vrijdag 4 juli 2014

Paul Craig Roberts 19

Washington Murders Countries, the US Constitution, and the Presstitute Media Makes Americans Complicit — Paul Craig Roberts

Washington Murders Countries, the US Constitution, and the Presstitute Media Makes Americans Complicit
Paul Craig Roberts
Having Murdered Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and the US Constitution, Washington is now Murdering Ukraine.
Thanks to Op-Ed News contributor Eric Zuesse, I can bring to your attention these photographs (URL below) of what the Nazi Government in Washington is doing to Ukrainians who protest the Washington Nazis’ theft of their country. On this Fourth of July Americans need to ask themselves just how much horror, how much evil, and how many lies they can accept from a government in Washington that has established itself independently of any input from citizens to which government in the US is allegedly accountable. Before you wrap yourself in the flag this July 4th, realize that “your” government under Clinton, Bush, and Obama has destroyed in your name, in whole or part, eight countries, murdering, maiming, and displacing millions of civilians, and now is at work on Ukraine. These massive crimes against humanity rival Hitler’s and have been completely covered up by the presstitute American media, a collection of whores who lie for money. How can you be a human when you sit in front of CNN, Fox News or read the New York Times and submit to the brainwashing? Think about how you are propagandized, lied to, disinformed, and led into accepting “your” government’s murder of millions of peoples. Consider, isn’t it treason for Washington to so dishonor the flag that we love? Why do we tolerate it? What is wrong with us? Our duty is to the Constitution, not to the criminals in Washington. A patriot is a person who defends the Constitution against enemies “foreign and domestic.” While we sat sucking our thumbs, shaking in our boots in fear of nonexistent “terrorists,” our Constitution was murdered by Washington.
Turn your backs and walk away from the militarist poison that will be spewed in July 4th speeches. Do you really want to support the Washington Nazis in their campaign to become known as the worst mass murderers in world history? Is mass murder to be America’s legacy to the world?
Here are the photos of Washington’s ruin of Ukraine: http://matveychev-oleg.livejournal.com/1224806.html The evil demons in Washington and Washington’s whore media tell you that these devastated people are “terrorists.” If you believe that, you are not human.
Here is Erik Zuesse’s article about the Washington sponsored murders:
Read it and be so ashamed. Everything American has been totally dishonored by “our” government, which has become the epitome of total evil.
 
About Dr. Paul Craig RobertsPaul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

woensdag 2 juli 2014

George Monbiot 5

Monbiot.com


Posted: 01 Jul 2014 12:59 AM PDT
The real enemies of press freedom are in the newsroom.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st July 2014
Three hundred years of press freedom are at risk, the newspapers cry. The government’s proposed press regulator, they warn, threatens their independence. They have a respectable case, when you can extract it from the festoons of sticky humbug. Because of the shocking failures, so far, of self-regulation, I’m marginally in favour of the state solution. But I can also see the dangers.
Those who gnash loudest against the regulator, however, recognise only one kind of freedom. In countries like ours, the principal threat to freedom of expression comes not from government but from within the media. Censorship, in most cases, is what happens in the newsroom.
No newspaper has been more outspoken about what it calls “a chill over press freedom” than the Daily Mail(1). Though I agree with almost nothing it says, I would defend its freedom from state censorship as fiercely as I would defend the Guardian’s. But, to judge by what it publishes, within the paper there is no freedom at all. There is just one line – echoed throughout its pages – on Europe, social security, state spending, tax, regulation, immigration, sentencing, trade unions and workers’ rights. Labour is always too far to the left, even when it stands for nothing at all. Witness the self-defeating headline on Monday: “Red Ed ‘won’t unveil any policies in case they scare off voters’”(2). Ed is red even when he’s grey.
This suggests that one of two processes is taking place: either any article suggesting dissenting views is purged with totalitarian rigour, or General Secretary Dacre’s terrified minions, knowing what is expected of them, never make such mistakes in the first place.
A similar political monoculture, though not always as rigid as the Daily Mail’s, afflicts much of the press. Reports that might reveal a different side of the story remain unwritten; alternative views unaired. A free market in news is not the same as a free press, unless freedom is defined so narrowly that it refers only to the power of government, rather than to the power of money.
The monomania of the proprietors – or the editors they appoint in their own image – is compounded by an insidious, incestuous internal culture. The hacking trial revealed a world, as Suzanne Moore notes, of “sleepovers, dinners, flowers and presents … in which genuine friendship is replaced by nightmare networking.”(3) A world in which one prime minister becomes godfather to a proprietors’ child and another borrows an editor’s horse(4,5), in which an industry that is supposed to hold power to account brokers a seamless marriage between loot and boot.
On Mount Olympus, the gods pronounce upon issues which afflict only mortals: columnists with private health plans support the savaging of the NHS; editors who educate their children privately heap praise upon Michael Gove, knowing that their progeny won’t suffer his assaults on state schools.
It doesn’t matter, the defenders of these papers say: there are plenty of outlets, so balance can be found across the spectrum. But the great majority of papers, local as well as national, are owned by exceedingly rich people or their companies, and reflect their views. The owners, in the words of Max Hastings, once editor of the Daily Telegraph, are members of “the rich men’s trade union”, who “feel an instinctive sympathy for fellow multi-millionaires”(6). The field as a whole is unbalanced.
So pervasive are these voices that they appear to dominate even outlets they do not possess. As Robert Peston, the BBC’s economics editor, said last month, BBC News “is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers. … If we think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this, we should. It’s part of the culture.”(7)
An analysis by researchers at Cardiff University found a deep and growing bias in the BBC in favour of bosses and against trade unions: five to one on the 6 o’clock news in 2007; 19 to one in 2012(8). Coverage of the banking crisis – caused by bankers – was overwhelmingly dominated, another study shows, by interviews with, er, bankers(9). As a result, there was little serious challenge to their demand for bail-outs and their resistance to regulation. The BBC, Mike Berry, who conducted this research, says, “tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world”(10).
Last week, a brilliant and popular columnist for the Times, Simon Barnes, was sacked after 32 years. He was told that the paper could no longer afford his wages(11). But he wondered whether it might have something to do with the fierce campaign he’s been waging against the owners of grouse moors, who have been wiping out the rare hen harriers that eat their quarry(12). It seems at first glance ridiculous: why would someone be sacked for grousing about grouse?
But after experiencing the furious seigneurial affront with which a former senior editor at the Times, Magnus Linklater, responded to my inquiries about his 4,000-acre estate in Scotland and his failure to declare this interest while excoriating the RSPB for trying to protect hen harriers(13,14), I’m less inclined than I might have been to dismiss the idea out of hand. This issue is of disproportionate interest to the rich men’s trade union. The two explanations might not be incompatible: if a paper owned by a crabby oligarch wanted to sack people for reasons of economy, it might look first at those who are engendering complaints among his fellow moguls. The Times has yet to give me a comment.
Over the past few weeks, Private Eye has published several alarming claims about what it sees as censorship by the Telegraph on behalf of its advertisers. It says that extra stars have been added to film reviews and that a story claiming HSBC had overstated its assets was spiked from on high so as not to offend the companies that pay the rent(15,16,17). The Telegraph told me, “We do not comment on inaccurate pieces from a satirical magazine like Private Eye.”(18)
Whatever the truth in these cases may be, it does not take journalists long to learn where the snakes lurk and the ladders begin. As the journalist Hannen Swaffer remarked long ago, “freedom of the press … is freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.”(19) Yes, let’s fight censorship: of the press and by the press.
www.monbiot.com


Noam Chomsky 101

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, America's Real Foreign Policy
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next new TomDispatch piece will be posted on Tuesday, July 8th. There will be a “best of TomDispatch” (with some new comments of mine) at the site this weekend. Tom]
It goes without saying that the honchos of the national security state weren’t exactly happy with Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations.  Still, over the last year, the comments of such figures, politicians associated with them, and retirees from their world clearly channeling their feelings have had a striking quality: over-the-top vituperation.  About the nicest thing anyone in that crew has had to say about Snowden is that he’s a “traitor” or -- shades of the Cold War era (and of absurdity, since the State Department trapped him in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport by taking his passport away) -- a “Russian spy.”  And that’s the mild stuff.  Such figures have also regularly called for his execution, for quite literally stringing him up from the old oak tree and letting him dangle in the breeze.  Theirs has been a bloodcurdling collective performance that gives the word “visceral” new meaning.
Such a response to the way Snowden released batches of NSA documents to Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman calls for explanation.  Here's mine: the NSA’s goal in creating a global surveillance state was either utopian or dystopian (depending on your point of view), but in either case, breathtakingly totalistic.  Its top officials meant to sweep up every electronic or online way one human being can communicate with others, and to develop the capability to surveil and track every inhabitant of the planet.  From German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to peasants with cell phones in the backlands of Afghanistan (not to speak of American citizens anywhere), no one was to be off the hook.  Conceptually, there would be no exceptions.  And the remarkable thing is how close the agency came to achieving this.
Whether consciously or not, however, the officials of the U.S. Intelligence Community did imagine one giant exception: themselves.  No one outside the loop was supposed to know what they were doing.  They alone on the planet were supposed to be unheard, unspied upon, and unsurveilled.  The shock of Snowden’s revelations, I suspect, and the visceral reactions came, in part, from the discovery that such a system really did have no exceptions, not even them.  In releasing the blueprint of their world, Snowden endangered nothing in the normal sense of the term, but that made him no less of a traitor to their exceptional world as they imagined it.  What he ensured was that, as they surveil us, we can now in some sense track them.  His act, in other words, dumped them in with the hoi polloi -- with us -- which, under the circumstances, was the ultimate insult and they responded accordingly.
An allied explanation lurks in Noam Chomsky’s latest TomDispatch post.  If the “security” in national security means not the security of the American people but, as he suggests, of those who run the national security state, and if secrecy is the attribute of power, then Edward Snowden broke their code of secrecy and exposed power itself to the light in a devastating and deflating way.  No wonder the reaction to him was so bloodthirsty and vitriolic.  Chomsky himself has an unsettling way of exposing various worlds of power, especially American power, to the light with similarly deflating results.  He’s been doing it for half a century and only gets better. Tom
Whose Security? 
How Washington Protects Itself and the Corporate Sector 
By Noam Chomsky
The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world affairs.  In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States for several reasons.  First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global significance and impact.  Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly uniquely so, which means we know more about it.  Finally, it is plainly the most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices in the U.S. -- and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence such choices.  The general principles, however, extend to the other major powers, and well beyond.
There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship, government pronouncements, and public discourse.  It holds that the prime commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.
There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine.  One obvious question to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989?  Answer: everything continued much as before.

The U.S. immediately invaded Panama, killing probably thousands of people and installing a client regime. This was routine practice in U.S.-dominated domains -- but in this case not quite as routine. For first time, a major foreign policy act was not justified by an alleged Russian threat. 
Instead, a series of fraudulent pretexts for the invasion were concocted that collapse instantly on examination. The media chimed in enthusiastically, lauding the magnificent achievement of defeating Panama, unconcerned that the pretexts were ludicrous, that the act itself was a radical violation of international law, and that it was bitterly condemned elsewhere, most harshly in Latin America.  Also ignored was the U.S. veto of a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning crimes by U.S. troops during the invasion, with Britain alone abstaining. 
All routine.  And all forgotten (which is also routine).
From El Salvador to the Russian Border
The administration of George H.W. Bush issued a new national security policy and defense budget in reaction to the collapse of the global enemy.  It was pretty much the same as before, although with new pretexts.  It was, it turned out, necessary to maintain a military establishment almost as great as the rest of the world combined and far more advanced in technological sophistication -- but not for defense against the now-nonexistent Soviet Union.  Rather, the excuse now was the growing “technological sophistication” of Third World powers.  Disciplined intellectuals understood that it would have been improper to collapse in ridicule, so they maintained a proper silence.
The U.S., the new programs insisted, must maintain its “defense industrial base.” The phrase is a euphemism, referring to high-tech industry generally, which relies heavily on extensive state intervention for research and development, often under Pentagon cover, in what economists continue to call the U.S. “free-market economy.” 
One of the most interesting provisions of the new plans had to do with the Middle East.  There, it was declared, Washington must maintain intervention forces targeting a crucial region where the major problems “could not have been laid at the Kremlin’s door.”  Contrary to 50 years of deceit, it was quietly conceded that the main concern was not the Russians, but rather what is called “radical nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism not under U.S. control.
All of this has evident bearing on the standard version, but it passed unnoticed -- or perhaps, therefore it passed unnoticed.
Other important events took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War.  One was in El Salvador, the leading recipient of U.S. military aid -- apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category -- and with one of the worst human rights records anywhere.  That is a familiar and very close correlation. 
The Salvadoran high command ordered the Atlacatl Brigade to invade the Jesuit University and murder six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, including the rector, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, and any witnesses, meaning their housekeeper and her daughter.  The Brigade had just returned from advanced counterinsurgency training at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and had already left a bloody trail of thousands of the usual victims in the course of the U.S.-run state terror campaign in El Salvador, one part of a broader terror and torture campaign throughout the region.  All routine.  Ignored and virtually forgotten in the United States and by its allies, again routine.  But it tells us a lot about the factors that drive policy, if we care to look at the real world.
Another important event took place in Europe.  Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow the unification of Germany and its membership in NATO, a hostile military alliance.  In the light of recent history, this was a most astonishing concession.  There was a quid pro quo.  President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker agreed that NATO would not expand “one inch to the East,” meaning into East Germany.  Instantly, they expanded NATO to East Germany. 
Gorbachev was naturally outraged, but when he complained, he was instructed by Washington that this had only been a verbal promise, a gentleman’s agreement, hence without force.  If he was naïve enough to accept the word of American leaders, it was his problem.
All of this, too, was routine, as was the silent acceptance and approval of the expansion of NATO in the U.S. and the West generally.  President Bill Clinton then expanded NATO further, right up to Russia’s borders.  Today, the world faces a serious crisis that is in no small measure a result of these policies.
The Appeal of Plundering the Poor
Another source of evidence is the declassified historical record.  It contains revealing accounts of the actual motives of state policy.  The story is rich and complex, but a few persistent themes play a dominant role.  One was articulated clearly at a western hemispheric conference called by the U.S. in Mexico in February 1945 where Washington imposed “An Economic Charter of the Americas” designed to eliminate economic nationalism “in all its forms.” There was one unspoken condition.  Economic nationalism would be fine for the U.S. whose economy relies heavily on massive state intervention.
The elimination of economic nationalism for others stood in sharp conflict with the Latin American stand of that moment, which State Department officials described as “the philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” As U.S. policy analysts added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country's resources should be the people of that country.”
That, of course, will not do.  Washington understands that the “first beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors, while Latin America fulfills its service function.  It should not, as both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations would make clear, undergo “excessive industrial development” that might infringe on U.S. interests.  Thus Brazil could produce low-quality steel that U.S. corporations did not want to bother with, but it would be “excessive,” were it to compete with U.S. firms.
Similar concerns resonate throughout the post-World War II period.  The global system that was to be dominated by the U.S. was threatened by what internal documents call “radical and nationalistic regimes” that respond to popular pressures for independent development.  That was the concern that motivated the overthrow of the parliamentary governments of Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 1954, as well as numerous others.  In the case of Iran, a major concern was the potential impact of Iranian independence on Egypt, then in turmoil over British colonial practice.  In Guatemala, apart from the crime of the new democracy in empowering the peasant majority and infringing on possessions of the United Fruit Company -- already offensive enough -- Washington’s concern was labor unrest and popular mobilization in neighboring U.S.-backed dictatorships.
In both cases the consequences reach to the present.  Literally not a day has passed since 1953 when the U.S. has not been torturing the people of Iran.  Guatemala remains one of the world’s worst horror chambers.  To this day, Mayans are fleeing from the effects of near-genocidal government military campaigns in the highlands backed by President Ronald Reagan and his top officials.  As the country director of Oxfam, a Guatemalan doctor, reported recently,
“There is a dramatic deterioration of the political, social, and economic context.  Attacks against Human Rights defenders have increased 300% during the last year.  There is a clear evidence of a very well organized strategy by the private sector and Army. Both have captured the government in order to keep the status quo and to impose the extraction economic model, pushing away dramatically indigenous peoples from their own land, due to the mining industry, African Palm and sugar cane plantations.  In addition the social movement defending their land and rights has been criminalized, many leaders are in jail, and many others have been killed.”
Nothing is known about this in the United States and the very obvious cause of it remains suppressed.
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced.  They complained that the Communists had an unfair advantage.  They were able to “appeal directly to the masses” and “get control of mass movements, something we have no capacity to duplicate.  The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”
That causes problems.  The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
The Cuban Example
A clear illustration of the general pattern was Cuba, when it finally gained independence in 1959.  Within months, military attacks on the island began.  Shortly after, the Eisenhower administration made a secret decision to overthrow the government.  John F. Kennedy then became president.  He intended to devote more attention to Latin America and so, on taking office, he created a study group to develop policies headed by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who summarized its conclusions for the incoming president.
As Schlesinger explained, threatening in an independent Cuba was “the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands.”  It was an idea that unfortunately appealed to the mass of the population in Latin America where “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes, and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Again, Washington’s usual dilemma.
As the CIA explained, “The extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a function of Cuban power... Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” for which his Cuba provides a model.  Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a “showcase” for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout Latin America.
The State Department Policy Planning Council warned that “the primary danger we face in Castro is... in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half” -- that is, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when the U.S. declared its intention of dominating the hemisphere.
The immediate goal at the time was to conquer Cuba, but that could not be achieved because of the power of the British enemy.  Still, that grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny, informed his colleagues that over time Cuba would fall into our hands by “the laws of political gravitation,” as an apple falls from the tree.  In brief, U.S. power would increase and Britain’s would decline.
In 1898, Adams’s prognosis was realized. The U.S. invaded Cuba in the guise of liberating it.  In fact, it prevented the island’s liberation from Spain and turned it into a “virtual colony” to quote historians Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.  Cuba remained so until January 1959, when it gained independence.  Since that time it has been subjected to major U.S. terrorist wars, primarily during the Kennedy years, and economic strangulation.  Not because of the Russians.
The pretense all along was that we were defending ourselves from the Russian threat -- an absurd explanation that generally went unchallenged.  A simple test of the thesis is what happened when any conceivable Russian threat disappeared.  U.S. policy toward Cuba became even harsher, spearheaded by liberal Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right in the 1992 election.  On the face of it, these events should have considerable bearing on the validity of the doctrinal framework for discussion of foreign policy and the factors that drive it.  Once again, however, the impact was slight.
The Virus of Nationalism
To borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology, independent nationalism is a “virus” that might “spread contagion.” Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile.  The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path towards some kind of socialist democracy.  The way to deal with such a threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected, typically by imposing murderous national security states.  That was achieved in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking holds worldwide. 
It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony.  It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia.  That might even have led Japan -- called the “superdomino” by Asia scholar John Dower -- to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish.  That, in turn, would have meant that the U.S. had lost the Pacific war, not an option to be considered in 1950.  The remedy was clear -- and largely achieved.  Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion.
In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that Washington should have ended the Vietnam War in 1965, when the Suharto dictatorship was installed in Indonesia, with enormous massacres that the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.  These were, however, greeted with unconstrained euphoria in the U.S. and the West generally because the “staggering bloodbath,” as the press cheerfully described it, ended any threat of contagion and opened Indonesia’s rich resources to western exploitation.  After that, the war to destroy Vietnam was superfluous, as Bundy recognized in retrospect.
The same was true in Latin America in the same years: one virus after another was viciously attacked and either destroyed or weakened to the point of bare survival.  From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the hemisphere, extending to Central America in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, a matter that there should be no need to review.
Much the same was true in the Middle East.  The unique U.S. relations with Israel were established in their current form in 1967, when Israel delivered a smashing blow to Egypt, the center of secular Arab nationalism.  By doing so, it protected U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, then engaged in military conflict with Egypt in Yemen.  Saudi Arabia, of course, is the most extreme radical fundamentalist Islamic state, and also a missionary state, expending huge sums to establish its Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines beyond its borders.  It is worth remembering that the U.S., like England before it, has tended to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has usually been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion.
The Value of Secrecy
There is much more to say, but the historical record demonstrates very clearly that the standard doctrine has little merit.  Security in the normal sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.
To repeat, in the normal sense.  But in evaluating the standard doctrine we have to ask what is actually meant by “security”: security for whom?
One answer is: security for state power.  There are many illustrations.  Take a current one.  In May, the U.S. agreed to support a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel.  Or by Washington, though it was really unnecessary to add that last condition.  The U.S. is uniquely self-immunized from the international legal system.  In fact, there is even congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to “rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial -- the “Netherlands Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe.  That once again illustrates the importance of protecting the security of state power.
But protecting it from whom? There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population.  As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine need for security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark.  And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by the prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington, the professor of the science of government at Harvard University.  In his words: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen.  Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
He wrote that in 1981, when the Cold War was again heating up, and he explained further that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.”
These simple truths are rarely acknowledged, but they provide insight into state power and policy, with reverberations to the present moment.
State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast, the population is not secure from state power.  A striking current illustration is the radical attack on the Constitution by the Obama administration’s massive surveillance program.  It is, of course, justified by “national security.” That is routine for virtually all actions of all states and so carries little information. 
When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented 54 terrorist acts.  On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen.  A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia.  That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.
Britain’s attitude is interesting.  In 2007, the British government called on Washington’s colossal spy agency “to analyze and retain any British citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails, and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet,” the Guardian reported.  That is a useful indication of the relative significance, in government eyes, of the privacy of its own citizens and of Washington’s demands.
Another concern is security for private power.  One current illustration is the huge trade agreements now being negotiated, the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic pacts.  These are being negotiated in secret -- but not completely in secret.  They are not secret from the hundreds of corporate lawyers who are drawing up the detailed provisions.  It is not hard to guess what the results will be, and the few leaks about them suggest that the expectations are accurate.  Like NAFTA and other such pacts, these are not free trade agreements.  In fact, they are not even trade agreements, but primarily investor rights agreements.
Again, secrecy is critically important to protect the primary domestic constituency of the governments involved, the corporate sector.
The Final Century of Human Civilization?
There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are well-established and would be taught in elementary schools in free societies.
There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving forces in policy formation.  Of course, it is not quite that simple.  There are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict, but consider this a good first approximation and radically opposed to the received standard doctrine.
Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population? It is easy to demonstrate that this is a marginal concern of policy planners.  Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear weapons.  As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats to the security of the population.  Turning to state policy, we find that it is committed to accelerating each of those threats -- in the interests of the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated private power that largely determines state policy.
Consider global warming.  There is now much exuberance in the United States about “100 years of energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of the next century” -- perhaps the final century of human civilization if current policies persist. 
That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security, certainly not for the population.  It also illustrates the moral calculus of contemporary Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits tomorrow.
These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system.  There is a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity.  And it has had some impact.  The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia Journalism Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.” In other words, if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the energy corporations.
That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced” doctrine. Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including the country’s major port -- and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it returned.  And the same is true of many other cases.  The actual media doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting -- and frightening.  It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the security of the population was a non-issue, and remains so.  There is no time here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that it strongly supports the lament of General Lee Butler, the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, which was armed with nuclear weapons.  In his words, we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And we can hardly count on continued divine intervention as policymakers play roulette with the fate of the species in pursuit of the driving factors in policy formation.
As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history.  There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war.  For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence -- and not in the distant future.  For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his recent books are Hegemony or SurvivalFailed StatesPower Systems,Occupy, and Hopes and Prospects. His latest book, Masters of Mankind, will be published soon by Haymarket Books, which is also reissuing twelve of his classic books in new editions over the coming year. His website iswww.chomsky.info.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook and Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me.
Copyright 2014 Noam Chomsky

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175863/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_america%27s_real_foreign_policy/ 

President Vladimir Putin 2

Guest Column by Vladimir Putin

IMPORTANT: Guest Column by Vladimir Putin
THE WEST IS TURNING THE PLANET INTO A GLOBAL BARRACKS–Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
The remarks below are excerpted from President Putin’s meeting with Russia’s ambassadors on July 1, 2014.
Putin damns Washington’s puppet president of Ukraine, an usurped position resulting from the overthrow of a democratically elected president, for taking “the path of violence which cannot lead to peace.” Putin’s remarks are simultaneous English translations as Putin speaks in Russian. Such translations are seldom good, but are usually adequate to convey the content.
“Unfortunately, Ukrainian President Poroshenko has made the decision to resume military actions, and we – meaning myself and my colleagues in Europe – could not convince him that the way to reliable, firm and long-term peace can’t lie through war. Previously, Petro Poroshenko had no direct relation to orders to take military action. Now he has taken on this responsibility in full. Not only military, but also more importantly, politically.”
“On Monday [June 30], I spoke with France, Germany and Ukraine via telephone. I stressed the need to prolong the ceasefire and the creation of a reliable mechanism for monitoring compliance with the cease fire and that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should play an active role. I offered that checkpoints on the Russian side of the Ukrainian border could be monitored by representatives of Ukraine and by OSCE to insure joint control of the border.”
“Everything that’s going on in Ukraine is of course the internal business of Ukrainian government, but we are painfully sorry that civilians die. In my opinion, there is a deliberate attempt by Ukraine to eliminate representatives of the press. It concerns both Russian and foreign journalists. The killing of journalists is absolutely unacceptable.”
“I hope pragmatism will prevail, that the West will get rid of its hegemonic ambitions and desire to arrange the world according to its preferences. I hope instead that the West will start building relations based on equal rights, mutual respect and good will toward others and respect for the interests of other countries.”
Putin said that Washington had put pressure on France not to deliver the Mistral-class helicopter ships that the Russian/French contract specified. “We know about the pressure that our American partners put on the French so that they would not deliver the Mistral ships to Russia. And we know that Washington hinted that if the French don’t deliver Mistral, sanctions on the French bank will be minimized or removed. What is this, if not blackmail?”
Putin said that Russia is willing to be a partner of the US and EU, but the partnership must be based on equality, not on America’s partners following Washington’s orders. “We are not going to stop our relations with the US. The bilateral relations are not in the best shape, that is true. But this– and I want to emphasize–is not Russia’s fault.”
While preparing this report I checked the BBC online news site. There was no mention of Putin’s remarks. Ditto the online cites for CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times. The Washington Post did mention that Putin condemned the renewed violence in Ukraine at a meeting with Russia’s ambassadors, but the importance of Putin’s meeting with Russia’s ambassadors was not conveyed by the Post’s report. Given Washington’s arrogance, why does it matter what Putin says? America’s loss to Belgium in the World Soccer Cup is more important to the American Propaganda Ministry than the President of Russia’s attempt to end conflict and the drive toward war.
As I have previously observed, Americans live in The Matrix, not in the real world. One day Americans could wake up stunned by reality, or they could die from weapons of mass destruction and not wake up. Americans are nothing but cannon fodder for the neoconservative drive for Washington’s world hegemony. The media on which Americans rely lies to them and prevents them from knowing any significant truths. Americans can learn that they lost the World Cup, but they cannot learn of their government’s crimes and drive toward war, or of the responses of other powerful countries whose governments are unwilling, unlike England, Germany, and France, to be Washington’s vassals.

dinsdag 1 juli 2014

New Pearl Harbor?

Is mr. Cheney predicting or announcing? 

"New Pearl Harbor"

Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor" (51).[15]

Though not arguing that Bush administration PNAC members were complicit in those attacks, other social critics such as journalist Mark Danner,[39] journalist John Pilger, in New Statesman,[40] and former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle Bernard Weiner, in CounterPunch,[41] all argue that PNAC members used the events of 9/11 as the "Pearl Harbor" that they needed––that is, as an "opportunity" to "capitalize on" (in Pilger's words), in order to enact long-desired plans.


Former Vice President Dick Cheney predicts U.S. will face deadly, nuclear attack within decade

The former vice president offered a prediction during a radio appearance that the U.S. will face a deadly terrorist attack within a decade — and a nuclear weapon could be used.

 
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
 
Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 1:04 AM
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APRIL 17, 2013 FILE POOL PHOTOOLIVIA HARRIS/APFormer Vice President Dick Cheney offered a prediction that the U.S. will face a deadly terrorist attack within a decade.
Dick Cheney's gone nuclear.
The former vice president offered a prediction that the U.S. will face a deadly terrorist attack within a decade — and a nuclear weapon could be used.
“I think there will be another attack, and next time, I think it’s likely to be far deadlier than the last one,” he said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show Tuesday.

Cheney believes the attack could be of a nuclear nature.AFP/AFP/GETTY IMAGESCheney believes the attack could be of a nuclear nature.
“Imagine what would happen if somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container and drive it down the Beltway outside Washington, D.C.,” Cheney added.
The gloomy Gus also speculated with Hewitt about life in the U.S. under martial law, which he said would likely be imposed in the event of another attack similar to 9/11.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/cheney-predicts-u-s-face-deadly-nuclear-attack-article-1.1842931

The Dollar  
Vigilante
Tuesday,July 01, 2014
Dick Cheney Has His First Good Idea
[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-In-Chief, Jeff Berwick]
You might know Dick Cheney as the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and the disinformation about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the lead up to the Iraq War. But those weren't his only ideas... Other ideas include shooting that guy while duck hunting and Haliburton's selling nuclear technology to Iran. In fact Haliburton does not care whatsoever about which countries the US bans trades with. They'll trade anyway with them. But Dick Cheney has only just recently had his best idea yet..and he's only on his second heart:
This is a brilliant idea which shows a true evolution in the man of Dick Cheney. 7 out of 10 Americans today believe the Iraq War was a bad idea but I think in ten years 7 out of 10 Americans will think this new Cheney idea was not such a bad one. He might even get a statue built for him. Once Americans know life without the District of Criminals (DC) and the power-hungry leeches which gravitate toward it they'll all turn libertarians. 
In order for someone to pull it off though they might need Dick Cheney as he acted like President on 9/11 when he pulled off the devastating terrorist attack and even caused the first building in recorded history to collapse at freefall speed from structural fires (WTC Building 7). To blow up DC the most evil minds are needed and Dick Cheney has proven himself.  But 9/11is not the only feat Cheney has pulled off.
The War In Iraq was brought to us in large part by Dick Cheney's work. Cheney gets things done. He undercut the CIA while in the White House instructing subordinates to stovepipe raw intelligence directly to his office. His intelligence agency at the Pentagon - setup by himself and Donald Rumself - helped gather and release much of the  disinformation which led to the Iraq War.  In December 2008 Dick Cheney admitted what most already knew: he was instrumental in initiating the Bush Era torture of waterboarding. He made up excuses in his book to make himself look better about it. Inconscionable. 
Then there was spying on innocent Americans. Barton Gellman wrote in Time Magazine: 
Cheney had devised, and Bush approved, an NSA operation to monitor the phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens without a warrant, part of which later became known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. After more than two years of going along with "the vice president's special program," the Justice Department concluded that parts of it were illegal. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey later told Congress, and authoritative sources confirmed privately last week, that Ashcroft decided on March 4, 2004 to stop certifying the surveillance as lawful unless the White House scaled it back.
It is undisputable that Dick Cheney's urged the federal government to spy on millions of non-terrorist Americans without a warrant. Cheney wanted the program to continue even after it was declared illegal. 
Dick Cheney also worked for decades to bring unprecedented new powers to the White House with no respect for the limits the founding fathers placed on the Presidency; that is, the rule of law. Since his days in the administration of Gerald Ford Cheney Cheney worked dilligently to expand the powers of the President. 
REDEMPTION
Dick Cheney is a self-aggrandizing criminal who should have been waterboarded and thrown in a cage many years ago. He used his knowledge and positions of power to undermine the public and start a war that has cost millions of lives. His manipulation of presidential decision-making sometimes even angered George W. Bush. While Cheney worked for Haliburton he did business with autocrats and even with enemies of the United States. By consolidating power in the White House, and going against the founders, spying on innocent Americans, encouraging war by disinformation and becoming directly complicit in torture Cheney has proven himself as one of the most evil and power-hungry reptile-humans on the planet. And that's before we consider that he is one of the main suspects of in 9/11.
But let's forget his unpopularity as he left office in 2008. Let's forget the psychopathy.  Just for a moment.
Mr. Cheney, if you read this,  I personally have a message for you.  If you are indeed planning a false flag attack much like the events of 9/11 (which you and your cronies planned), I support your efforts. Nuking DC very well might be the only way for you to redeem yourself (probably not) and for the world to be liberated from the US war machine. We encourage you to use "precision strikes" on key players in DC, however, instead of a nuclear bomb, as this would be a much more humane way of going about the War on DC.  Alternative press outlets have done a fansastic job in the 21st century identifying main criminals among those in DC and I believe we can spare many, many innocent lives, of which yours is not yet and probably won't ever be a part.
(Ed. Note: If you're worried that Dick Cheney's sick logic endangers you, click here.]
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Anarcho-Capitalist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.  Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast.  Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and gold conferences as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business.