haley used tendentiously and selectively props including physical “pieces” of a missile and other intelligence to stir up hostility in support of the Trump administration’s hostilities towards Iran.

Powell used a small vial as a prop in talking about a biological weapon. Haley displayed a warehouse full of wrecked hardware, including the missile remnants. The featured piece consisted of remnants of a missile fired from Yemen in the direction of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The missile fired at Riyadh was a rather feeble and ineffective response to the continuing air assault on Yemen by a Saudi-led coalition that has turned a civil war sparked by tribal disgruntlement into one of the world’s biggest current humanitarian disasters.

The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimates 13,893 civilian casualties (5,144 dead, 8,749 wounded) in Yemen since the Saudi bombing campaign began in March of 2015, but that figure has not been updated in over three months.

As if the situation couldn’t possibly get worse, Saudi Arabia has destroyed all of the Yemeni infrastructure that is the major cause of a cholera outbreak. The cholera outbreak has enveloped Yemen since October of 2016. The World Health Organization currently estimates 900,000 cases of the illness, but expects the figure to exceed 1 million by the end of the year.

The Saudi-led air war is clearly the biggest source of the carnage not a missile aimed at the Riyadh airport that produced no casualties.

The United States aids the Saudi air war. The exact nature and extent of the assistance are unclear, but what is publicly acknowledged includes U.S. provision of targeting information and refueling of Saudi warplanes.

It is morally offensive for Haley to try to focus attention on Iranian-related markings on a missile fragment while her own government abets far more suffering and destruction in the same war of which that missile was a part.

Haley’s remarks at the show-and-tell did nothing to explain how the munitions displayed around her demonstrate had anything to do with Iranian policies or how they are proof that Iran is the driver of conflict and instability in the Middle East.

Coincidently, Iran’s sworn enemies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates provided most of the material on display. The U.S. officials would not or could not say where the “evidence” had been recovered. Nor could they say when the weapons had been supplied or when they were used.

Officials of the United States, the world’s leading exporter of arms, ought to be especially careful about suggesting that factory markings on munitions equate to evidence about a country’s foreign policy, given how U.S. origin arms have been used by the likes of ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Scare tactics were a big part of the Bush administration’s campaign of selling its war, with the brandishing of things like vials. The Bush administration told us to imagine the damage if these vials were filled with bio-chemical weapons, in reference to those being “produced” in Iraq.

Haley got fully into the same mode when she warned about the missile that hit close to the Riyadh airport, “Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London, or Berlin. That’s what we’re talking about here. That’s what Iran is actively supporting.”

We still don’t know exactly where Trump, Haley, or anyone else in the current administration wants or expects to go with their campaign of stoking maximum tension and hostility toward Iran. However, more and more of their campaign sounds a lot like what the Bush administration and neoconservatives were saying about Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

Intelligence is to inform policy makers so that they can make decisions that have not already been made. When the U.S. begins a campaign to use selective intelligence and tragic events to sell a threat it usually indicates that a decision for armed conflict has already been made. This campaign is underway both at Iran and at North Korea.

Remember the Maine (Spanish-American War), the Lusitania (WW1), Pearl Harbor (WW2), the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam), Saddam’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), post-9/11’s War on Terrorism (Afghanistan) and saving the Yazidi from ISIS (Syria). These events coupled with “convenient” propaganda were successful in selling those wars.

Congratulations to Nikki Haley as the latest entry into the Snake Oil Salesperson’s gallery of rogues.

 

Afghanistan – The Harvey Weinstein Strategy

In our post-Weinstein world, men charged with sexual misconduct are guilty until proven innocent, their crimes are capital offenses, there exists no statute of limitations, and “zero tolerance” has become a battle cry. The pain, suffering, and humiliation of the women preyed upon by reprobates should not be minimized but let us consider other victims and their perpetrators.

The American people retain a capacity for outrage. We can distinguish between the tolerable and the intolerable. And we can demand accountability of powerful individuals and institutions. However, I am confused why this same level of outrage is absent when it comes to needless war.

Compare the culpability of these sexual scoundrels to those of the high-ranking officials who have presided over or promoted this country’s various military misadventures of the present century. These wars have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and will ultimately cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars. *

The public treats, with respect, the views of pundits and media personalities who persist in promoting war while condemning any innuendo of sexual harassment. If I was more of a conspiracy nut I would conclude that mainstream media is guilty of colluding with the government to distract the public’s attention away from our executions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalis, Syria, Pakistan and soon to be North Korea or Iran.

When it comes to sexual harassment there are no statute of limitations and “zero tolerance” is expected in response to all allegations. So, why when it comes to war the past doesn’t count. The media prefers to sustain the pretense that tomorrow is full of possibilities. Victory lies just around the corner.

The president, who has yet to visit Afghanistan, in his Thanksgiving message to the troops remarked, “We’re not fighting anymore to just walk around,” he continued “We’re fighting to win. And you people [have] turned it around over the last three to four months like nobody has seen.”

The term winning is quite elastic. Trump may think that it implies vanquishing the enemy—white flags and surrender ceremonies on the U.S.S. Missouri. General Nicholson knows better. “Winning,” the field commander says, “means delivering a negotiated settlement that reduces the level of violence and protecting the homeland.”

It took a succession of high-profile scandals before Americans truly woke up to the plague of sexual harassment and assault. What will it take before the public concludes that they have had enough of wars that don’t work? Vietnam had a televised war, body bags returning and the My Lai Massacre to awakened our outrage.

The crime that is not being reported is that General “Mad Dog” Mattis, General Nicholson, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster are following the Harvey Weinstein playbook: keep doing it until they make you stop.

Consider a recent article in U.S. News and World Report;

“Armed with a new strategy and renewed support from old allies, the Trump administration now believes it has everything it needs to win the war in Afghanistan. Top military advisers all the way up to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis say they can accomplish what two previous administrations and multiple troop surges could not: the defeat of the Taliban by Western-backed local forces, a negotiated peace and the establishment of a popularly supported government in Kabul capable of keeping the country from once again becoming a haven to any terrorist group.”

Over the past 17 years the US has experimented with just about every approach imaginable: invasion, regime change, occupation, nation-building, pacification, decapitation, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency, not to mention various surges, differing in scope and duration.

We have had a big troop presence and a smaller one, more bombing and less, restrictive rules of engagement and permissive ones. And how about that MOAB that made a big boom but no “surrender” materialized. What is next using nuclear weapons?

If you believe that Harvey Weinstein has learned his lesson and can be trusted to interview young actresses while wearing his bathrobe then the “new strategy” in Afghanistan is right up your alley.

* By 2015, the Afghan project, had already absorbed at least $65 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars and more than 300,000 dead. By the way have those costly military efforts have not eliminated “terrorism,” they have fertilized the terrorist community.

 

 Paul Harvey 

The November 19th 60 Minutes program attempted to shed some light on the humanitarian crisis being played out in Yemen. Their broadcast found me nostalgic for Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey was synonymous with ABC’s radio show called “The Rest of the Story”. The program had its beginning during World War 2 and  premiered on the ABC Radio Network in the 1970’s.

The Rest of the Story consisted of stories presented as little-known or forgotten facts on a variety of subjects with some key element of the story  held back until the end. The broadcasts always concluded with Harvey completing his narrative with: “And now you know the rest of the story.”

Yemen

A year ago, I wrote two blogs about Yemen, #012 Oh Yemen! – Man, It’s Hard Just to Live and #013 Part 2 “America is killing the Yemeni people.” Since those blogs appeared, the crisis in Yemen has gotten worse. On November 19^th, 60 Minutes attempted to expose the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Their effort should be applauded but it failed to provide a complete picture and may have even mislead the public.

60 Minutes

The 60 Minutes report fell short of telling the rest of the story. They refused to call the blockade what it is, a weapon of genocide and they conviently omitted the names of those countries, that David Beasley of the World Food Program, referred to as “all of those involved”. 

The Rest of the Story

Hunger Blockades 

Enforcement of sanctions and blockades, by States on other States is a criminal act against humanity. States throughout history have encumbering and prohibited trade. Seldom, however, can the consequences of such an effort, have been as devastating as in the case of the British naval blockade of Germany in the First World War. This hunger blockade belongs to the category of forgotten state atrocities of the twentieth century. The Saudi blockade on Yemen is this century’s atrocity.

In 1914, at the outset of World War 1, Great Britain under the direction of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, implemented a blockade against Germany. Churchill described his aim as, to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission”.

At that time, Americans denounced this action as inhumane.  Yet when the US went to war in 1917, the US supported the British’s effort to “starve the whole population”.  This starvation blockade was responsible for at least 762,106 civilian deaths. One hundred years have pasted and the U.S. is again supporting a “Hunger Blockade”.

War has a “funny” way of changing the perspective of participating nations.  Upon entering World War 1, a U.S. admiral explained our changing position to then British Prime Minister Lloyd George, “you will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are.” The only thing that has changed in 100 years is that we no longer need two months of training.

 U.S. Entry into World War 1

In 1915 Germany responded to the British “Hunger Blockade” when it launched a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany declared the area around the British Isles a war zone, in which all merchant ships, including those from neutral countries, would be attacked by the German navy. This retaliatory action culminating in the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat.

After the Lusitania incident, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson demanded that the German government end its attacks against unarmed merchant ships. By September 1915, the German government imposed stricter constraints on the operation of its submarines. The German navy would later suspend U-boat warfare altogether. This action had no effect on the British “Hunger Blockade”.

Then on January 31, 1917, the German Reichstag government announced that unrestricted submarine warfare would resume the next day. In April, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean as one of the main reason for his declaration.

 Selective and incomplete reporting appears to be the narrative for the mainstream media, they have become too complicit with the noise being generated in Washington D.C. by our political and military leaders. The media never directs the viewers to the actual role that the United States government plays in global crisis.

 “Hunger Blockade” on Yemen – Famine or Genocide?

The 60 Minutes production focused almost entirely on Yemen’s hunger crisis, David Beasley of the World Food Program told 60 Minutes that if his organization doesn’t get substantially more international assistance in the next few months, 125,000 children could starve to death. The starvation issue in Yemen is only one of the many crisis facing the Yemeni people.

60 Minutes does report that Saudi Arabia and its coalition allies had placed an almost total blockade on Yemen. The fact that 60 Minutes falls short of calling the Yemen’s starvation crisis a genocide caused by Saudi actions is under reporting. The viewer should walk away from the 60 Minute piece clearly understanding that Saudi Arabia is the direct cause and their coalition members are conspirators

This humanitarian crisis is not due to natural occurring conditions such as weather, crop failure, drought or even population shifts. It is caused by a concerted effort by the Saudi coalition to punish and murder the Yemeni population living in the Houthi controlled areas of Yemen. Based upon David Beasley’s input, one would conclude that the humanitarian atrocity taking place in Yemen, the Saudi’s two and one half year bombing campaign and the Saudi led blockade of Yemen ports and airfields are apparently coincidental.

The Houthi vs The Saudi  

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has been waging a brutal military operation in Yemen in response to the Houthis seizing control of the capital, Saana and ousting the Saudi backed President Abdurabu Mansur Hadi. Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia to beg the royals for support to get his prize back.

The Houthi, native to Yemen, are made up of tribes who have come together to reclaim their role within Yemen’s political society. The name comes from its founder-leader Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. His following began as a theological movement preaching peace. The Houthi are a Zaidi predominantly Shia-led religious-political group. Their religious belief puts them on the other side of the new Middle East “Cold War”. (Iran versus Saudi Arabia)

The Saudi’s intolerant Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam and its commercial mercenaries act to overthrow and shatter Arab regimes and societies that have independent modern, nationalist and secular leadership or practice multi-ethnic or multi-religious tolerance. They also target republics with Shia-majority governments opposed to Saudi-Wahhabi domination in the Middle East.

Intervention in Presidential Elections? – US Fingerprints

The Houthi movement turned to violent clashes with government going back to the 1990 and through the 2011 Yemeni Revolution, its version of the Arab Spring. The Houthi’s opposition took a more focused attack on the central government after the staged 2012 elections.

The US backed and recognized the corrupt and violent national election that had only one name on the ballot. The only candidate was the Saudi and US backed, Vice President Abdurabu Mansur Hadi. Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulated the people of Yemen “on today’s successful presidential election,” calling it “another important step forward in their democratic transition process.”

In a speech, one of the Houthi’s current leaders, Abdulmalek al-Houthi proclaimed that, “this government is a puppet in the hands of influential forces, which are indifferent to the rightful and sincere demands of these people,” referring to the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Fast forward: in the fall of 2014 the Houthi attack and takeover Saana; the US agrees, in concept, to a nuclear treaty with Iran; events upset the Saudi royals; the Saudi’s puppet Hadi forced into exile; Saudi ask and receives permission to bomb Yemen; the Obama administration admits that their approval is to placate the very sad Saudi’s.

The Saudi’s military campaign against Yemen began in March of 2015 with significant US funding, logistical support, and arms the bombing has caused enormous suffering in what was the poorest nation in the Arab world. However, over the past two years, the Saudi Arabia-led operations, have enforced restrictions on Yemen’s airspace and blockades of its seaports thus cutting off food and medical supplies to the Yemeni civilians.

The bombings and blockade has accounted for Yemen’s malnutrition crisis of colossal proportions. Close to 80 percent of Yemen’s population lacks reliable access to food, and the United Nations estimates that 7 million of the country’s population of 28 million people are facing a death sentence handed down by the Saudi regime.

Cholera –  The Saudi Weapon of Choice

The U.N. reported that there have been over 2,000 deaths due to cholera since the end of April, most victims being children. 60 Minutes fails to make it clear that, death from cholera, is preventable with the consumption of clean potable water or other hydrating fluid. The 60 Minutes connects the outbreak of cholera with the Saudi and its supporting allies but fails to deliver the knockout blow.

The Saudi’s blockade of fuel to operate sewage and water works facilities and their targeting of these facilities, has created a petri-dish for cholera. The destruction of the Yemeni infrastructure put millions of the Yemeni at risk of contracting and spreading of cholera. Dr Homer Venters, director of programmes for the research group Physicians for Human Rights, says the Saudi coalition hits on clinics and sewage works are a “tactic of war” that amounts to the “weaponisation of disease”. (cholera)

Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen, Alexandra Faite, said “we could reach up to 1 million [cases] the end of the year.” CNN reports that an estimated 5,000 people were becoming infected by cholera daily as of September. Save the Children’s country director for Yemen, Tamer Kirolos, told CNN that cholera is “easily treatable if you have access to basic healthcare.”

Really – Blame It On Iran

On November 4, Saudi Arabia shot down a ballistic missile that the Houthis had fired towards Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. The Houthi missile caused no casualties but it “shook the Saudi capital”. This attack was the first first-ever missile strike targeting the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The Houthi missile launch is a logical response against a country committing “war crimes” against the Yemeni.

Saudi Arabia reacted quickly, and harshly, on November 6, it declared the attack to be “an act of war” by Iran. This is a strange statement considering that the missiles were manufactured in Yemen. The Houthi missile was a counter-attack to the Saudis’ starvation blockade and daily bombing of Yemeni cities. Iran had no role in the launching of the missile.

“All of Those Involved”

The Saudis tightened its blockade of Yemen, rendering it virtually impossible for humanitarian aid to reach Yemen’s air and seaports. The blockade of Yemen’s ports is not new, with the US approval, Saudi Arabia and its allies have been stopping food and medical supplies, to a country that depends almost entirely upon imported food and medical supplies, for the past two years.

Saudi Arabia’s newer version the “hunger blockade” is intended to exacerbate what the United Nations has deemed the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Under international pressure the Saudis “modified” the blockade to apply only to Houthi held areas.  This area, is where there is a desperate need for humanitarian assistance.

The Saudi decision to “ease” the blockade is meant to make Riyadh seem reasonable. The fact is that it is a meaningless gesture that has done little to really improve the situation in Yemen. Houthi terrain has seen 84 percent of cholera infections – 456,962 out of 542,278 cases. Those infected have more chance of dying in Houthi held areas.

On the 60 Minutes program, David Beasley of the World Food Program made an interesting statement about the usage of food as part of the Saudi’s strategy. “I don’t think there’s any question the Saudi-led coalition, along with the Houthis and all of those involved, are using food as a weapon.”

“All of those involved” aren’t currently blockading Yemen from the air, land, and sea. “All of those involved” aren’t equally responsible for nearly a million Yemenis suffering from cholera without access to proper medical care. And “all of those involved” aren’t regularly conducting airstrikes that hit civilian targets, weddings, schools and funerals, in Houthi-held northern Yemen.

The ambiguity of Beasley’s statement, “all of those involved”, confuses the audience. His attempt to avoid the appearance of being bias is disgraceful, with an estimated seven million Yemenis in or nearing famine conditions, it’s long past the point of trying to protect Riyadh’s delicate feelings.

Damn It – Connect the Dots

The most egregious part of the 60 Minutes coverage was its total failure to completely identify Who “all of those involved” are, namely the role that the United States and Britain have played in arming and sustaining the Saudi war effort. The United States has been intimately involved in the Saudi intervention in Yemen. The Obama and Trump administrations have provided logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi Arabian-led war effort, and approved billions of dollars in American arms shipments.

Saudi airstrikes have targeted civilian areas like marketplaces, hospitals, rehab centers for the blind, and funeral homes. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 16 attacks in which the coalition has used cluster bombs banned under international law. Destruction of the country’s infrastructure has caused the spread of easily preventable diseases like cholera. The economy has been brought to a nearly complete standstill.

 al-Monitor has reported that: “the US Department of Defense provided about 480,000 gallons of aviation fuel to the mission at a cost of more than $1 million in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a 140% increase over the previous year. The disclosure comes as Yemen suffers the world’s worst cholera epidemic and the Saudis face international pressure to lift their blockade of the country’s ports.”

This revelation should be a wake-up call to every American that this country is literally fueling the largest humanitarian crisis in the world and the worst cholera outbreak in recorded history,” said Kate Gould, a lobbyist with the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group. “The [United States] is operating these gas stations in the sky to fuel Saudi and UAE bombers as they rain down terror on Yemeni water and other sanitation infrastructure — the last safeguards Yemen has against these disease outbreaks sweeping the country.”

The Saudi operation in Yemen depends on this ongoing logistical support from the U.S. It also depends on arms, like American cluster bombs and British missiles, that U.S. and U.K. arms dealers eagerly sell to the Saudis. Which means that it’s within American and British power to end this atrocity, to end the starvation, to force the Saudis to reopen the entire country to humanitarian aid.

The US and British are very invested in maintaining their toxic but lucrative relationships with the Saudi monarchy. Their cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia has prevented them from stopping their support of the Saudi crimes.

Neither Washington nor London has taken any substantive steps to end or even reduce their involvement in immiserating the Yemeni people. Without a public outcry against this genocide the US and England will continue to promote the Saudi propaganda about Iran level of involvement.

Main-stream Media – You’re not Paul Harvey

60 Minutes, the hard-hitting news magazine, did not utter a single sentence in its Yemen segment to explain how America and Britain are responsible for the many images of starving children that their viewers were seeing on Sunday night.

60 Minutes even went out of their way to muster up a feeble example of how the US attempted to “help” the Yemeni by suppling dock cranes. Their selective reporting, ignoring the US support for the Saudi genocide of the Yemeni people, misleads the audience. The complete American story of the Yemen crisis seems to have escaped the award-winning show.

Stunning omissions of the facts is certainly not a new phenomenon in Western media. It has made a habit of downplaying or outright ignoring American and British involvement in Yemen. The American audience deserves to know that our government has helped to create the atrocities that flashed on the screen. In failing to provide a complete report, 60 Minutes did its viewers, and the people of Yemen, a tremendous disservice.

“Irreversible Harm”

Fifty-four years after President Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA and FBI asked for and received more time to decide what secrets they need to preserve. “I have no choice – today – but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security,” Trump wrote. Is President Trump the latest President to bow to the power of our intelligence community?

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was murdered in the streets of Dallas.  For a quarter century, the CIA and FBI have known the “final” deadline for releasing the JFK files was to be in the year 2017. Some 2800 files were released in full by the National Archives, but another 300 will remain sealed. It is ludicrous that the CIA and FBI would need a six-month extension to decide what secrets that they still must hold back from the citizens of the US.

Journalist Caitlin Johnstone points out that the biggest revelation from last week’s limited release of the JFK files is “the fact that the FBI and CIA still desperately need to keep secrets about something that happened 54 years ago.” The need to prevent these documents from being released to the public does make sense if both agencies were involved with a cover-up and the execution.

The Cold War – 1960 Presidential Election

Cold War rhetoric dominated the 1960 presidential campaign both Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon pledged to strengthen American military forces and promised a tough stance against the Soviet Union and international communism. Kennedy warned of the Soviet’s growing arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles and pledged to revitalize American nuclear forces.

Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for permitting the establishment of a pro-Soviet government in Cuba. In his inaugural address, Kennedy stressed the contest between the free world and the communist world, and he pledged that the American people would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

The fact that Kennedy was a hard core Cold War warrior is suspect. His actions and the information now available indicates that Kennedy began a transformation to a peace advocate upon entering the White House. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, this was perceived by many as a weakness.

Kennedy came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war.  He was aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals, the CIA and the intelligence community.

On numerous occasions, Kennedy spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him.  On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”

The Agency

Exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Harry Truman titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”

The op-ed appeared only in the Post’s early edition on Dec. 22, 1963. It was removed from that day’s later editions and, despite being authored by the President who was responsible for setting up the CIA in 1947, the op-ed was ignored in all other major media.

Truman believed that the spy agency had wandered off into troubling directions. He began his op-ed by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.”

Truman was bothered by the CIA’s apparent abuse of its responsibility “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

“Give them hell Harry’s” honesty and common man persona deserves credit for admitting that he had regretted creating the CIA. Speaking to a biographer in the 1960s, less than 20 years after signing the National Security Act of 1947, Truman expressed his thought concerning the agency:

Biographer Merle Miller: “Mr. President, I know that you were responsible as        President for setting up the CIA. How do you feel about it now?”

Truman: “I think it was a mistake. And if I’d know what was going to happen, I never would have done it.”

CIA – Allen Dulles’ Footprint

Eisenhower employed the CIA to tackle the specter of communism in developing countries outside the Soviet Union’s immediate sphere of influence. Newly appointed CIA director Allen Dulles took enormous liberties in conducting a variety of covert operations. Thousands of CIA operatives were assigned to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and attempted to launch coups, assassinate heads of state, arm anti-communist revolutionaries, spread propaganda, and support despotic pro-American regimes.

Eisenhower began to favor using the CIA instead of the military because their covert operations didn’t attract as much attention and cost much less money. The covert operation of the CIA could be conducted so that the President could easily deny any involvement.

Iran

In a CIA-sponsored coup in Iran in 1953, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers authorized the agency to overthrow a democratically elected Prime Minister. The new Iranian government negotiations for more of a percentage of profits from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were unsuccessful. Prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh threatened to nationalize for the control of the British-owned Oil Company. The West, afraid that the popular, nationalist, prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, would then cut off oil exports to the United States, CIA operatives convinced military leaders to overthrow Mossadegh and restore Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah, as head of state in 1953.

Pahlavi returned control of Anglo-Iranian Oil to the British and then signed agreements to supply the United States with almost half of all the oil drilled in Iran. He installed a repressive regime that was well armed with US made weapons. This is the same guy that in 1979 provoked a radical group of students to seize the American Embassy in Tehran and hold US worker’s hostages for 444 days after the US allowed him into our country.

Guatemala

The following year, in 1954, a similar coup in Guatemala when the CIA helped overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. Eisenhower and his top advisers worried that President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán program of land reform was a step toward Guatemala’s becoming a Marxist state. The land reform produced a strong opposition from the United Fruit Company, the major land owners in Guatemalan. When Arbenz bought weapons from Communist Czechoslovakia after the Eisenhower administration cut off Guatemala’s access to U.S. military supplies the CIA initiated their second successful coup in less than one year.

The CIA helped counterrevolutionaries drive Arbenz from power in June 1954. Guatemala appealed in vain to the United Nations, and administration officials denied that the United States had anything to do with the change in government in Guatemala. The new President, Carlos Castillo Armas, reversed land reform, clamped down on the Communists, restricted voting rights and curtailed civil liberties before an assassin murdered him in 1957.

Bay of Pigs

Guatemala became the base for another CIA covert action that the Eisenhower administration planned but did not carry out before leaving office. Eisenhower decided that Fidel Castro, who came to power in Cuba in 1959, was a “madman” who had to be deposed. In 1960, the CIA began the training in Guatemala of anti-Castro exiles who would invade Cuba. Soon after John F. Kennedy became President, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion began April 1961.

Kennedy vs Dulles

Plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy became President, he refused to approve the use of U.S. combat forces and air support for the invasion. CIA Director Allen Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy questioned the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plans.

Dulles, a man that was not use to taking no from Presidents, set out to give the President no choice except to send U.S. troops to the rescue. Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face.  Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and that they had informed Castro so that he could prepare his forces for the invasion. The CIA withheld this information from the President.

CIA Director Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. The CIA knew that there was no chance of success without a speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support. The planned mouse-trapping of the novice President Kennedy had been underpinned by a rosy “analysis” showing how this pin-prick on the beach would lead to a popular uprising against Fidel Castro.

Dulles had misjudged Kennedy. Notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”  The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was the overthrow of Fidel Castro. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy for its failure.

A few months after the abortive invasion of Cuba, Kennedy was quoted by a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” Clearly, the outrage was mutual. This treachery set the stage for events to come.  For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and his assistant General Charles Cabell.

While Dulles was attempting to get his man in Cuba, he paid little or no attention to how Castro’s patrons in Moscow reacted. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs failure the Soviets began installing nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to future U.S. aggression. This lead directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

*In the “you cannot make this stuff up category”, in 1963 President Johnson named Dulles to The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly known as the Warren Commission. General Charles Cabell’s brother Earle Cabell was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed.  

JFK – Digging His Grave

Kennedy become the antagonist to nearly all his advisers. His opposition to the use of force in U.S. foreign policy became louder and louder. In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand?  I want a negotiated settlement in Laos.  I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia.  Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

In October of 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers learned that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. These offensive weapons represented a new and existential threat to America. Kennedy’s advisers, pushed for air strikes against Cuba and a full-scale invasion as “the last chance we will have to destroy Castro.”

Had the military and the intelligence advisors wishes prevailed a nuclear war would have been a nearly certain outcome. Instead Kennedy delivered the Soviets an ultimatum insisting on their removal and announced an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands.

Kennedy refused to bomb and invade Cuba as his military advisors wished. Kennedy took another tact and arranged a private negotiation with the Soviet leader Khrushchev. The two engaged in a missile swap. The two superpower leaders agreed that Moscow would remove their missiles in Cuba and Washington would remove its missiles in Turkey.

The Kennedy and Khrushchev triumph of diplomacy was view as a sign of weakness by hardened Cold War advocates on both sides. This backing down from the brink of war had grave consequences on both Kennedy and Khrushchev. Khrushchev was removed from office within a year and many believe that this to be another nail in Kennedy’s coffin.

In June1963, he gave a speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

In October 1963, he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965, later over turned by President Johnson

A few months later Kennedy signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev. Secret negotiations with Khrushchev were held via the KGB, Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII, and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel angered the intelligence and military communities to the point of mistrust.

In an interview with Daniel, JFK made statements about Cuba that were considered treasonous, to the CIA and top generals. On October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption.  I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of several sins on the part of the United States.  Now we will have to pay for those sins.  In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”

Every move that Kennedy was making appeared to be anti-war and a reconciliation toward both Cuba and the Soviet Union. JFK, a war hero, who had experienced the horror of war was shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis.

Kennedy’s actions in 1963 were very different than his 1960 campaign declaration of being a Cold War warrior. JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and the Intelligence Community. They accused President Kennedy by being soft on communism and a threat to national security.

Kennedy’s refusal to go to war in Cuba, his decision to engage in private with Khrushchev, his “treasonous statements” about the Castro’s revolution, his back-channel communications with the Soviets, giving up US missiles in Turkey, pulling back of military personnel in Vietnam, his signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, his calling for a complete disarmament, the firing of the Director of the CIA Dulles, and his threat to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces” marked him as an enemy of the national security state. The collision course was set.

Oswald – “I’m just a patsy”

In the Dallas Police station, shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination, a reporter asked Oswald, “Did you kill the President?” Oswald’s response, “No, they’ve taken me in because of the fact, that I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy!”

The dictionary defines a patsy as a person who is easily taken advantage of, especially by being cheated or blamed for something. Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy for the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA to explain the assassination of JFK. Oswald moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, Oswald was captured and silenced in the Dallas police headquarters.

Oswald “On the Radar”

Oswald served as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s top secret U-2 spy plane operating base at Atsurgi Naval Air Station in Japan. Oswald had a Crypto clearance. Oswald’s unit was responsible for tracking the U-2’s and communicating with them while in flight over the Soviet Union collecting information on their ballistic missile program.

Oswald was discharged from the Marines in September 1959 and defected to the Soviet Union in October of 1959.  At the American Embassy in Moscow Oswald renounced his US citizenry and threatened to give the Soviets radar procedures of the US Marines. This act brought him to the attention of both the FBI and the CIA. Providing the Soviets with this information would have been very important to their intelligence and would be considered an act of treason for the American. The CIA opened a defection 201 file on him but it took them over one year to open the file. The Soviets feared that the Oswald defection was arranged.

The Soviets moved Oswald from Moscow to Minsk. While working at a Soviet factory in Minsk, he met and married his Russian wife Marina. During his time in Minsk, Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union. No connection between these two events have ever been linked.

In Minsk, Oswald became disenchanted with the Soviet system. The Soviets apparently never quite trusted him and he was constantly monitored by the authorities. Oswald would ask for a permit to return to the US. Oswald would be granted the permit and the application process, for unknown reasons, took 2 years to complete.

The CIA – An Escort Service

Oswald return to the U.S, by way of a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, was met at the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey by, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent Bulgarian anti-communist with intelligence connections.  Raikin was apparently recommended by the State Department to escort Oswald through his immigration process and his return to the Dallas area.  Raikin bought Oswald and his family (Marina and their daughter) bus tickets for their trip to Fort Worth.
In Texas, with the help of a Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, Oswald was befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, a wealthy anti-communist Russian, with CIA assets, connections to Texas Oil Industry and several prominent US aristocratic families. de Mohrenschildt and Oswald met, in October 1962. The de Mohrenschildts and Oswalds soon became inseparable.

George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt were constantly in and out of the Oswald household, making introductions and offering help in finding housing, child care, marriage counseling and social introductions. De Mohrenschildt got him a job at a graphic arts company where he worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.  Oswald was shepherded around Dallas by de Mohrenschildt.

When Oswald moved to New Orleans, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, taking a $285,000 contract from the CIA to conduct a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier. de Mohrenschildt handed Oswald off to Ruth Paine. Ruth was introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt.

Ruth Paine had both CIA associations and personal relation that lead back to Allen Dulles. Ruth’s sister Sylvia had worked for the CIA and Paine’s mother-in-law was a close friend of Mary Bancroft, who was a former OSS spy and the mistress at varying times with Allen Dulles. In April 1963 Marina and her daughter moved in with Ruth Paine and was living in Ruth Paine’s house in Irving at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

The Making of a Patsy

In New Orleans Oswald became further emerged with CIA connections. Oswald’s first job in New Orleans was with the Reilly Coffee Company. Reilly Coffee was owned by the CIA-affiliated William Reilly.  The Reilly Coffee Company was conveniently located near the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices.

Another connection to the CIA was Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, a munitions supplier for the Bay of Pigs Invasion and trained anti-Castro paramilitaries. Bannister was a right-wing activist with strong anti-Castro connections.

Oswald would work with Bannister. Bannister’s office was the source for the leftist pro-Castro leaflets, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, that Oswald had handed out, on the streets of New Orleans. Oswald engaged in contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances appear to have been directed from Bannister’s office.

New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigations convinced him that a group of right-wing activists, including Banister, were involved in a conspiracy with elements of the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Kennedy. Garrison claimed that the motive for the assassination was anger over Kennedy’s attempts to obtain a peace settlement in both Cuba and Vietnam. DA Garrison believed that Banister and his associates in New Orleans had conspired to set up Oswald as a patsy in the JFK assassination

Oswald’s affiliations and his multiple antithetical roles still confound many students of the Kennedy assignation. His behavior in New Orleans make it difficult for anyone to deciphering the purposes behind his actions. The one thing that is crystal clear is that the Washington Intelligence Agency’s fingerprints are all over Oswald’s stay in New Orleans.

If Oswald’s actions were a ploy to set him up as a future patsy it was very successful.  By the time that Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Dallas he had been turned into a man with multiple personas, all of them capable of killing Kennedy. Oswald hated Kennedy either because he – Oswald – admired Castro or because he was anti-Castro. Perhaps Oswald was angry at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, or else he just liked to take potshots at important people. He was fond of guns, a bit violent, and even sometimes beat up his wife.

The Right Place at the Right Time

In early October, Oswald returned to Dallas. With Marina and their daughter living at Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, Oswald rented a room in a boarding house in the Oak Cliff district of Dallas. Oak Cliff is proximity to the central business district of downtown Dallas and the School Book Depository.

Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963. The owner of the Book Depository building was D. Harold Byrd, a right-wing oilman, a Kennedy foe and a close friend of George de Mohrenschildt. Byrd had employed de Mohrenschildt at his Three States Oil and Gas Co. during the 1950s and de Mohrenschildt had put D. Harold Byrd’s wife on the board of his charity foundation devoted to the study of cystic fibrosis.

Some theories contend that Oswald – or anyone who might have been directing him – could not have known that the motorcade would pass by the Book Depository at the time he took the job there. But there were only two possible routes through downtown to JFK’s destination, the Dallas Trade Mart, the Book Depository building stood on one of those routes.

Kennedy’s trip to Dallas was announced to the public in September of 1963. One week before the assassination two Secret Service agents rerouted the motorcade from proceeding down Main Street to turning onto Elm. This adjustment put the motorcade’s route in front of the School Book Depository building.

Coincidence – Connection Is Apparent

Texas laws in 1963 allowed untraceable over-the-counter firearms purchases, Oswald went through unnecessary and inconvenient steps to order his guns through the interstate mail, this tied the “murder weapon” to Oswald because it required identification and left a paper trail. Moreover, the two guns he ordered through the mail were both from companies that were being investigated by the ATF and the Senate.

Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection for Kennedy on the morning of November 22^nd:  the Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car; they took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire; they approved a clear security violation with the final sharp, dogleg turn onto the street that Kennedy was executed on; squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head.

Abraham Bolden was the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK. Bolden was prosecuted and imprisoned after he had warned that the president was going to be assassinated. He has also provided evidence of an aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago, on November 2, 1963.

The list of people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces within the government, not a lone rogue actor.  This is the only “irreversible harm to our nation’s security” that makes sense.

Allen Dulles, former Director of the CIA, is the trunk of the family tree that killed Kennedy. The branches include General Charles Cabell, his brother Earle Cabell, George de Mohrenschildt, Ruth Paine, William Reilly, Guy Bannister, D. Harold Byrd’s just to name a few.

James W. Douglass author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters writes “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible.  When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system.  We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us.  Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

A “Scary” After Thought

In Kennedy’s day, the Cold War provided the rationale for outsized expenditures. Today, new and more creative rationales are used to justify the intelligence community growth. Since the Kennedy’s assassination the Soviet Union and communism has, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Yet the national-security state continues to grow in scope and influence. In Kennedy’s day, the CIA dominated the field of intelligence, today the national “intelligence community” consists of some 17 agencies.

The size and payroll of this blotted apparatus grew by leaps and bounds in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Today, intelligence spending exceeds $80 billion per year, more than the budget of the Department of State ($49 billion) and the Department of Homeland Security ($43 billion). The reality is that with every new “crisis” the intelligence community expands.

Expansion of the intelligence community cost US tax payers dearly, more US debt is incurred and more taxes are used to limit freedom and rights of the individual. What worked during the Cold War still works today: if you scare the hell out of the public they will get on board.

Final Conclusion

Recently, Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, the Senate Minority Leader with 36 years of experience in Congress explained the dangers of “taking on the intelligence community.” Schumer, when asked about Trump’s spats with the Intelligence community said: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

The US national security state, the systemic bubble that the government insist is needed to protect its citizens against; in the 60’s – communism; today – terrorism. In 1963, a faction of the US national security state, executed a domestic coup d’état. This is the only irreversible harm to our nation’s security that is being protected. The result of November 22, 1963 was that the power of the Presidency was curtailed and the intelligence community usurped control of the Executive Branch.

 American Exceptionalism

All countries have their own brand of chest-thumping nationalism, but almost none is as patently universal — even messianic — as this belief in America’s special character and role in the world. While the mission may be centuries old, the phrase only recently entered the political lexicon, it was first uttered when Joseph Stalin used it in a derogatory statement to explain the “Great Depression”. Today the term is experiencing a resurgence in an age of anxiety about American decline.

A Walk Down Memory Lane

American exceptionalism can be traced to Colonial American. The Puritans believed God had made a covenant with their people and had chosen them to provide a model for the other nations of the Earth. Puritan leader, John Winthrop, expressed this idea as a “City upon a Hill”— alluding to a phrase from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Winthrop promoted the idea that the Puritan community of New England should serve as a model community for the rest of the world, as the “eyes of all people are upon us.”

In 1776, revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” describes America as a beacon of liberty for the world. “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe,” he explains. “Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart.”

Seymour Martin Lipset a leading theorist of democracy and American exceptionalism believed that American exceptionalism grew out of the American Revolution, becoming “the first new nation” and developing the uniquely American ideology of “Americanism”, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, republicanism, democracy, and laissez-faire economics. This ideology itself is often referred to as “American exceptionalism.”

In his 1835, literary work Democracy in America French writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the “position of the Americans” is “quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”

In the late 19^th century the US used American Exceptionalism as an excuse to enter the Imperialist race for Global hegemony when the Spanish-American War turned into an invasion and conquering of the Philippines.  The Filipinos fight for independence and their resistance to U.S. rule prompted President McKinley to portray the American cause as humanitarian, expressing his sorrow that certain “foolish” Filipinos had failed to recognize the benefits of American generosity.

President McKinley would, in his 1899 speech to congress, exposed his version of American Exceptional when he proclaimed that a reason to occupy the Philippines was to take them and educate them, uplift them, civilize them and Christianize them.

One hundred years ago progressive President Woodrow Wilson, in his declaration of war, on Germany, revealed a US Foreign Policy that remains in place today. Arguing that America has a unique duty to spread liberty and democracy abroad “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy.”

In June 1927 Jay Lovestone, a leader of the Communist Party in America, described America’s economic and social uniqueness. He noted the increasing strength of American capitalism, and the country’s “tremendous reserve power”; strength and power prevented a Communist revolution in the US. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, would publicly disagree with Lovestone’s assessment calling it “the heresy of American exceptionalism”. In his exchange with Lovestone, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was the first to coin the term “American exceptionalism”.

In 1941 magazine publisher Henry Luce urges the United States to enter World War II and exchange isolationism for an “American century” in which it acts as the “powerhouse” of those ideals that are “especially American.”

The 1950s brought together a group of American historians — including Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and David Potter — that argued that if the United States forged a “consensus” of liberal values over time it would enabled it to sidestep movements such as fascism and socialism.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy suggests that America’s distinctiveness stems from its determination to exemplify and defend freedom all over the world. He invokes Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” and declared: “More than any other people on Earth, we bear burdens and accept risks unprecedented in their size and their duration, not for ourselves alone but for all who wish to be free.”

The 1970’s challenged the concept of American Exceptionalism. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal Daniel Bell a sociologist voiced a growing skepticism in his 1975 National Affairs essay, The End of American Exceptionalism, “Today,” he writes, “the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation’s future.” President Jimmy Carter spoke of a national “crisis of confidence” to the paeans of American greatness.

The 1980 presidential election brought Ronald Reagan’s bluster brought American exceptionalism back into vogue. “I’ve always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way,” Describing America as “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

By 1990 as the final days of the Cold War passed the American model was proclaimed the winner and changed American exceptionalism from an option to a requirement. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War” but the “end of history as such, that is … the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed.

The end of the cold war marked an expansion of US policy based upon American Exceptionalism. In a 1996 speech, to justify NATO’s intervention in Bosnia, President Bill Clinton declares that “America remains the indispensable nation” and that “there are times when America, and only America, can make a difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression.”

The post-Cold War visions of American exceptionalism became a partisan talking point as future George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessan, in a Weekly Standard article, contended that there are two competing visions of internationalism in the 21st century: the “‘global multilateralism’ of the Clinton-Gore Democrats” vs. the “‘American exceptionalism’ of the Reagan-Bush Republicans.”

“You’re either with us, or against us”

George W. Bush proclaimed “Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. This is the everlasting dream of America.” His dreams of American freedom culminated with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush’s “Wars Against Terrorism” turned into two failed projects in nation building. His dreams of democracy by force cost the American people over 3 trillion dollars and about 8,000 dead military personnel.

Amid skepticism about America’s global leadership and a disastrous war in Iraq and the global financial crisis, Democrat Barack Obama ran against Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” in the election to succeed him. The term American exceptional was used in his campaign when he stated that. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama says, but not one based on “our military prowess or our economic dominance.”

The Obama rhetoric made him appear to be a peace candidate his, “I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism” made him the first sitting U.S. president to use the phrase “American exceptionalism” publicly. However, his quote was twisted to become an accusation of believing that “America’s just another nation with a flag.”

In response to his critics Obama has invoked Bill Clinton’s “indispensable nation” in his State of the Union address and later declared that, “My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism.” How has any questioning of American exceptionalism become proof of a disdain for American uniqueness?

Bipartisan Agreement

Recent Polls have indicated that 80 percent of Americans believe the United States “has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.” American exceptionalism has evolved into a litmus test for patriotism.

In the 2016, Presidential election both candidates campaign mottos were connected to the “American exceptionalism” theme. There is no difference between “Make America Great Again” and “America Is Already Great”? Both are premised on the same line of reasoning: America, due to its providential founding, cannot be and is not a normal country: it is exceptional, a “shining city on a hill.”

On the Left, many believe that America should intervene all over the world on a values crusade. Leftist journalist has endeavored to excuse the social justice warriors’ impulse for political violence. The Right neo-conservatism believe that intervention is an American mission to spread democracy throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Nationalism is the real problem and it is troubling. The Nationalist with their American exceptionalism cover claim that the spread of Democracy and the American way, “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” The United States must enforce a “global democratic revolution.” But is the answer a crusade to impose as neocon Max Boot expounded, “the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees, at gunpoint if need be?”

The Media

The hubristic nature of American Exceptionalism ideology feeds delusions of innocence, which prevents a more critical analysis of America’s adventures abroad. The mainstream media has a tendency promote U.S. policy makers’ motives as noble and in good faith. Never are reporters allowed to ascribe sinister motives to U.S. officials—this is only permissible when covering America’s enemies.”

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.” The New York Times published article that whitewashed the motives behind the decision by George W. Bush House to invade Iraq. “The Times portrayed the new Iraq as a potential cornerstone of a democratic and Western-facing Middle East.

The illegal American intervention in the Syrian war was portrayed as “self-defense” when U.S. forces shot down a Syrian fighter jet over Raqqa in June. “The Syrian regime and others in the regime need to understand,” said White House spokesman Sean Spicer, “that we will retain the right of self-defense, of coalition forces aligned against ISIS.”

Over the past few months we learned that that nearly 1,000 US troops are on the ground in Niger, a massive force for the tiny country but the media reports more on Trumps call to the widow of a victim or the apparently, unpreparedness and under-equipped soldiers and not the fact that Niger is now the “hub” for US military operations in Western Africa and most of the 100 US Senator were unaware of US Special forces deployed in Niger.

Murtaza Hussain, a journalist for The Intercept pointed out that the United States has the largest and most powerful empire in the world. Through a network of nearly 800 military bases located in 70 countries around the globe, and an array of trade deals and alliances, American leaders have by using a mixture of force and suasion to sustain the systems that keep its hegemony intact. (Hussain’s work focuses on national security, foreign policy and human rights. His work has previously been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian and Al Jazeera English.)

In Yemen, U.S. special-operations have been conducting raids on this impoverished, violent, and bitterly divided country. US bombs and operations have kill innocent civilians. Yemen is a country that the United States periodically bombs in accordance with the “War on Terrorism” we support the two-and-a-half-year-old war that Saudi Arabia has been waging against the Yemeni people. Their war efforts, include the bombing of innocent civilians and a blockade of its ports in an attempted to deny food, potable water and medical supplies as Yemeni citizens are dying by the thousands from a cholera epidemic and malnutrition.

Few Americans pay much attention to these events. Africans, Middle Easterners, Arabs and Asians are being killed and maimed by U.S. ordnance falling from the skies. Why does the media not give these stories the airtime that they give to Harvey Weinstein or Civil War statues or those “unpatriotic” NFL players that kneel for the National Anthem? Could it be that they feel that these “primitives” are just not our guys?

I Wasn’t Taught This in School

From the genocide of Native Americans to the US military’s boots on the ground in about 70% of the nation across the world American exceptionalism has served to disguise the US governmental effort for a larger footprint across the World. The problem that persists with believing the myth of American exceptionalism is the presumption that the rest of the world buys into this myth. The American people continually have a willful misunderstanding of the past that blinds us to available alternatives, such as realism.

In the end, the ideology of American Exceptionalism feeds delusions of American Innocence and prepares the ground for military intervention the world over. American exceptionalism is not a valid reason to sanction, intervene, invade, occupy and remake nations into a “democratic” paradise.

“American exceptionalism” is authoritarian and since the Spanish-American War the US’s foreign policy has justified intervention as being on the “humane and moral side”.  The abusive action of intervention is immoral and distorts free choice and sovereignty through threats of power and force. “American exceptionalism” when stripped naked is totalitarian.

The US government, and most of the liberal West, believe that freedom has been granted to us by the highest of authority. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson explains that the citizen’s rights have been; “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Under closer scrutiny, a logical conclusion would be that Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was not just intended for Americans, he was writing for all people. Intervention and occupation usurps the powers “endowed by their Creator”. It is immoral to intervene and occupy because the occupier controls the people’s rights, among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. American exceptionalism should not become a surrogate for the Creator. That would-be blasphemy.

Conclusion

The Anti-Imperialists League was formed in the late 1800’s during the Spanish-American War. It would behoove us to revisit the philosophy of the Anti-Imperialists. Republican George F. Hoar, an anti-Imperialist Senator from Massachusetts, called for principles over national self-interests.

Senator Hoar pointed out the difference between a republic and an empire, between liberty and slavery, between the Declaration of Independence and Imperialism. He emphasized that by standing on its traditional principles, the United States had become “the strongest, freest, richest nation on the face of the earth.” He asserted that all people must be treated as people desiring independence, and not treat people as “primitives to be subdued so that their land might be used as a stepping-stone…” 

Our attempts to export American Exceptionalism, democracy, freedom and our “War on Terrorism” have only produced broken countries in our wake. As we continue to repeat “we meant well” the blowback has produced more enemies and more terrorist around the globe. Our crusades to slay monsters abroad must stop before the political and economic burdens of a perpetual War State will destroys us.

 

Where Have You Gone Colin Kaepernick?

Colin Kaepernick’s protest has been silenced by the noise  from the latest media frenzy. Kaepernick is out of football, blackballed from the NFL not because of his ability to quarterback but because of his “unpatriotic” sit/kneel during the National Anthem. The fact that he is not Tom Brady or Cam Newton does not help his cause but two years ago he was a starting NFL quarterback and last year he ranked 17th of 30 in quarterback ratings.

Kaepernick began his protest before the August 26, 2016  preseason game between the San Fransico 49ers  and the Green Bay Packers. The protest was in response to unfair treatment of blacks by the police.  “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” said Kaepernick explaining the basis of his protest to reporters.

The NFL and team owners appears to have concluded that the league is better off without him. Just like the Boxing Associations shunned Mohammad Ali for his protest in the 1960’s. Removing Kaepernick from the NFL did not stop the protest that he had started. Earlier in the season some NFL players continued the protest with little media coverage.

The intensity of media coverage changed drastically after President Trump made some remarks challenging those players’ patriotism, the owners tolerance and their inability to control the player’s actions. Trump, being Trump, created a divisive environment in which both the owners and players believed that their character, actions or motives were attacked by the President.

A protest that started as a response to police treatment against blacks has morphed into a patriotic litmus test. This controversy has come to fuison over the traditional ritual of playing the National Anthem before sporting events.

Forced “patriotism” and blind “patriotism” are the catalyst for the latest media over exposure. The President’s suggestion to fire SOBs that refuse to stand for the National Anthem has exposed a bigger issue, an increasingly hostile nationalist agenda.

 History – The National Pastime and Patriotism

In Chicago, on September 5, 1918, during Game 1 of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs the Star Spangled Banner was introduced to American sports. What began with an active duty soldier saluting the flag grew into a tradition that is common in professional, college, high school and youth sports.

The US had just entered  World War 1 a year and a half before that day. More than 100,000 U.S. soldiers had died fighting in the war overseas. A day before Game 1, a bomb had exploded in Chicago killing four people and injuring dozens more. The U.S. government had recently announced that it would begin drafting major league baseball players to go to war.

During the seventh-inning stretch, the U.S. Navy band began to play the Star Spangled Banner. As the song began, Red Sox infielder Fred Thomas—who was in the Navy and had been granted furlough to play in the World Series turned toward the American flag and gave it a military salute. Other players turned to the flag with hands over hearts, and the already-standing crowd began to sing. At the song’s conclusion, the fans erupted in thunderous applause.

The song would be played at each of the Series’ remaining games, to increasingly rapturous response. It was “patriotism” that started this American tradition., The Red Sox continue the patriotic spirit by honor wounded veterans and giving them free tickets. In Boston, for the decisive Game 6, the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner was moved to the start of the game.Thus, the association of sports, the flag and patriotism was hatched.

In 1931, President Hoover made the Star-Spangled Banner officially the U.S. national anthem. By the end of World War II,  NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden ordered that it be played at every football game. “The National Anthem should be as much a part of every game as the kick-off. We must not drop it simply because the war is over. We should never forget what it stands for.” Influenced by post-war patriotism the tradition quickly spread to other sports

The NFL Goes Over the Top

The NFL discovered that patriotism was good for business, and nothing is more patriotic than supporting our troops—especially when they are overseas at wartime. The league doubled down on the military and support for its mission both home and abroad.

“It was a conscious effort on our part to bring the element of patriotism into the Super Bowl,” Pete Rozelle, former NFL commissioner, said about the past Super Bowls that he reigned over. 

In the 1960s, Pete Rozelle continued to align the NFL with the military even thought there was a political and generational divide caused by the Vietnam War. His loyalty to the military paid off in the 1990s with the rebirth of “patriotism” mustered by the Middle East invasion. The 1990’s also brought a tremendous increase in TV revenues.

In the 1981 Super Bowl, during the Iran hostage crisis, the NFL wrapped the entire Superdome in one giant-sized yellow ribbon. The league handed out smaller ribbons at halftime to facilitate the singing of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” a song about loved ones coming home that has long been synonymous with bringing those loved one’s home during times of crisis.

Tracing the history of all of this, it seems that the fork in the road for the NFL and patriotism began in post 9/11 America. The NFL supersized patriotism. A corporate brand of patriotism found its way into all walks of life and into the NFL’s broadcast and corporate partners.

The NFL became the standard-bearer for what many of us believe to be patriotism. “We’ve become the winter version of the Fourth of July celebration,” said another past commissioner of the NFL, Paul Tagliabue.

Patriotism Becomes Mandate

It’s the kind of patriotism that gets warped into needing to exhibit patriotism not as a choice, but by mandate. An example of this can be found in the actions taken by a CBS’s broadcast crew after 9/11. One of CBS’s broadcasting crews voluntarily wore flag pins on their lapels. The network like that patriotic symbolism so much they made it a requirement for all their NFL broadcasting crews.

In 2009, due to timing concerns for the television networks, the NFL changed the protocol for the National Anthem. The players’ location for the primetime games was moved to the field during the anthem. In all other games the players had already been stationed on the field for the national anthem. This change afforded the NFL, the networks and their sponsors a national audience for “the show.”

At about the same time that the players were told to stand for the National Anthem, the Department of Defense (DOD) was ramping up its recruitment for support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The DOD began paying sports teams millions in U.S. tax dollars for what amounted to “paid patriotism,” for mega-military spectacles on the playing field before the game.

Do I Really Have to Give Credit to Senator McCain?

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a veteran and considered by many as a patriotic man and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) headed a congressional investigation into the DOD funding of professional sports.

Their investigation found that between 2012 and 2015, the DOD shelled out $53 million to professional sports—including $10 million to the NFL—on “marketing and advertising” for military recruitment. The report labeled many of the ceremonies honoring heroes and flyovers as federal funded propaganda.

Their report revealed that the DOD could not accurately account for how many contracts it awarded or how much money was spent. Their official response was that the NFL secured 62 percent of its 122 contracts with major league teams and 70 percent of the more than $10 million. The DOD indicated that the purpose of these contracts was to support recruiting.

The NFL’s is one of the DOD’s top cheerleader and recruiter for the warfare state. The national anthem has been used as a prop in this near-religious convocation from soldier parading, flag-waving and flyovers by Blue Angels fighter jets to jumbo Tron shout-outs to warriors deployed around the world protecting the United States’ Empire.

The NFL became a promotion tool of the DOD. The defense contractors use the media to hawk their billion-dollar war wares as the DOD actively recruits patriotic men and women (not cross genders) to “defend democracy, freedom and justice”.

Il Duce – Italian for the ” Leader of a Movement”

Does the President have the authority to dictate policy and procedures of a “private” corporation? Why not?  After all the governmental expects some sway from Crony Capitalism! (notice the “Crony”)

When a company takes money from the government it become beholden to them. Mussolini called it Fascism or “The marriage of corporation and state.”. Trump calls it “Make America great again.”

When the government subsidizes a “favorable” company, it can exert a strong influence over the company’s internal and external workings. Money encourages a regulatory role and makes private property and private initiative contingent upon their service to the state.

Standing or kneeling for the National Anthem should be the policy of the private corporation and their ownership, not the Federal Government. The line of sovereignty becomes blurred when governmental “contracts” are involved. The NFL created a relationship by shilling for the warfare state and using Americans patriotism to cash in on the gravy train that governmental contracts bring.

Accepting federal funds is an endorsement for the increasingly paternalist role of the Federal Government. From public education to health care “we the people” have become subservient to Washington DC. Taxes, regulations and directives are not only expected of the favorable but have become requirements to maintain a privilaged status.

“Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” john prine

Standing for the National Anthem might be a symbol of patriotism for many but there are dozens of things that are more patriotic than standing for a song about a flag. Real patriots take a stand, speak out, kneel, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line.

There is nothing less patriotic than a mandate to do so, patriotism has become overexposed. Forced patriotism is a bastardization of the intended purpose. Forced patriotism is alive and well in the NFL. Patriotic displays will continue to be calculated and designed to unite rather than divide.

Kaepernick’s protest was not designed to be unpatriotic but it upset a sterilized version of patriotism.  It was a challenge to the NFL’s homogenized, “one size fits all” patriotism. Colin Kaepernick was a victim of propaganda and the ratings game.

Today’s NFL cannot afford to offend half of its audience to please the other half. Even the current unified stand against Trump’s comments has that collective fuzzy feeling. Standing up to the President for calling NFL players SOBs. Really, as US bombs and drone murder civilians it is name calling that hurt our feelings?

Patriotism in Perspective

The Commander and Chief orders, supports and initiates sanctions and blockages used to starve Yemeni and North Korean civilians of food and medical supplies as US bombs kill civilians in Syria and Afghanistan. It is comforting to know that our perspective of patriotism is well directed.

A United States Patriot should be a person who regards himself or herself as a defender of the Constitution, especially of individual rights against the interference by the government. It is anti-American to be anti-freedom.

A “Nationalist,” is a misguided patriot, with a zealous and aggressive enthusiasm for governmental support over individual rights. It is a blind obedience to what an authority dictates. It is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.

There is nothing patriotic about nationalism. When Americans allow the government to dismantle the Constitution we will watch as a democratic republic becomes a police state protected by a standing army.

That was Colin Kaepernick’s original message? “I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed.” The national television audience, the NFL, the flag and patriotism may be overwhelming opponents but the message is crystal clear.

 “You can’t always get what you want”

Wars usually begins in response to an “incident”, in other words, for revenge or restitution. The “incident” typically moves a nation beyond its saturation point of tolerance, or the “incident” becomes a reason for a nation to declare a war that it “wanted”. Whatever the motivation, the scope of the war that follows become unexplainable and is not the war “you want”.

The Spanish-American War started when the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor. The United States’ Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on Union forces at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. World War 1 began when a Serbian assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. World War 2 was declared after Germany invaded Poland. The Korean War was in response to North Korean troops crossing over the 38^th parallel. The Vietnam War began after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The Iraq War was to secure weapons of mass destruction being held by a madman. The Afghanistan War was in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The USS Maine explosion turned out to be a spontaneous combustion of coal that ignited the Maine ‘s ammunition stored below deck. This war led to the slaughter, torture and 50-year occupation of the Philippians. The Fort Sumter’s bombardment had no casualties but the Civil War devastated the South. The assassination in Serbia led to 8 million dead in WW1. The invasion of Poland, began the murdering spree of 3% of the world’s population. In Korea, 2.8 million Koreans, Chinese and Americans lost their lives and the 38^th parallel still divides Korea. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fabrication that became responsible for the death of 1.35 million real people. In Iraq, the search for WMD came up empty at a cost of $1.7 trillion dollars, as many as 1 million dead, the destruction of a country and a group of head choppers.

Ah, but Afghanistan was the good war. US forces would kill bin Laden and destroy the al-Qaeda camps reeking terrorist attacks all over the globe. bid Laden was killed in 2011 and by 2010 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was being described by the Obama administration and CIA Director Leon Panetta, as “its presence in Afghanistan as minimal”. The Bush War that became the Obama War is now the Trump War.

The Taliban

In the 1980’s the US supported the mujahedeen, (Afghan “freedom fighters”) Osama bin Laden’s and some Arab/Islamic jihadist. In 1980, the jihadists were a little-known group of maybe a few hundred members calling itself al-Qaeda. The mujahedeen were the major resistant force against the Soviets with al-Qaeda providing limited support.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979 to prop-up the failing Soviet backed Afghan government. The US supported and supplied the “freedom fighters”.  That makes sense, they were anti-communist and engaged in warfare against our Cold War enemy. The mujahedeen were victorious and by February of 1989, send the Soviets packing back to Moscow to discover that their little war in Afghanistan cost them their empire.

The Soviet backed government in Afghanistan failed and a power vacuum ensued. Tribal Warlords, drug kingpins, corruption, violence and chaos emerged from the ashes. A Pashtun-Islamic fundamentalist group calling themselves the Taliban, a name derived from the Pashtun word for student, emerged as the alternative to the corrupt factions.

The Taliban is an Islamic group mostly made up of Pashtun tribal members from the Kandahar Province in Southern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. The Pashtun tribe makes up about 40% of the country’s population. By 1994, the Taliban had become the most powerful opposition group. Their rule would require a strict adherence to a combination of traditional Pashtun culture and Islamic sharia law.

The Taliban expanded their rule from the Kandahar Province toward the governmental capital in Kabul. The Taliban ruthless enforcement of the Pashtun-Sharia Law attracted a lot of negative attention from the Western media. Eventually the Taliban captured Kabul. The seizure of Kabul, combined with the assassination of Ahmad Massoud, an ethnic Tajik from the rival Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s only viable opponent, moved Afghanistan into a fundamentalist Islamic Republic.

The Taliban continued to enforce its brutal rule upon the Afghans. Reports of their extreme and repressive regime, especially towards women, were seen quite often on the US national news. Many of the Taliban laws were considered unjust and in violation of civil and individual rights. The media did a fine job to demonized and expose the Taliban abusive rule while ignoring similar violations in Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden, the terrorist

After the Soviets left Afghanistan, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to resume working for his family’s construction firm. During the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait a bin Laden offered the king of Saudi Arabia to mobilize his al-Qaeda warriors and to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The King rejected his offer and turned to the US.

This situation may have launched bin Laden’s radicalization toward world-wide terrorism against the West.  Bin Laden directed his outrage at the Saudis that allow US “infidels” into the holy land and the US government for remaining in the Saudi bases well after the war. Bin Laden’s public criticism against the Royal Family would not be tolerated.

The Saudi’s expelled Bin Laden. He relocated to Sudan taking with him as much as $20 million. The Sudan Government hired him to build several infrastructure projects. While in Sudan, he began a web of terrorist plots. Bin Laden’s terrorist network became associated with the training of the Somalian rebels that killed U.S. troops (Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu); the 1993 first bombing of the World Trade Center: an assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and suicide bombings at the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan.

The Sudanese officials expelled bin Laden from their country and in 1996 he moved back to Afghanistan. His terrorist activities continued with the bombing of the Khobar military complex: the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; truck bombs at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in Yemen.

During his “terrorist years” Bin Laden’s declared a holy war against U.S.; endorse a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world. These activities placed him on the FBI’s top 10 Most Wanted Fugitive List.

Bi Laden and the Taliban

In Afghanistan, Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda presence was not fully embraced by the Taliban. Well before the 9/11 attack, the Taliban had thought seriously about expelling al-Qaeda from their country. Many of the Taliban leaders viewed bin Laden’s and his jihadists as a rival foreign force distracting from their political influence and objectives. They were barely tolerated but the Taliban refused the US access to him.

Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization continued their terrorist plots and train terrorist in the camps along the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. Then in 2001, after 9/11, a trail of evidence indicated that bin Laden was not the architect of the plan but he approved it and that he added financial support for the hijacking terrorist. (the plot was planned in Indonesia, the Philippines, Germany and the United States)

Bush’s Wars on Terror, bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Iraq, Freedom etc.

The trail of the financial aid, directed to the terrorist, also led to Saudi Arabian royal family members and Saudi government associates. The Bush administration choose to fly the Saudi royal family members out of the United States while declaring a war on terrorism and bin Laden.

President Bush demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban government capture and extradite bin Laden to the United States. The Taliban did not refuse this request but instead asked the United States for proof of bin Laden’s involvement. Bush declined to address the Taliban’s request and issued an ultimatum demanding that they either turn him over or the US forces would take care of it.

Again, the Taliban responded with a “no” but offered to turn bin Laden over to a third county. This counter proposal was unprecedented for a Pashtun group to make. According to Pashtunwali, the ethical code and lifestyle of the indigenous Pashtun people, expelling bin-Laden could be interpreted as a violation of Nanawatai.

Nanawata (asylum) is the code to protect a person against his enemies, protection is required at all costs; even those running from the law must be given refuge until the situation can be clarified (this tradition saved the life of US Navy Seal, Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell) The counter proposal was rejected by the Bush administration. Bush ordered an invasion to capture bin Laden and destroy the al-Qaeda training camps.

“But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need”

Why was this counter proposal not approved? Would accepting the Taliban’s proposal have prevented this 17-year old war?  We will never know and besides the fury of 9/11 and the thrust for revenge would not have been satisfied.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and allied with the Northern Alliance to swiftly overthrow the Taliban government. The Bonn Conference replaced the Taliban government with Hamid Karzai. Karzai, a Pashtun rival of the Taliban, was selected to head the Afghan Interim Administration and most key positions in the government were given to Tajik members of the Northern Alliance

Karzai’s is rule ushered in a new of government under a new constitution called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Karzai would later be elected president in 2004 and then re-elected in the 2009 elections. In 2014, Karzai was replaced with the newly elected Ghani, an ex-World Bank economic hitman.

After the Taliban’s 2001 ousting, the Taliban vowed to continue an armed resistance against a “foreign occupation”. Their claim is that the Bonn Conference’s constitution is illegitimate and un-Islamic. They will continue their campaign is against the “puppet government” of the West. Some Taliban remained active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many crossed the border into the safe zones along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There they receive support and supplies from the ISI.

In 2002, the US focused their efforts on al-Qaeda and bin Laden and by the end of 2003 the US forces had moved bin-Laden and the al-Qaeda operatives out of Afghanistan into hideaways in Pakistan. This could have been a good time to withdraw from Afghanistan.  Washington passed on this opportunity to and choose to continue with its war and occupation of Afghanistan.

“Ch-ch-changes”

 The US’s war strategies have changed over the years; from the invasion to the support of an insurgent force, to a counterinsurgency surge (Obama’s 2009 100,000 troop invasion) to “clear and hold” villages to “nation building” projects to “winning hearts and minds”, to policing and to “training” of Afghans. All initiatives have proven to be fruitless. Could it be the mission?

To answer this question “the mission” must be clearly defined. What is the mission? When the war you get is not the war you “wanted” change the mission. Senator Rand Paul describes this process; “there was significant mission creep in Afghanistan. We went from striking back against those who attacked us, to regime change, to nation-building, to policing their country for them.”

So, by 2001, the US had overthrown the Talban regime, the government was replaced with a democratically elected president (2004), bin Laden was dead and the al-Qaeda terrorist camps were removed. Mission accomplished! Time to go home. No, mission creep, time to “Nation Build”.

When a foreign military force hangs around to tell, ask, direct, suggest or coerces the citizens it is not a humanitarian effort it becomes an occupying force. The military and economic, infrastructural and humanitarian efforts and personnel become targets. Occupation promotes dissent, dissent metastasizes into violence and the violence of an underdog is terrorism because that is their most powerful weapons.

Afghanistan is an impoverished nation with over half the population illiterate. Rural Afghanistan depends upon its local economy. Most villages are isolated by its mountainous terrain and harsh climate. At the time of the US invasion only 3% of the roads were paved.

Kabul and other major cities were worlds away. Most Afghans had no connection to the international economy nor to the central government, in Kabul. It is landlocked nation mostly comprised of Islamic fundamentalist and members of regional ethnic tribes with very basic needs. The Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, tribes’ have their list of priorities and territories to rule. Being left alone to provide and protect their family is high on the tribal list.

After the Taliban’s regime was removal from Kabul they returned to their power base, the villages of rural Afghanistan and into Pashtun Pakistan. The Taliban in these environments they grew in strength and recruitments. Many Afghans began to prefer the Taliban’s strict requirements over the coercive and corrupt central government that was supported by a foreign super power.

The Taliban lived among the villagers, became active in tribal disputes while carrying out a hit and run type war against the abusive local police, government forces and US occupying forces. The growth in the Taliban’s support and their intimidation of those villages that did not comply, allowed the Taliban to gain control over much of rural Afghanistan.

Obama’s War – The Surge

By 2009, Afghanistan was spiraling out of control. President Obama agreed to a surge in US reinforcements. The “Peace President” believed that a surge was needed to provide security for the Afghan government, military, police and the in country foreign forces. The surge would be a counterinsurgency against the Taliban. This counterinsurgency would be a clear-hold-build strategy.

The clear, hold and build strategy evolved into cycles of, what the Israeli refer to as “mowing the lawn” in which commanders continuously conquered territory only to have their adversaries return. Another problem with the hold and build phase was the who. Who would be doing the hold. The inability to recruit qualified Afghans became problematic. The new security was prone to shakedowns and corruption inflicted upon the locals.

In 2010, the Afghan Local Police formed a Village Stability Organization (VSO) program to provide the stability at the local level. The recruits would be from the village they would later secure. This group was trained by US special forces and provided limited success that allowed the local Afghans to avoid Taliban intimidation.

The US military leaders deceptively reported that the new stabilization effort stemmed the tide of support for the Taliban. Over time, the Taliban benefited by the fact that the people would see the police force as an extension of the predatory Afghan central government. The Taliban promoted this notion and continued their community involvement and random act of violence against the police force.

The escalating battles became a struggle for authority, the Taliban’s versus Kabul’s, local versus international and Islamic idealist warriors versus Western “infidels”.

Beginning in 2011, with the counterinsurgency and the “success” of the surge began a drawdown of troops. The transition of power was scheduled to be completed in 2014. The hold and build phases proved to be a false hope.

The Taliban patiently waited for the completion of the 2014 withdrawal They continued to be successful in their portrayal of the security forces as governmental extortionist sent to bribe the villagers with gifts and promises in return for support, cooperation and loyalty to its illegitimate government.

The withdrawal of combat troops was competed by December of 2014. Since the withdrawal, violence has continued and the Taliban’s rule has expanded. Today, in 2017, the Talban control 40% of the country.

This Taliban is not the same rag tag fighters the US fought against in 2000’s. The Taliban is more veteran, better trained, better supplied and more capable military force. They have learned from the US; they have read the US military books on war strategies; they have the night vision goggle left behind, they know how to use the armament left and they drive around in the Humvees that were once driven by the US and NATO forces.

The Afghan War has some new and some old combatants. Presently include, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the government forces with Pakistan, ISI and India watching closely. It is a hornet’s nest and is does not make sense to “mow the lawn” when angry hornets are swarming.

Trump’s War (officially entering its 3^rd Presidential Regime)

There are a few statements in the Trumps’ War speech that I found most infuriating.

One: The newest deployment of troops will not be number based but it will be condition based.      

This is an open check book with no accountability and no limit to lives and spending. Do we the people deserve answers? What are the conditions? What are the numbers? Trump will be sending more troops to Afghanistan but won’t tell the public how many. Just trust me?

Two: The same old false flag waving reason is being used to create a quilt upon our “American   Exceptionalism” public and a military mentality. We owe it to those that sacrificed their lives for such a noble cause.

This lie is both deceptive and immoral. The reality is that our sons’ and daughters’ lives are payment for the Generals to have another chance in getting their war “right”; another star; more fruit salad, more scrambled eggs and more notoriety.

It is immoral that Americans lives are spent to perpetuate war crimes; to hone the art of deception so that they will be better qualified for a job in the US government upon retirement. The fact that our taxes will be payment to government cronies that supply and manufacturer the weapons of war. Just Trust me?

The last time I fell for “just trust me” I woke up with my head in the toilet covered in puke. This time it could be the Constitution of the United States.

Conclusion – Let’s declare a “War on Peace”

Sovereignty is the authority of a state to govern itself. A sovereign nation gets to make choices for itself. The Taliban reflect the Pashtun culture. I vehemently disagree with many of their traditions and culture. As citizens of the liberal West, we have the right to speak, assemble, boycott and protest traditions and cultures of an illiberal non-Western country. The Taliban’s actions, customs and control are local to Afghanistan, not to the United States.

Afghanistan has been fractured by internal conflict and foreign intervention for centuries, However, as a sovereign and neutral nation, in the 1950s and 1960s, the biggest strides toward a more liberal and westernized lifestyle occurred. The era was a brief and relatively peaceful.  The Afghans traded with the Soviet for machinery and weapons, and with U.S. financial aid the Afghans constructed modern buildings in Kabul. Afghanistan appeared to be on a path toward a more open, prosperous society, while maintaining, a respect for the more conservative factions and traditional cultures of its multi-tribal population.

The U.S. must admit that the “Good War” turned into an attempt to reshape the structures of Afghan societies, politics, and economies has failed and it is time to leave. Let the people of Afghanistan take ownership of their future, Let the Afghans prepare their defense against the next invading force. (ISIS, AL-Qaeda, ISI, Pakistan, India …)

Hewaad (Pashtun for country) is another Pashtun culture obligation. It is to protect the land of the Pashtuns. To them defense of the nation means the defense of Pashtun culture. ISIS, al-Qaeda, Pakistan, India, will become another victim to add to the pile of previous empires that have expired in Afghanistan. Hopefully, the US will not be in that pile.

The US lost 58,228 lives in Vietnam for entering a civil war against the illiberal Vietcong. Shortly after the last US troops withdrew the civil war ended, Vietnam united and won its sovereignty. Vietnam rebuilt and modernized at a pace that they decided upon.

The US now has a strong diplomatic relation with Vietnam. Vietnam has the 47^th highest Gross Domestic Product. (GDP out of 211) It is one of the most attractive retail markets in the world and has become a prime US trading partner that prospers from an increasing US tourist industry. The French and US intervention delayed the ultimate result of Vietnam by 25 years and millions of lives.

Vietnam was for a “War on Communism”, Afghanistan a “War of Terrorism” and the opioid crisis a “War on Drugs.” Declaring war strengthen the “enemy”.  I am declaring a “WAR on Peace!”