Author: John Grant

Supplying an army at a distance drains the public coffers and impoverishes the common people.
— Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

With the killing of Osama bin Laden by a 79-member JSOC hunter/killer team inside Pakistan, the nation has entered yet another of those moments when a news media that professes independence has become an unashamed cheerleader for militarism.

No one can deny the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) Seal Team executed its killing mission with great competence and aplomb. They were also lucky that the bin Laden entourage had apparently become so confident of its safety that it was a bit lackadaisical.

Ever since the Desert One debacle in 1980 in Iran, US special operations commanders were determined that the system evolve into a sophisticated program with double and triple backup plans etc. Apparently a motto in the Seals is, you come out of an operation either as “a Zero or a Hero.” In this case, it’s “Hero” in spades.

Students revel in West Virginia and John Brennan tells a whopper

The competence exhibited by the team is especially welcome in many quarters in the US following a decade noted for too many examples of huge and really bad decisions that were examples of what happens when you link incompetence with great power.

Just to name a few of the big ones: There was the decision to insert into Afghanistan an incredibly expensive army and the creation, there, of an entire government that involved a network of heavily corrupt loyalties that had to be sustained with payoffs and other blandishments. That decision has led to an incredibly wasteful logistical nightmare. Then there was the completely dishonorable decision to invade and occupy Iraq based on dishonestly misdirected 911 revenge politics. Recently, we have added Libya to the list of mission-creep wars; it has gone from a no-fly zone to a palace bombing that killed three of the leader’s grandkids. All this consumes gobs and gobs of tax dollars that could be used in neglected areas at home.

Just to round out the list of disastrous decisions, let’s not forget the elimination of financial regulation begun by President Reagan that led inexorably to the 2007-08 economic meltdown, which was followed by a huge tax-payer bailout of the very pirates who got the nation into the mess in the first place. In that bargain, homeowners were supposed to get help, but it somehow never arrived.

 
Some men rob you with a six gun.
Some do it with a fountain pen.

“Pretty Boy Floyd”
Woody Guthrie
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We hear a lot about what democracy means in America. In the case of the Cheri Honkala Green Party campaign for Sheriff of Philadelphia, what democracy means is recognizing that the selective enforcement of laws is a reality in our history and, then, offering voters the real choice of a sheriff who will not enforce foreclosure orders in a depressed economy.

Honkala is a well-known poor people’s activist in Philadelphia who, over the years, has organized large street demonstrations and even gotten herself arrested many times occupying homes and doing other actions to call attention to the plight of the poor. She was raised dirt poor in Minnesota and she has worked lots of unpleasant and dreary jobs to survive. Her first-born son, Mark Webber — born when she was age 16 and living in a car — is a successful Hollywood actor.

Some say Honkala is not serious and is out to destroy good government. One writer in Philadelphia referred to her in his headline as an “outlaw” and in his lead as “Philly’s most famous embodiment of grass-roots guerilla protestdom.”

Robin Hood and Cheri Honkala

I prefer to use one of the most famous sheriff references in world literature. I see Cheri Honkala as Robin Hood. Instead of running around in green tights and using bows and arrows to engage the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, she’s using the ballot box to take the Sheriff of Nottingham’s job.

The central plank of Honkala’s campaign is a determination to stop the evictions of poor and middle-class homeowners whose mortgages have been foreclosed on by banks and lenders. There’s no mystery or sleight of hand; anyone who votes for Honkala knows what he or she is voting for: A revamped Sheriff’s Office with a new mission to counter the pirate-style economics of the moment.

“The Americans have not been honest about this, even among themselves.”

That’s how Mullah Attullah Lodin, deputy chairman of the High Peace Council of Afghanistan, sees our nation and its government as it relates to the question of permanent bases in Afghanistan and to his specific portfolio, the establishment of peace in Afghanistan.

Lodin is a former Hizb-e Islami militia commander (they fought the Russians), and he’s now in the Karzai government. Some might suggest he has an agenda, which generally means not being in synch with US policy. Americans don’t have “agendas.” The presumption is Afghans are backward and corrupt and somehow not as worthy of trust as a westerner or an American. And Lodin’s all for talking peace with the Taliban, which makes him radioactive.

Under the reigning myth of American Exceptionalism, whatever Americans do is right and good because they are Americans and — more important — because they have the most lethal weapons on the planet, up to and including the R&D marvel of the Afghanistan War, lethal drone technology.

As the rock anthem says: We are the champions!

Mullah Attullah Lodin, Kabul and the Mad Hatter

Only in America can a man in a flight suit in an air-conditioned room monitor TV screens following unaware people going about their business 10,000 miles away and, on orders from some other air-conditioned room, while sipping a Diet Pepsi turn those distant human beings into exploded pieces of steaming offal and flesh. This man, then, gets in his car and drives home to dinner with his wife and kids.

So far, we have not heard what it’s like in the realm of Post Traumatic Stress to do this kind of lethal, remote “combat” day-in-day-out. At what point does a drone pilot burn out or crack up? Is there a rest and relaxation spa and special counselors for drone pilots who begin to ask moral questions?

The battle over the meaning of a traumatic experience is fought in the arena of political discourse, popular culture and scholarly debate. The outcome of this battle shapes the rhetoric of the dominant culture and influences future political action.

–Kali Tal, Worlds Of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma

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There’s a major struggle for meaning going on in America now that centers on war trauma among returning soldiers and veterans of our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Libya.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the current official term for what has plagued soldiers throughout history as they returned from wars to civilian society. PTSD became an official term in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, following a period of struggle among psychiatric authorities and activists that focused on the experiences of Vietnam veterans. The DSM is regularly revised and updated.

What sort of meaning one ascribes to war trauma depends on who one consults and how connected they may be, directly or ideologically, to the Department of Defense, which has a major stake in establishing certain parameters of meaning in how PTSD is perceived in the culture.

The key terms for the military are about establishing resiliency to facilitate the reintegration of soldiers into their units for future deployment and the idea of a warrior class with a warrior ethos. In the case of resiliency and reintegration, those concepts are also key in civilian-based trauma recovery. It just depends on what one is building resiliency for and what one intends to reintegrate a soldier into, civilian life or future re-deployment.

The era of the citizen soldier has faded into the past when there was a draft and when wars like World War Two were “popular” and widely understood to be defensive and to make sense to most people. Now, we have a completely volunteer military, an institution that is becoming more and more separated, even aloof, from civilian life, as it deploys its soldiers to fight foreign wars that, for many, make less and less sense and use up more and more national resources.

The mythic Ajax falling on his sword

No one is a “soldier” anymore; whether you’re in special ops doing lethal night raids into Pakistan or repairing computers on a FOB, you’re now a “warrior” — as if you wore studded breast-plates and carried swords and lived by the rule come home with your shield or on it.

Peace is in the air and its blowing around like little specks of Spring pollen. Maybe it’s a good time for the US government to recognize this hopeful spirit of Spring and try to figure out a new tack in its foreign war policy.

US war policy is still very much bogged down in the paranoid, preemptive strike mentality of the Bush years. We have moved on only in the sense our very sophisticated military is now less concerned about holding large areas and much more focused on the precise task of finding and killing insurgent leaders. Lop off their heads.

At the same time, using its two most powerful tools vis-à-vis the American public – secrecy and public relations – our military is involved in a concerted campaign of face-saving, lest anyone think our forces are in a condition of moral quagmire or military stalemate. Which they are.

Consider the story in The New York Times about Mohammed Massoom Stanekzai, an official of the Hamid Karzai government of Afghanistan, specifically secretary of something called the High Peace Council. Stanekzai reveals that, as part of his office focused on “peace,” he and other Afghan officials are in regular contact with the Taliban insurgency.

Cartoon by Makhmud Eshonkulov of Uzbekistan

This is really interesting news. The backward nation of Afghanistan actually has a Department Of Peace. Of course, antiwar Congressman Dennis Kucinich has lobbied for a Department Of Peace in the United States for years. It’s in his bill H.R. 808.

 
“…get a man greedy enough and he got the guts to go – go, go, …Vietnam, hot damn.”

-Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the program created by Congress to expend over $700 billion of our tax dollars to prevent a “meltdown of the financial system,” is a “colossal failure.” It’s now official. Neil M. Barofsky, the man hired as TARP’s special inspector general, has come clean.

Why is it a colossal failure? Because, Mr Barofsky says, the act passed by Congress “expressly directs” Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department to spend hundreds of billions of the TARP money to aid struggling homeowners with their mortgages.

This has not been done. Instead, as critics have pointed out ad nauseum, all this tax money went to high-wire-act financial institutions so they could regain their balance, “not only to survive but even to flourish.” In essence, the bursting real-estate bubble was re-inflated with ordinary Americans’ tax revenues. The argument went, for those at the bottom, that we did it for your own good.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and a US bombing in Libya

Before piloting the Treasury Department, the brilliant Mr. Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates and the International Monetary Fund, and was president of the NY Federal Reserve Bank. He was also a pal of the previous Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had earlier headed Goldman Sachs. Geithner is, of course, very familiar with the financial Ponzi schemers whose institutions he saved, because he’s one of them.

And we never really face what is in front of us, never face what is inside our gutless language of cartels and drug lords and homeland security, never face that forces are unleashed on the land with names like poverty, a fix, murder, and despair, and our tools cannot master these forces. …Things happen and no one says much. Then after a while, no one admits the thing even happened.

-Charles Bowden on life in Ciudad Juarez
 

US Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual resigned last week after cables he sent were released by WikiLeaks suggesting he thought Mexican police and military forces were crippled by corruption.

Truth was no defense in Pascual’s case.

Since right-wing President Felipe Calderon won a razor thin majority in 2006 and immediately declared a bloody shooting war on drug cartels, some cartel leaders have been killed or arrested. But, then, like mushrooms, as happened in Colombia with the killing of Jose Escobar, the number of cartels has grown from four to seven. In the crossfire, over 34,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered, many in notoriously gruesome fashion without a shred of mercy.

It seems the cartels have calculated that their strong suit in countering Calderon’s bully war – fought in conjunction with US drug warriors and with lots of US money — is extreme and certain violence of the sort that means not only will you be gruesomely tortured, dismembered and killed, but so will your entire family.

In his book Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Field, Charles Bowden paints a horrific picture of a city overwhelmed to the point of mass numbness and the inability to even remotely address the present descent into barbarism. Only two percent of the crimes in the city ever go to court, let alone end in a conviction.

The Supply, center, and left and right, the Cost.

Calderon’s war, most agree, is a dismal failure. He cannot run for re-election, but since he wants his National Action Party (PAN) to win big in next year’s election, some shift or change may be in the air. Security is now in the forefront of people’s minds in Mexico. Naturally, life and death trumps concerns about drug trafficking.

A contingent of 20 right-wing veterans with flags and signs declaring their devotion to “our troops,” marched up to the blocked-off Pennsylvania Avenue area in front of the White House. One of the men wore a blue shirt with Army Security Agency printed on it.

“I was in the ASA,” I said to the man, attempting some cordial dialogue. At 19, I had been an Army Security Agency radio direction finder in the mountains west of Pleiku.

The heavy-set man glowered at me and said: “I’m sorry to hear that.” It was as if he were somehow the arbiter of who was, and who wasn’t, a good American, as if he alone gave a damn about “our troops.”

I shot back at him: “So, what the hell does that mean?” He turned away, and I moved on. So much for dialogue.

It was a beautiful, sunny Saturday. By 10 AM a crowd had begun to gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House to hear a host of speakers. By the time Daniel Ellsberg, Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges had spoken, there were 1000 people in the park, many of them veterans. The rally had been called by Veterans For Peace.

A young woman who had served as a nurse in Iraq told the crowd a moving story of water shortages in Iraq and of having to live for days in clothes soaked with a wounded soldier’s blood. Ryan Endicott, a young Marine combat veteran and Winter Soldier spoke emotionally about refusing to re-deploy to Iraq and participate any more in a war he had concluded was immoral. A Vietnam veteran known as Watermelon Slim faced the Obama White House and chastised its resident (who was in Brazil) for assuming, and in cases like drone attacks, escalating the disastrous Bush war agenda.

Iraq Marine combat veteran Ryan Endicott and a mock drone over the White House (Photos: John Grant)

It was March 19th, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and, amazingly, the day the US began its aerial intervention into Libya – our third or fourth war, depending if you count Pakistan as a separate war from Afghanistan. The New York Times reported that the March 19 Libyan attacks were “on a scale not seen since the Iraq War.” It was eerily circular.

By the end of the day, DC park police had arrested 113 people.

Here’s a modest proposal for President Obama and our policy wizards to consider:

General Petraeus has provided laudable service to his great nation by pulling counter-insurgency theory from the wreckage of Vietnam and giving it CPR; and after his predecessor self-immolated in Rolling Stone, he stepped in and assumed command of US forces in Afghanistan.

But, now, as a New York Times military analysis makes very clear, the mission in Afghanistan has moved on into new territory. Also, according to an independent think tank known as PHOOA, it is time to replace the good General Petraeus with a new commander more appropriate to the reality of the mission.

The new candidate is Bozo The Clown. PHOOA (pronounced P-Hoooah!) is an acronym for Pull Head Out Of Ass. It’s time to put someone in charge who perfectly symbolizes the reality of current US war policy in Afghanistan, which is simply in-your-face absurdity.

Bozo over Af-Pak

Reading the latest news from Afghanistan – especially as we approach the annual commander’s briefing to Congress – is reminiscent of that famous Monty Python routine where the Black Knight’s arms and legs are cut off, yet he insists, “It’s just a flesh wound. C’mon, you pansy!”

Sure, we could bomb them “into the stone age,” and we could muster the resources to keep troops there forever. And our troops are as tough and as brave as any on the planet. But every sign indicates it is our vast national wealth and far superior firepower that allows us to stay while the logic of our occupation runs out of gas. As in late Vietnam, saving face is now our most important mission.

Stripping before men still clothed is the first step toward weakening the prisoner’s psychological defense. … But stripping is also sexually laden. It transposes sexual gestures, acts and innuendo from a strip club to the torture chamber. Thus sex is always present in the torture chamber whether the victim is a man or a woman. The sexing of torture is deeply grounded in the recesses of the torturer’s psyche.

-Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algeria to Baghdad

The process – employed in the name of “security” – which involves the mutual destruction of human dignity, seems to be an integral part of most police and specialized agency methods.

-Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
 

Ever since I first read about the program to routinely strip PFC Bradley Manning, conceived by his jailers at Quantico Brig in Virginia, I have been trying to figure out in this time of moral fatigue how to express how morally outrageous this behavior by US military personnel is.

For anyone who has been away on vacation to Planet Apathy, Manning is imprisoned for allegedly releasing classified materials to WikiLeaks. He has recently been charged with 22 crimes, including “aiding the enemy,” which can carry the death penalty. His jailers apparently hope young Manning will incriminate the big fish Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Assange just lost an initial extradition hearing in a case brought by Sweden, which wants to extradite him from Britain to question him on controversial sexual allegations. It is widely suspected the US hopes to extradite him to the US once he’s in custody in Sweden.

Bradley Manning, Quantico Brig and a naked detainee in Abu Ghraib under the Saddam regime

Whether or not The New York Times and other newspapers that have printed some of the WikiLeaks material – and the American people who read and benefited from the information — are considered “the enemy” was not made clear by the military. The Times now regularly cites information from the releases to shed light on how our elected government works around the world.

Relevant to all this are the many signs that our military is becoming quite desperate not to lose face over its two problematic military occupations. This fits nicely into Marnia Lazreg’s thesis that torture (in her case, in the Algeria War) is a tool of the “twilight of empire.” At this historical juncture, the fear within our government of something like WikiLeaks must be incredible.