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Zebra 3 Report by Joe Anybody
Monday, 30 May 2011
WAr Timeline: U.S. Military, 1775 - 1994
Mood:
 don't ask
Now Playing: Timeline stops in 1995
Topic: WAR
PBS Timeline: U.S. Military Actions and Wars, 1775 - 1994Other Timelines
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/timeline/warletters/  Library of Congress Signing the Declaration of Independence 1775-1783: The Thirteen Colonies Colonists wage and win a guerilla war for American independence from England 1798-1800: The Quasi-War Along the U.S. Atlantic Coast and the West Indies, an undeclared war with France begins; the U.S. wins 9 of 10 naval encounters. 1801-1805: Tripolitan War Tripoli (now Libya) declares war on the U.S.; the U.S. responds by blockading and then invading Tripoli. 1811: The "Indian Belt" Affair Across Indiana and Michigan, U.S. forces, led by Tecumseh defeat Native Americans and burn a city, Prophetstown.  Library of Congress U.S. Constitution and H.M.S. Java 1812-1815: The War of 1812 The U.S. wars with Great Britain over freedom of the seas, capture of seamen, and a blockade of U.S. ports. Battles were fought in and around Lake Erie; New Orleans, Louisiana; and the nation's capital. 1817-1818: First Seminole War Following Native American raids in Florida, U.S. forces destroy Seminole villages and break tribal resistance. 1832: Assault on Sumatra In the first U.S. armed intervention in Asia, the U.S. retaliates against an attack on a U.S. merchant vessel, killing 100 Sumatrans and burning the town of Quallah Battoo, located in what is now Indonesia. 1832: Black Hawk War In Illinois and Wisconsin, Sac and Fox tribes under Sac leader Black Hawk attack white settlers, but are defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe. 1835-1836: Texas Revolution Texas settlers revolt against Mexico. 1835-1842: Second Seminole War In Florida, American troops clash with Native Americans led by Osceola; the Seminole people are reduced to 350 in number by 1842. 1838-1839: Aroostook War The U.S. fights an undeclared war with England over Maine's boundaries. Approximately 10,000 troops camp along the Aroostook River in a conflict without casualties.  Library of Congress Recruiting notice for the Mexican War 1846-1848: The Mexican War The U.S. declares war against Mexico; the war ends with Mexico ceding all rights to Texas, and the U.S. purchase of New Mexico and California. 1847-1850: Cayuse War In Washington state, Cayuse destroy the intrusive mission of Marcus Whitman, blaming the missionaries for a smallpox outbreak. In addition to Whitman, his wife, and their helpers, 14 Native Americans are killed. The U.S. military forces the Cayuse to surrender and hangs five people. 1855-1858: Third Seminole War Brigadier General William S. Harney subdues Billy Bowlegs and other Seminole warriors in Florida. 1856: Bleeding Kansas Conflict erupts in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery forces, including John Brown; federal troops quell the fighting. 1857-1858: Mormon Expedition The U.S. Army subdues Mormons who refuse to obey federal law in Utah.  LIbrary of Congress Civil War Battle Scene 1861-1865: American Civil War Americans go to war over slavery and the attempted secession of southern states from the United States. 1871: War with Korea After merchants are killed in Korea, the U.S. kills 250 Koreans in battle; a treaty is secured in 1882. 1871-1876: Apache Wars Apache leaders Geronimo and Victorio raid white settlers and soldiers in Arizona; Geronimo surrenders in 1886.  Colorado Historical Society Captain Jack and his followers checking the advance of Union troops in the lava beds 1872-1873: Modoc War In California and Oregon, U.S. cavalry fight to return the Modoc people and their leader, Kintpuash (known to whites as Captain Jack), to an Oregon reservation; Kintpuash is hanged and the Modoc are exiled to Oklahoma. 1876-1877: Black Hills War Gold in South Dakota brings in whites to Sioux land. Colonel George A. Custer and 264 soldiers are killed at Little Bighorn; subsequently, the U.S. Army destroys Indian resistance.  Library of Congress Nez Perce group known as "Chief Joseph's Band", Lapwai, Idaho, spring, 1877 1877: Nez Percé War Across Idaho, Oregon, and the Washington border, the U.S. moves against the previously peaceful Nez Percé people in the Northwest; Chief Joseph leads a skillful retreat towards Canada, but is caught. 1878: Bannock War Native Americans of the Bannock tribe attack white settlers in Idaho before they suffer heavy losses and are forced back to Fort Hall Reservation. 1890: Messiah War The U.S. apprehends Sioux leader Sitting Bull, who is killed when followers try to free him. The Sioux surrender but are massacred at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, in this final fight between Native Americans and the U.S. Army. 1893: Coup in Hawaii U.S. Marines land in the kingdom of Hawaii to aid the overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani.  Colorado Historical Society 'Off to War' parade in Denver, CO 1898-1902: Spanish-American War U.S. victories against Spain lead to the Treaty of Paris, which establishes the independence of Cuba, and cedes Puerto Rico and Guam to the U.S.. The U.S. also purchases the Philippines for $20 million. 1912: Occupation of Nicaragua Marines arrive in Nicaragua to bolster the government of Adolfo Diaz; the last marines depart in 1934. 1914: Tampico Affair After U.S. Marines are arrested at Tampico, U.S. forces bombard Veracruz, Mexico, and occupy the city. 1915: Invasion of Haiti U.S. Marines occupy Haiti after a civil war; a treaty between the U.S. and the Haitian Senate makes the island nation a virtual U.S. protectorate. Troops withdraw in 1934. 1916-1917: Expedition Against Villa The U.S. military invades Northern Mexico to capture Mexican Pancho Villa, who had raided New Mexico, killing 18; U.S. forces numbering 11,000 withdraw, unable to capture Villa.  Library of Congress Corner of the battlefield near Arras 1917-1918: World War I The U.S. ends three years of neutrality in the European conflict, declaring war on Germany. An armistice is declared November 11, 1918. 1918-1920: Siberian Expedition The U.S. and other Allied troops invade Russia to protect war supplies during the Russian Revolution. 1927: Protection of Shanghai's International Settlement One hundred Marines land in Shanghai to defend U.S. property during a civil war there.  Colorado Historical Society 7 GI's at a sandbag bunker in Italy 1941-1945: World War II The U.S. enters World War II after Japanese planes attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; in 1945, Germany and Japan surrender to Allied forces 1950-1953: Korean War The U.S. battles North Korean soldiers and then Chinese soldiers in Korea before an armistice is signed in 1953. 1955: Defense of Chinese Nationalists The U.S. 7th Fleet helps Nationalist Chinese evacuate 25,000 troops and 17,000 civilians from China to Taiwan to escape victorious Communist forces.  Vietnam War Internet Project Soldiers with a prisoner 1955-1973: Vietnam War In 1955, U.S. advisers are sent to Vietnam; in 1964 Congress authorizes President Lyndon B. Johnson to "repel any armed attack" in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. A cease-fire is declared in 1973. 1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion A CIA-backed invasion of Cuba fails. 1962: Anti-Communist Intervention President John F. Kennedy orders 5,000 troops to Thailand to support the right-wing Laotian government. 1965: Dominican Crisis Marines invade the Dominican Republic at the start of a civil war; troops withdraw in 1966. 1975: Mayaguez Incident A U.S. merchant ship is rescued from Cambodians by U.S. Navy and Marines off the coast of Cambodia. 1980: Operation Eagle Claw A military mission to free American hostages in Iran fails. 1983: Operation Urgent Fury U.S. Marines and Rangers remove U.S. medical students from Grenada. 1986: Operation El Dorado Canyon U.S. war planes strike Libya in retaliation for the Libyan bombing of a West Berlin disco. 1990-1991: Persian Gulf War The U.S. leads a multi-nation coalition against Iraq after that country invades Kuwait; Iraq surrenders. 199-1993: Operation Restore Hope U.S. troops go to Somalia to help restore order and deliver food during a period of unrest and famine. 1994-1995: Operation Uphold Democracy The U.S. Army sends troops to Haiti in September 1994 to help restore a democratic government.
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 6:14 AM PDT
Updated: Thursday, 2 June 2011 7:37 AM PDT
Monday, 23 May 2011
War ... what is good for? Absolutly Nothing!.. Say it again!
Mood:
 accident prone
Now Playing: May 21 updates from the Internet - whos that war going anyway?
Topic: WAR
Reported by Zabihullah Mujahid and Qari Yousuf Ahmadi | Afghan Taliban Spokespersons
Operation Badar MAY 21 2011
1. FARAH, May. 21 –Mujahideen detonated a remote-controlled roadside bomb on an American tank at 03:00 pm yesterday, instantly killing all 4 invaders onboard in Bakwa’s Ghaziabad area.
2. KANDAHAR, May. 21 – As many as 4 police minions lost their lives in Dand district’s Pazki area when their vehicle was blown to bits by a land mine at around 04:00 pm yesterday.
3. ZABUL, May. 21 – A US Special Forces military convoy travelling on Kabul-Kandahar main highway through Matizo area near Qalat city was hit by land mines, eliminating 2 Land Cruiser 4WD vehicles and killing all invaders inside.
4. KANDAHAR, May. 21 – At around 05:00 pm yesterday in Dand’s Pazki area, 3 police puppets including their commander were killed and 4 others seriously wounded in bombing which destroyed their vehicle.
5. ZABUL, May. 21 – An ebony skinned American terrorist who had come out of his outpost at 07:00 am local time was shot dead by Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate in Shomolzo’s Qala Rasheed area.
6. ZABUL, May. 21 – 5 innocent civilians were detained and taken back to their bases by barbaric US invaders in Shomolzo’s Pie Khelo area after raided their homes last night.
7. ZABUL, May. 21 – A border police vehicle in Shomolzo’s Haji Ajab Khan Nawrhi area was obliterated by an IED at around 05:00 pm yesterday, killing all 4 puppets onboard.
8. ZABUL, May. 21 – As many as 7 police minions lost their lives or were severely wounded when their vehicle was annihilated by an IED in Nawrak area located near Qalat city at 09:00 am this morning.
9. KABUL, May 21 – As many as 51 military doctors and other officials of the NATO and local puppets got killed and dozens more were wounded on Saturday noon local time in twin martyr attacks that rocked the Charsad Bestar (400-bed) hospital, the largest military hospital in the country located in the heart of Kabul city, the capital of the country, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman for Al-Emarah reported from.
Both Mujahids have embraced martyrdom with an interval of an hour after fighting bravely in the military section of the hospital before detonating their explosivs belts, Mujahid added.
10. HELMAND, May. 21 – At least 2 US invaders were killed and 3 fatally wounded in an IED attack on their foot patrol in Nad Ali’s Si Waik Gharbi area at 02:00 pm yesterday while walking in front of their outpost.
11. FARYAB, May. 21 – An ISAF tank in Khwaja Namusa district’s Ghra Taifa area was destroyed earlier this morning by a land mine, killing 2 invaders and seriously wounding 3 others onboard.
12. HELMAND, May. 21 – Heavy fighting is taking place in Nawa district since earlier this afternoon when Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate, as part of operation ‘Badar’ carried out an armed assault on the invaders outposts located in Tangano Godar area.
13. KANDAHAR, May. 21 – Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate from Zhiri district say that the US tank, which the invaders used to park in Sarkili area to ambush Mujahideen everyday, was shot this afternoon by 82mm canon round, destroying the tank and killing all enemy personnel inside.
14. ZABUL, May. 21 – An anti-tank mine planted by Mujahideen on the main road to Shomolzo near Shinki district center tore through an American armored tank at 09:00 am this morning, killing and wounding all invaders inside.
15. HELMAND, May. 21 – Latest reports arriving about the Helmand offensive which carried out by Mujahideen of Islamic Emirate in the entire district 2 days earlier as a part of ‘Operation Badar’ say that those 20 missiles which slammed into Shurab airfield, considered as the enemies largest base in the province had destroyed 6 US helicopters after hitting their shelter besides causing the enemy deadly casualties.
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Posted by Joe Anybody
at 10:58 AM PDT
Updated: Monday, 23 May 2011 11:18 AM PDT
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Just The Facts 702 in 130 + 6,ooo
Mood:
 not sure
Now Playing: Military Economy - The Rich Get Cake The Poor Starve
Topic: WAR
Hows the War Economy Working For You Portland Indymedia newswire: "According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate,
"The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners.
The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more." Common DreamsThese are just examples of the War Economy of the United States. It reaches into the very heart of our country and exudes from every pore. In order to dominate the planet and insure our security, the U.S. allocates 59% of it's discretionary budget to the Military(Department of Defense, War, Veterans Affairs and Nuclear Weapons Programs.
Such expenditures constantly demand cuts in funding for education, health care and other social service programs, as evidenced, for example, by recent Republican attempted cuts to Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio.
Portland March 19 protest videos from Peace Rally
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 11:55 AM PDT
Updated: Sunday, 27 March 2011 11:57 AM PDT
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
The CIA and the Western Media - Can you say "Curveball in Iraq"
Mood:
 loud
Now Playing: Iraq war liar - informant named and the media "curveball"
Topic: WAR
| | An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western Media
By Jonathan Cook
| Global Research, February 28, 2011 |
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.
Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world -- including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral element in that transnational elite.
The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations; -- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation; -- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom; -- That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness; -- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; -- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.
These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us -- and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late, to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders -- those opposed to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” -- opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not directly -- what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff -- termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.
The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media landscape, to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. |
| Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global ResearchThe CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com© Copyright Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2011 The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23432 |
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| | An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western Media
By Jonathan Cook
| Global Research, February 28, 2011 |
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.
Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world -- including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral element in that transnational elite.
The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations; -- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation; -- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom; -- That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness; -- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; -- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.
These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us -- and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late, to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders -- those opposed to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” -- opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not directly -- what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff -- termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.
The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media landscape, to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. |
| Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global ResearchThe CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com© Copyright Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2011 The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23432 |
|
| | An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western Media
By Jonathan Cook
| Global Research, February 28, 2011 |
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.
Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world -- including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral element in that transnational elite.
The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations; -- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation; -- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom; -- That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness; -- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; -- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.
These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us -- and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late, to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders -- those opposed to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” -- opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not directly -- what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff -- termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.
The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media landscape, to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. |
| Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global ResearchThe CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com© Copyright Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2011 The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23432 |
|
| | An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western Media
By Jonathan Cook
| Global Research, February 28, 2011 |
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.
Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world -- including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral element in that transnational elite.
The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations; -- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation; -- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom; -- That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness; -- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; -- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.
These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us -- and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late, to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders -- those opposed to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” -- opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not directly -- what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff -- termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.
The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media landscape, to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. |
| Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global ResearchThe CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com© Copyright Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2011 The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=23432 |
|
An Empire of Lies: The CIA and the Western Media
Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role -- if an inadvertent one -- in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.
Curveball’s account included the details of mobile biological weapons trucks presented by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to the United Nations in early 2003. Powell’s apparently compelling case on WMD was used to justify the US attack on Iraq a few weeks later.
Eight years on, Curveball revealed to the Guardian that he had fabricated the story of Saddam’s WMD back in 2000, shortly after his arrival in Germany seeking asylum. He told the paper he had lied to German intelligence in the hope his testimony might help topple Saddam, though it seems more likely he simply wanted to ensure his asylum case was taken more seriously.
For the careful reader -- and I stress the word careful -- several disturbing facts emerged from the report.
One was that the German authorities had quickly proven his account of Iraq’s WMD to be false. Both German and British intelligence had travelled to Dubai to meet Bassil Latif, his former boss at Iraq’s Military Industries Commission. Dr Latif had proven that Curveball’s claims could not be true. The German authorities quickly lost interest in Janabi and he was not interviewed again until late 2002, when it became more pressing for the US to make a convincing case for an attack on Iraq.
Another interesting disclosure was that, despite the vital need to get straight all the facts about Curveball’s testimony -- given the stakes involved in launching a pre-emptive strike against another sovereign state -- the Americans never bothered to interview Curveball themselves.
A third revelation was that the CIA’s head of operations in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, passed on warnings from German intelligence that they considered Curveball’s testimony to be highly dubious. The head of the CIA, George Tenet, simply ignored the advice.
With Curveball’s admission in mind, as well as these other facts from the story, we can draw some obvious conclusions -- conclusions confirmed by subsequent developments.
Lacking both grounds in international law and the backing of major allies, the Bush administration desperately needed Janabi’s story about WMD, however discredited it was, to justify its military plans for Iraq. The White House did not interview Curveball because they knew his account of Saddam’s WMD programme was made up. His story would unravel under scrutiny; better to leave Washington with the option of “plausible deniability”.
Nonetheless, Janabi’s falsified account was vitally useful: for much of the American public, it added a veneer of credibility to the implausible case that Saddam was a danger to the world; it helped fortify wavering allies facing their own doubting publics; and it brought on board Colin Powell, a former general seen as the main voice of reason in the administration.
In other words, Bush’s White House used Curveball to breathe life into its mythological story about Saddam’s threat to world peace.
So how did the Guardian, a bastion of liberal journalism, present its exclusive on the most controversial episode in recent American foreign policy?
Here is its headline: “How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam”.
Did the headline-writer misunderstand the story as written by the paper’s reporters? No, the headline neatly encapsulated its message. In the text, we are told Powell's presentation to the UN “revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed” Curveball’s account. At another point, we are told Janabi “pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence”. And that: “His critics -- who are many and powerful -- say the cost of his deception is too difficult to estimate.”
In other words, the Guardian assumed, despite all the evidence uncovered in its own research, that Curveball misled the Bush administration into making a disastrous miscalculation. On this view, the White House was the real victim of Curveball’s lies, not the Iraqi people -- more than a million of whom are dead as a result of the invasion, according to the best available figures, and four million of whom have been forced into exile.
There is nothing exceptional about this example. I chose it because it relates to an event of continuing and momentous significance.
Unfortunately, there is something depressingly familiar about this kind of reporting, even in the West’s main liberal publications. Contrary to its avowed aim, mainstream journalism invariably diminishes the impact of new events when they threaten powerful elites.
We will examine why in a minute. But first let us consider what, or who, constitutes “empire” today? Certainly, in its most symbolic form, it can be identified as the US government and its army, comprising the world’s sole superpower.
Traditionally, empires have been defined narrowly, in terms of a strong nation-state that successfully expands its sphere of influence and power to other territories. Empire’s aim is to make those territories dependent, and then either exploit their resources in the case of poorly developed countries, or, with more developed countries, turn them into new markets for its surplus goods. It is in this latter sense that the American empire has often been able to claim that it is a force for global good, helping to spread freedom and the benefits of consumer culture.
Empire achieves its aims in different ways: through force, such as conquest, when dealing with populations resistant to the theft of their resources; and more subtly through political and economic interference, persuasion and mind-control when it wants to create new markets. However it works, the aim is to create a sense in the dependent territories that their interests and fates are bound to those of empire.
In our globalised world, the question of who is at the centre of empire is much less clear than it once was. The US government is today less the heart of empire than its enabler. What were until recently the arms of empire, especially the financial and military industries, have become a transnational imperial elite whose interests are not bound by borders and whose powers largely evade legislative and moral controls.
Israel’s leadership, we should note, as well its elite supporters around the world -- including the Zionist lobbies, the arms manufacturers and Western militaries, and to a degree even the crumbling Arab tyrannies of the Middle East -- are an integral element in that transnational elite.
The imperial elites’ success depends to a large extent on a shared belief among the western public both that “we” need them to secure our livelihoods and security and that at the same time we are really their masters. Some of the necessary illusions perpetuated by the transnational elites include:
-- That we elect governments whose job is to restrain the corporations; -- That we, in particular, and the global workforce in general are the chief beneficiaries of the corporations’ wealth creation; -- That the corporations and the ideology that underpins them, global capitalism, are the only hope for freedom; -- That consumption is not only an expression of our freedom but also a major source of our happiness; -- That economic growth can be maintained indefinitely and at no long-term cost to the health of the planet; -- And that there are groups, called terrorists, who want to destroy this benevolent system of wealth creation and personal improvement.
These assumptions, however fanciful they may appear when subjected to scrutiny, are the ideological bedrock on which the narratives of our societies in the West are constructed and from which ultimately our sense of identity derives. This ideological system appears to us -- and I am using “we” and “us” to refer to western publics only -- to describe the natural order.
The job of sanctifying these assumptions -- and ensuring they are not scrutinised -- falls to our mainstream media. Western corporations own the media, and their advertising makes the industry profitable. In this sense, the media cannot fulfil the function of watchdog of power, because in fact it is power. It is the power of the globalised elite to control and limit the ideological and imaginative horizons of the media’s readers and viewers. It does so to ensure that imperial interests, which are synonymous with those of the corporations, are not threatened.
The Curveball story neatly illustrates the media’s role.
His confession has come too late -- eight years too late, to be precise -- to have any impact on the events that matter. As happens so often with important stories that challenge elite interests, the facts vitally needed to allow western publics to reach informed conclusions were not available when they were needed. In this case, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are gone, as are their neoconservative advisers. Curveball’s story is now chiefly of interest to historians.
That last point is quite literally true. The Guardian’s revelations were of almost no concern to the US media, the supposed watchdog at the heart of the US empire. A search of the Lexis Nexis media database shows that Curveball’s admissions featured only in the New York Times, in a brief report on page 7, as well as in a news round-up in the Washington Times. The dozens of other major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, made no mention of it at all.
Instead, the main audience for the story outside the UK was the readers of India’s Hindu newspaper and the Khaleej Times.
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value. The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited a “fantasist” -- or desperate exile from a brutal regime, depending on how one looks at it -- for its own illegal and immoral ends.
Why did the Guardian miss the main point in its own exclusive? The reason is that all our mainstream media, however liberal, take as their starting point the idea both that the West’s political culture is inherently benevolent and that it is morally superior to all existing, or conceivable, alternative systems.
In reporting and commentary, this is demonstrated most clearly in the idea that “our” leaders always act in good faith, whereas “their” leaders -- those opposed to empire or its interests -- are driven by base or evil motives.
It is in this way that official enemies, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, can be singled out as personifying the crazed or evil dictator -- while other equally rogue regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s are described as “moderate” -- opening the way for their countries to become targets of our own imperial strategies.
States selected for the “embrace” of empire are left with a stark choice: accept our terms of surrender and become an ally; or defy empire and face our wrath.
When the corporate elites trample on other peoples and states to advance their own selfish interests, such as in the invasion of Iraq to control its resources, our dominant media cannot allow its reporting to frame the events honestly. The continuing assumption in liberal commentary about the US attack on Iraq, for example, is that, once no WMD were found, the Bush administration remained to pursue a misguided effort to root out the terrorists, restore law and order, and spread democracy.
For the western media, our leaders make mistakes, they are naïve or even stupid, but they are never bad or evil. Our media do not call for Bush or Blair to be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
This, of course, does not mean that the western media is Pravda, the propaganda mouthpiece of the old Soviet empire. There are differences. Dissent is possible, though it must remain within the relatively narrow confines of “reasonable” debate, a spectrum of possible thought that accepts unreservedly the presumption that we are better, more moral, than them.
Similarly, journalists are rarely told -- at least, not directly -- what to write. The media have developed careful selection processes and hierarchies among their editorial staff -- termed “filters” by media critics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky -- to ensure that dissenting or truly independent journalists do not reach positions of real influence.
There is, in other words, no simple party line. There are competing elites and corporations, and their voices are reflected in the narrow range of what we term commentary and opinion. Rather than being dictated to by party officials, as happened under the Soviet system, our journalists scramble for access, to be admitted into the ante-chambers of power. These privileges make careers but they come at a huge cost to the reporters’ independence.
Nonetheless, the range of what is permissible is slowly expanding -- over the opposition of the elites and our mainstream TV and press. The reason is to be found in the new media, which is gradually eroding the monopoly long enjoyed by the corporate media to control the spread of information and popular ideas. Wikileaks is so far the most obvious, and impressive, outcome of that trend.
The consequences are already tangible across the Middle East, which has suffered disproportionately under the oppressive rule of empire. The upheavals as Arab publics struggle to shake off their tyrants are also stripping bare some of the illusions the western media have peddled to us. Empire, we have been told, wants democracy and freedom around the globe. And yet it is caught mute and impassive as the henchmen of empire unleash US-made weapons against their peoples who are demanding western-style freedoms.
An important question is: how will our media respond to this exposure, not just of our politicians’ hypocrisy but also of their own? They are already trying to co-opt the new media, including Wikileaks, but without real success. They are also starting to allow a wider range of debate, though still heavily constrained, than had been possible before.
The West’s version of glasnost is particularly obvious in the coverage of the problem closest to our hearts here in Palestine. What Israel terms a delegitimisation campaign is really the opening up -- slightly -- of the media landscape, to allow a little light where until recently darkness reigned.
This is an opportunity and one that we must nurture. We must demand of the corporate media more honesty; we must shame them by being better-informed than the hacks who recycle official press releases and clamour for access; and we must desert them, as is already happening, for better sources of information.
We have a window. And we must force it open before the elites of empire try to slam it shut.
This is the text of a talk entitled “Media as a Tool of Empire” delivered to Sabeel, the Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, at its eighth international conference in Bethlehem on Friday February 25.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. |
Jonathan Cook is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Jonathan Cook |
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 12:01 AM PST
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
My Cousin Ted
Mood:
 blue
Now Playing: http://www.iraqwarheroes.org/westhusing.htm
Topic: WAR
Theodore S Westhusing | Dallas, Texas | June 5, 2005 | | Age | Military | Rank | Unit/Location | | 44 | Army | Col | United States Military Academy West Point, New York |
| Died in Baghdad, Iraq, from non-combat related injuries. | | | | From Brian C 04/10/08: Ted Westhusing, was a champion basketball player at Jenks High School in Tulsa Oklahoma. A driven kid with a strong work ethic, he would show up at the gym at 7AM to throw 100 practice shots before school. He was driven academically too, becoming a National Merritt Scholarship finalist. His career through West Point and straight into overseas service was sterling, and by 2000 he had enrolled in Emory University to earn his doctorate in Philosophy. His dissertation was on honor and the ethics of war, with the opening containing the following passage: "Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge." Would that all military commanders took such an interest in the study of ethics and morality and what our conduct in times of war says about our development as human beings. Would that any educational system in this country taught ethics, decision making, or even political science that's not part of an advanced degree anymore.
Ted Westhusing, the soldier, philosopher and ethicist, was given a guaranteed lifetime teaching position and West Point by the time he had finished with his service and his education. he felt like he could do more for his country by trying to shape the minds coming out of the academy that were the ones that would be military commanders. He had settled into that life with his wife and kids, when in 2004 he volunteered for active duty in Iraq, feeling like the experience would help his teaching. He had missed combat in his active duty and it seemed like an important piece for someone who not only philosophized about war, but who was also preparing the military's future leaders.
But more than that, he was sure that the Iraq mission was a just one; he supported the cause and he bought the information that was put in front of him. Considering that vials of powder were being tossed around hearings by the highest level of military commanders how could he not? This was a man who was so steeped in the patriotism of idealistic military fervor that he barely could fit in regular society. His whole being was dedicated to this path, and he was proud to serve his country.
Once in Iraq, he found himself straddling the fence between a questioning philosopher and an unquestioning soldier. Westhusing had thought he was freeing a country in bondage, keeping America safe from a horrible threat, and spreading democracy to a grateful people. But the reality of what was happening in this out of control war was too much for him. His mission was to oversee one of the most important tasks left from the war; retraining the Iraqi military by overseeing the private contractors that had been put in charge of it.
As the assignment went on he found that everywhere he looked he was seeing corrupt contractors doing shoddy work, abusing people, and stealing from the government. These contractors were being paid to do many of the jobs that would normally be done by a regulated military, and they bore out the worst fears of those who don't believe in outsourcing such vital work. He responded to the corruption that he saw by reporting the problems up the line, but the response from his commanding officers was disappointing. He had, for much of his career, idolized military commanders, and in that assignment he found himself with some of the military's most famous faces, doing the most important job, but he was terribly disappointed and alarmed to realize that they were greedy and corrupt themselves.
The wall of silence about this was impenetrable and the reality of the situation turned his entire belief system upside down, making him question everything that was going on, and his role in it. Having envisioned the top military commanders to be the most honorable that America has to offer, he was crushed to find out that ascending to power in this military could be more due to cronyism than expertise and that these men who he had aspired to be like were greedy and corrupt themselves. Upon reporting to his commanding officers, he realized that not only did the problems stretch to the level above him, but that they were systemic.
To these commanders the only real problem was the fact that they had a deeply honorable soldier in their command that was likely to rock the cash cow. Westhusing was so bereft at the realization of his part in this breakdown in the military's code of conduct, and the atrocities carried out in America's name, that he became despondent and finally in June, 2005, he shot himself. It was called a suicide, though there have been some questions raised about it.
He's not the first Iraq suicide, though he was, at the time of his death, the highest ranking one. He was an oddity; a thinking soldier in a war that requires blind obedience, and unwavering dedication. The black and white world of Bush's military doesn't allow much for the grays that come into the picture when one is, at heart, a philosopher...and even in the face of seeing the reality of war, how can anyone come to terms with the revelation of corruption on this scale? More crushing was the realization that the leaders that he idolized, and the honor that he held as being the very foundation of his entire world as a military officer, were all a lie, and stories told to cadets at West Point that didn't bear out in reality. The leaders in this war didn't care, and many were, as he outlined in his 4 page suicide letter, that was addressed to General's Fil and Petraeus, his direct commanders, only out for their own selfish enrichment.
Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don't care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential—I don't know who trust anymore. [sic] Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.
COL Ted Westhusing
Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq. | | | | |
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 11:08 PM PST
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Veterans in DC today chain themselves to Fence 12/16/10
Mood:
 special
Now Playing: Veterans For Peace DEMAND PEACE NOW ...in Washington DC
Topic: WAR
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 11:55 AM PST
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Lots of hidden ways we are taxed to support offensive wars
Mood:
 bright
Now Playing: War and Taxes, stop the high treason, Congress never declared war.
Topic: WAR
Hello Z3 Readers the email below I received this morning, and am sharing the insight with you all - it was written by a Veteran For Peace Chapter 72 member. I am eager to share it. ~joe
No apology necessary. It's a good rant.
I am reminded that there are a lot of hidden ways we are taxed to support offensive wars
that have never been officially declared.
Allowing Sears to jack up its prices and lower its dividends to shareholders for the purpose
of paying reservists is just another form of war tax.
If Congress does not actually declare a war there should not be one. If a war is declared by
Congress it should be paid for out of current government revenues not by borrowing from China
or shifting costs to the patrons of Sears.
Those who never serve in uniform cannot understand what it actually means, namely taking an
oath to protect the Consititution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution is very
clear in providing a deterrent to offensive wars by requiring an actual declaration by Congress
and this requires Congress to provide the means by which the war is to be paid for. There cannot
be tax cuts during war time or any form of shifting the burden onto consumers or shareholders.
Unless there is a declaration of war by Congress there should never be the mobilization of the
reserves let alone consecutive overseas duty assignments that leave our domestic services
such as the police, fire department, hospitals, and schools understaffed due to inappropriate
offensive deployment of the active duty forces and the reserves.
According to the Constitution it is all about defense. If Congress wants to go after pirates on the
high seas or make a marque of reprisal that needs to be done in a manner that commits the
necessary means at the time such Congressional powers are exercised. There should never be
shielding of the rich supporters of the Republican Party from the actual costs of war or the
exercise of other defensive measures. To insist on such shielding is actually a form of
high treason in a time of war and the Republicans need to be held accountable for this
unpatriotic practice and recognized as domestic enemies of the Constitution.
Respectfully yours,
Howard Welsh
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 6:00 AM PST
Updated: Saturday, 4 December 2010 2:34 PM PST
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Plowshares and Trident Nukes - 5 protester activist are in the courtroom
Mood:
not sure
Now Playing: Disarm Now Plowshares were in court again (Nov 2010)
Topic: WAR
1. Disarm Now Plowshares: Motions to Dismiss DENIED!
(posted on VFP ch 72 email server: Malcolm Chaddock)
11.23.10
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Friends,
The Disarm Now Plowshares were in court again; this time for the pre-trial
conference in which a most important issue ? the motions to dismiss their
case ? was argued.
All five Disarm Now Plowshares co-defendants - Bill ?Bix? Bichsel, SJ, Susan
Crane, Lynne Greenwald, Steve Kelly, SJ, and Anne Montgomery, RSCJ ? were
present for the proceedings in Judge Benjamin Settle?s courtroom at the U.S.
District Court, Tacoma, Washington on November 22, 2010.
Susan Crane began the defendant?s testimony; the following are some of her
key points.
?Our action on Nov. 2, the testimony of Ramsey Clark, the motions we filed,
make clear that we are *concerned about the trident nuclear warheads*??
?The trident nuclear weapons system is illegal and immoral. It?s a system
preparing for the mass murder of innocent civilians that will affect
generations to come.?
?As loving human beings, we have a responsibility, right and duty to use
nonviolent actions to prevent the trident nuclear weapons system from
operating.?
Crane went on to invoke the heart of the Plowshares vision and its vital
importance in addressing Trident (and nuclear weapons) that constitute the
taproot of violence in our nation (and the world).
?On Nov. 2, 2009, we *remembered t*he words of the prophet *Isaiah,* who had
a vision of beating swords into plowshares??convert weapons of war into
something useful for human life. *It is our firm understanding that these
Trident nuclear weapons are illegal under national and international* law,
as well as the teachings of our faith, and general humanitarian law and
conscience.?
Crane worked to build the defense case for applying the necessity defense;
that ?the indisputable facts of Trident are hard to face, but we can?t deny
that it is in preparation for the use of nuclear weapons.? Understanding
that there is ?imminent harm? from the manufacture, deployment and
preparation for the use of Trident, the Disarm Now Plowshares acted out of
conscience, and moral and legal duty. ?The harm we created (cut fence) is
minor in comparison with the harm of a nuclear explosion.?
Anne Montgomery spoke to former Attorney General Ramsey Clark?s previous
testimony in this case before she moved on to discussing her first
Plowshares action, King of Prussia in 1980. She remembered thinking at that
time that, ?If someone had a gun in his or her hand, I would have to knock
it out of that hand.? She stated that they cut the fences because there was
no other way in; no criminal intent. Montgomery also stressed that they
have tried all other means to bring light to these weapons, and had to do
this Plowshares action because the public is ignorant of the existence of
the weapons. ?We were willing to give our own blood to avoid shedding the
blood of others.?
In reference to the justification defense, Montgomery quoted Judge Spaeth
from a concurrent opinion in the Superior Court in Pennsylvania in a 1983
appeal of the Plowshares Eight trial.
?Accordingly, whenever a defendant pleads justification, the court should
ask, ?What higher value than the value of literal compliance with the law is
defendant asserting?? The trial court failed to ask this question. Apparently
in its eyes *no* higher value is implicated in this case. And for the
dissent, this case is to be decided as we would decide a case involving ?the
theft and destruction of guns or explosives by altruistic and well-meaning
citizens who sincerely believe that guns or explosives possess the potential
to kill at sometime in the future.? But appellants are not pleading the
danger arising from ?guns or explosives;? they are pleading the danger
arising from nuclear missiles. One who does not understand that danger does
not understand appellants? plea.?
?Appellants do not assert that their action would *avoid* nuclear war (what
a grandiose and unlikely idea!). Instead, at least so far as I can tell
from the record, their belief was that their action, in combination with the
actions of others, might accelerate a political process ultimately leading
to the abandonment of nuclear missiles. And that belief, I submit, should
not be dismissed as ?unreasonable as a matter of law.? A jury might ? or
might not ? find it unreasonable as a matter of fact. But that is for a
jury to say, not for a court.?
Although not referred to in today?s proceedings, the following text from the
closing argument for the Plowshares Eight appeal (referenced above) is most
powerful, and sums up the reality of the peril of nuclear weapons.
?The people in the Pentagon offices and their counterparts in the Kremlin
where the questions of coping with war injuries are dealt with must be
having a hard time these days, looking ahead as they must to the possibility
of thermonuclear war. Any sensible analyst in such an office would be
tempted to scratch off all the expense items related to surgical care of the
irradiated, burned, and blasted, the men, women, and children with empty
bone marrows and vaporized skin. What conceivable benefit can come from
sinking money in hospitals subject to instant combustion, only capable of
salvaging, at their intact best, a few hundred victims who will be lying out
there in the hundreds of thousands? There exists no medical technology that
can cope with the certain outcome of just one small, neat, so-called
tactical bomb exploded over a battlefield. As for the problem raised by a
single large bomb dropped on New York City or Moscow, with the dead and
dying in the millions, what would medical technology be good for? As the
saying goes, forget it. Think of something else. Get a computer running
somewhere in a cave, to estimate the likely numbers of the lucky dead. L.
Thomas, *On Medicine and the Bomb*, reprinted in L. Thomas, *Late Night
Thoughts on Listening to Mahler?s Ninth Symphony*. Nor is the peril
confined to those who will be ?irradiate, burned, and blasted.? It extends
much farther, to our survival as a species. If only a small fraction of the
nuclear missiles now able to be fired, either by us or by the Soviet Union,
are fired, a ?dark nuclear winter? will occur: a cloud of debris will block
off our sunlight; temperatures will plunge; and our death by freezing of
starvation will follow. Scientists have identified a 100 megaton explosion
as the ?nuclear war threshold? that once crossed will lead to such a global
catastrophe. See ?After Atomic War: Doom in the Dark,? Phil. Enquirer,
November 1, 1983. It is in the light of this peril that the reasonableness
of appellants? belief must be judged.?
Steve Kelly then summed up the legal case. He stated that U.S. voluntary
participation in international law is well established, and that Ramsey
Clark clearly established this fact in his earlier testimony. Kelly also
cited the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision on the Legality of
the Threat or Use of Nuclear weapons.
Constitutionally, the laws are clear that the threat of use of nuclear
weapons is unlawful, and the presence of Trident (which targets civilian
populations) is grossly unlawful. He further stated that the conditions of
necessity have been met; the defendants were not trying to change the law,
but were ?trying to block any intended threat or use of those weapons,? and
they did in fact successfully do so; the base was locked down and no work
was done on the warheads for up to 11 hours that day.
Earlier in the proceedings Crane stated (in justifying the Plowshares
action) that over many years people have tried many, many other avenues,
including fasting, vigils, war tax resistance and demonstrations, to bring
the government?s attention to this issue, but they have still been ignored.
The prosecution later declared that the Disarm Now Plowshares co-defendants
had taken the lazy path; ?Going to Bangor is easy,? stated the prosecutor. He
further stated that the hard thing is engaging in the democratic process,
using speech, etc.
William Bichsel responded to the prosecution?s statement, saying that they
engaged in nonviolent action to turn these weapons (symbolically) into
plowshares, and inform the public about the presence of these weapons so
that the democratic process could be fulfilled. After 40 years of using
every method conceivable, any reasonable person would consider these actions
reasonable and necessary. Bichsel also spoke to the traditions that have
been so important and effective over a long period of time; that the
defendants are standing in the tradition of people like Harriet Tubman and
Rosa Parks, and are schooled in the nonviolence of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Following the testimony, Judge Settle denied both motions to dismiss, and
stated that although he understands that the defendants ?are acting out of
conscience,? that does not apply here since the court is supposed to uphold
the Constitution. It must therefore follow, by precedent, that the
Nuremburg Principles and necessity defense are not applicable in this case.
When Crane responded that all five co-defendants ?feel we are entitled to a
full defense,? Judge Settle replied that court is bound by precedent, and
that the defendants can appeal should there be a conviction. Case closed???
The Disarm Now Plowshares five trial begins at 9:00 AM on December 7, 2010.
Although the government has essentially denied the defendants any reasonable
defense, the five are prepared to forge ahead with joyful hearts. Let all
who believe in extinguishing the violent fire of nuclear weapons before it
erupts support these courageous individuals who are fully prepared to give
up their freedoms for this just cause.
There are many opportunities to support Disarm Now Plowshares. In addition
to coming to the court to witness the trial and join in vigils outside the
courthouse, there will be evening programs in Tacoma beginning on Monday
(December 6) and continuing each evening of the trial. These will be
opportunities to meet the members of Disarm Now, hear speakers, and enjoy
music, food and fellowship.
On Monday evening, December 6, Angie Zelter will be the main speaker. Zelter,
a peace, human rights and environmental campaigner, has written several
books, including "Trident on Trial - the case for people's disarmament."
On Tuesday evening, December 7, Colonel Ann Wright, is the main
speaker. Wright,
who served in the U.S. Army and Foreign Service, resigned on the eve of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, stating that without the authorization of the UN
Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich
country would be a violation of international law. Most recently, she was
on the May, 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attacked by the Israeli
military.
There are other speakers not yet confirmed, and all the event information
will be posted on the Disarm Now Plowshares ?Events? page at
http://disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com/events/ as they are confirmed.
Read the Disarm Now Plowshares Blog at
http://disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com/ for ongoing reflections leading
up to trial and daily reports during the trial.
Finally, please spread the word about Disarm Now Plowshares and their
courageous act of resistance so that everyone may learn of these immoral and
illegal weapons of mass destruction (Trident) and their duty, as citizens,
to speak out against them.
Peace to All,
Leonard
Contact: Leonard Eiger, 425-445-2190, subversivepeacemaking@comcast.net
Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action
16159 Clear Creek Road NW Poulsbo, WA 98370
Further information (and updates on events) on Disarm Now Plowshares is
available at http://disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com/.
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Posted by Joe Anybody
at 10:24 AM PST
Friday, 19 November 2010
"american kills" - Suicide the numbers are rising ....
Mood:
 incredulous
Now Playing: MILITARY SUICIDE MURRAL
Topic: WAR
sebastian errazuriz: american kills
'american kills' installation'american kills' by chilean-born new york based artist sebastian errazuriz is a public installation showcasing the suicide rates of US soldiers. after searching on official war sites on the internet, he accidentally found out that 2 times more american soldiers had died in 2009 by committing suicide than those killed during that same year in the war in iraq; an alarming comparison that errazuriz had personally never read or heard about before.  according to the artist, a first google search showed only reports of media alarm about suicide rates, but the information was always comfortably presented divided into months and generally separated by statistics from the army, navy or air-force. 
'when I first found the overall statistics summed the 304 suicides by US soldiers during
2009, I was shocked. I tried to find a number to compare that statistic. to my surprise
the suicide statistic doubled the total of 149 US soldiers that had died in the iraq war
during 2009 and equaled the number of soldiers killed in afghanistan.' - SR  errazuriz's first instinct was to post the statistic on facebook, dumbfounded by the lack of response and interest, he bought can of black paint and decided to 'post' the news in the real world on his own wall outside his studio in brooklyn. equipped with a ladder, he marked a black strip for every dead soldier, until both the suicide rates and war rates occupied the entire wall and were registered as a single image.  ' the counting of dead soldiers outside my studio was long and surprisingly eerie; it was
hard to forget that every brush stroke was a soldier who had died the previous year.
a lot of people stopped to read the mural and were immediately impressed by the reality
portrayed. most of them seemed quite shocked and approached me to ask if what I was
painting was real. I tried to explain that I simply wished to create a physical image that
could capture people's imagination, creating awareness of the current numbers in death,
war and the infinite discrepancy between the resources and energies destined to fight and
protect soldiers at war versus the energies invested in protecting their mental health
and stability.'- SR
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 4:52 PM PST
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Suicides in the Military rate is rising - What are we doing about it
Mood:
 crushed out
Now Playing: Suicides in the Military and PTSD cries that only get ignored
Topic: WAR
Hi Z3 Readers, This serious article was in my email box this morning from the great folks at VFP chapter 72. My cousin Ted Westhusing comitted suicide in Iraq in 2005.
Subject: Soldiers fed up with mistreatment at Ft. Lewis
November 2, 2010 JOINT BASE LEWIS MCHORD, WASHINGTON ? An anonymous group of soldiers in 4-9 Infantry Brigade have released a statement detailing how the Army drove one soldier to suicide. It details the humiliation that soldiers who seek help for mental problems face from their superiors. This comes on the heels of a rash of incidents involving soldiers from JBLM who had untreated mental issues, including one soldier who shot a police officer in Salt Lake City, UT.
The letter reads: ?On March 17, 2010, Spc. Kirkland returned home from his second deployment to Iraq. Three days later he was dead?killed by the Army. Spc. Kirkland was sent home from Iraq because the burden of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder became too great?so much that he wanted to take his own life. Many of us also struggle with the effects of PTSD, which is a completely natural, human response to what we are exposed to overseas. It is not a sign of weakness or cowardice, but the inevitable result of serving in combat. It is a burden we all share, and we all deserve adequate treatment and understanding for the sacrifices we have made. Upon returning home, Spc. Kirkland was not more than three steps into the barracks before the acting First Sergeant publicly ridiculed him, calling him a ?coward? and a ?pussy,? knowing full well that Kirkland was suffering from severe depression and anxiety. He was then carelessly assigned to a room by himself, and like every other soldier !
with PTSD, given substandard care by Army mental health doctors. Forty-eight hours after he was in the care of 4-9 Infantry, he was dead. Spc. Kirkland had a wife and young daughter. Before his blood had even dried off the floor, our respected leadership was already mocking his death.
Spc. Kirkland did not kill himself. He was killed by the Army. The Army inadequately treats PTSD, while it re-enforces a culture of humiliation for the soldiers who suffer from it. Spc. Kirkland was accused of faking his trauma. PTSD is a legitimate medical condition that is unavoidable in a combat zone. As soldiers who lay down our lives every day, we deserve adequate treatment for the wounds we receive in combat. We deserve to be treated for PTSD just like we would for a bullet wound or shrapnel. Spc. Kirkland received the opposite. But what happened to Spc. Kirkland is not an isolated incident. This is happening at such a high rate in the Army that it is becoming an epidemic. Now, more active duty soldiers commit suicide than are killed in combat. Every year, the number of suicides far surpasses the year before, and 2010 is already dwarfing last year?s numbers. How has the Army responded?
Scandal after scandal has broken out about Army officers ordering doctors not to diagnose PTSD; to instead deny veterans the care they deserve, pump them full of pills, and return them to combat. It has become Army policy to do everything possible to avoid diagnosing PTSD. And when it is diagnosed, the care is inadequate. Throughout the Army, soldiers have to fight for simple medical care. The Army doesn?t care at all about us, our lives, or our families?and hundreds of us are dying because of it.
We are denied care because the Army needs bodies to throw into two quagmires, and because the VA doesn?t want to pay us the benefits we deserve. Maj. Keith Markham, Executive Director of 4-9 Infantry, put it very clearly in a private memo to his platoon leaders: ?We have an unlimited supply of expendable labor.? That?s what we soldiers are to the Army and the Officer Corps: expendable labor. Spc. Kirkland was expendable, and we witness that fact every day. But soldiers all over the Army are standing up. At Ft. Hood, the base with the highest number of suicides, protests have been held both outside the base and in the hospitals, consisting of active duty soldiers demanding better treatment. All over the country soldiers are organizing in their units to fight for adequate care.
The Army will never give us the care we deserve unless we force it to do so. As soldiers, we have rights. Mental health care is a right for the job we were made to do. We have the right to be adequately treated and compensated for PTSD?but the Army is not doing that, so we have the right to collectively organize and demand proper treatment. Actual defense spending in the U.S. is over 1 trillion dollars a year. Most of that money goes into the pockets of defense contractors, while only a tiny fraction is allocated for mental health care.
There are hundreds of billions of dollars for new fighter jets, or to open Burger Kings and KBR facilities overseas, but when extra resources are needed to combat a suicide epidemic, we only get scraps from the table.? The Army has taken no disciplinary actions against the leadership involved with SPC Kirkland?s death. Nor has the Army released any statements regarding the circumstances behind the incident. GI Voice, DBA COFFEE STRONG, is a veteran owned and operated coffee house for soldiers, veterans, and military families to speak out about their experiences in a comfortable and safe environment. We provide free GI rights counseling, veterans benefit advocacy, and PTSD counseling for soldiers and veterans.
Coffee Strong is located 300 meters from the Madigan Gate of Fort Lewis at 15109 Union Ave. SW Ste B.
For more information please contact: Seth Manzel Executive Director GI Voice, DBA COFFEE STRONG 253-228-8912 http://www.facebook.com/l/87f8bB1GvdHR4Lf9QOCGQ2-eO9Q;www.coffeestrong.org
Dennis W. Mills, Board Member
Coffee Strong
(360) 867-1487
Skype: dennismills
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 10:06 PM PDT
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