Author: Dave LIndorff

A staggering 168 people, 12 times as many as those killed earlier this week in San Bernardino, and including a whole daycare center class of 15 little children, were killed by a crazed terrorist in the 1995 Oklahome City truck-bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The killer, Timothy McVeigh, was a right-wing Christian fanatic who wanted to avenge the killing of a bunch of Christian cultists in Waco, Texas by federal agents two years earlier. His accomplice Terry Nichols had the same deranged goal.

Although there are plenty of right-wing and fanatic Christian nut-jobs in the US, somehow Americans get on with their lives and don’t worry over-much about being the victim of one of their attacks, though they happen often enough. Just recall the slaughter earlier this year of nine parishioners of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, who was hoping to ignite a race war, or nut-job Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people — 20 of the schoolchildren, in the Sandy Hook School massacre.

Such terrorist killings in the US are actually pretty common, sometimes involving just one victim, as in the case of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas shot point blank in the head by a Christian anti-abortion wacko as Tiller stood handing out programs in the foyer of his church. Maybe such terrorist actions are not as common as run-of-the-mill mass slayings by people who simply slip a cog when life gets too hard for them and — America being the land of the almost free gun –they grab a weapon or two and some boxes of cartridges from the local gun shop, and go out to cause mayhem en route to a suicide by cop, or by their own bloody hand. But they’re frequent enough.

Given this uniquely violent American reality, why has everyone gotten so freaked out by the San Bernardino shooting, in which only 14 people were shot, or for that matter by the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed just three people (admittedly seriously injuring dozens more)?

Awful as this latest mass killing is, and these earlier ones, let’s admit that as far American mayhem goes, they have not been particularly big deals.

No, the thing that has people, at least in the media and in the national police state, all worked up is that this time (as in the case of the Boston bombing, where one wounded kid on the loose led to a city-wide martial-law military lock-down), the killers are Muslims — and immigrant Muslims at that. Somehow that makes it much scarier, even though the San Bernardino killers (and the Boston bombers) were not nearly as proficient at killing as McVeigh and Nichols or even Roof. Hell, McVeigh researched and figured out how to make an exploding truck that was heard 50 miles away in all directions and that took down a nine-story building! Lanza slaughtered 26 people all by himself, and even the inept Roof managed to kill nine people on his own.

Tashfeen Malik, terrorist killer of fewer than 14 people, Adam Lanza, not a terrorist, killer of 26 people, including 20 small children
 

ThisCantBeHappening! is happy to welcome Jess Guh to our news collective. Jess brings a passion for justice and equality, especially in the medical profession and in the delivery of health care, to our group, as well as a talent for making medical issues clear to the lay reader.

Of herself, she writtes:

Jess Guh hails from a home just outside of Philadelphia where two Taiwanese immigrants were delightfully surprised to have raised a queer, outspoken radical. She attended Stanford University where she officially majored in film and unofficially majored in activism, Ultimate Frisbee, co-op living, and consensus decision making. Deciding that medicine could be the perfect union of her nerdy self and her passion for community well being, she went to medical school at the University of Michigan.  She moved to Seattle for her residency in Family Medicine and has been living there ever since. Currently she works as a primary care physician at a community health center dedicated to serving people that the American healthcare system has traditionally ignored.

Jess Guh, physician journalist
 

Spurred by the egregious health inequities that she witnesses on a daily basis, as well as her own experiences as a minority in the medical profession, she has found her voice through writing. She has also presented nationally about the impacts of race and implicit bias on medical outcomes and consults on strategies to diversify the medical workforce.

Jess also writes at her personal blog at: www.jessguh.com

“US forces would never intentionally strike a hospital.”
  – US Commander of NATO Forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Campbell
 

After weeks of lies, the Obama administration and the Pentagon, unable to find any way to explain their murderous hour-long AC-130 gunship assault on and destruction of a Doctors Without Borders-run hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, have turned to a new lie: they bombed the wrong building.

Gen. John Campbell, commander of NATO forces (sic) in Afghanistan, citing the results of a just-released Pentagon study of the Oct. 3 incident which killed 30 medical personnel and patients and left the only hospital in the region a smoking ruin, now says that the American mass-slaughter flying machine bombed “the wrong target,” hitting the hospital instead of a “nearby building,” supposedly a government structure from which Taliban were said to be firing.

Campbell said the hospital attack, which would be a grave war crime if intentional, was simply “the direct result of avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failure,” he said, adding, “US forces would never intentionally strike a hospital.”

Grim guffaws could be heard around the world, if not, perhaps, among the assembled hack reporters, who in dutifully transcribing the general’s remarks for their articles failed to first check their history. Had they even made a cursory search, they’d have discovered that hitting hospitals is something the US military does routinely and with alacrity.

Indeed the Kunduz attack isn’t even the first time a Doctors Without Borders hospital has been struck by US bombs. Back on July 20, 1993, when US forces were busy blowing up Somalia, they bombed Digfer Hospital, the largest hospital in the capital city of Mogadishu, seriously damaging the facility where a number of DWB physicians were working, and killing three patients. At the time, a U.N. official explained that the hospital had been targeted because gunmen loyal to warlord coup-leader Gen. Mohammad Farah Aidid were hiding there. (If that were the reason, that attack would have been a war crime.)

But it’s not just Doctors Without Borders-run hospitals that the US attacks.

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, the US was widely known to be routinely targeting hospitals. The worst example of this criminal behavior was during the notorious 1972 Christmas Bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the two largest cities in northern Vietnam, ordered by then President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor and fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger when peace talks with the North Vietnamese broke down. In complete disregard for civilian lives, both cities were relentlessly attacked for days, both by small planes and, carpet-bombing B-52s. A total of 20,000 tons of bombs was dropped on the two cities, leveling them. Included in the targeting of those bombs was Vietnam’s largest healthcare facility, Hanoi’s ll50-bed Bach Mai Hospital, hit by B-52s and essentially destroyed. Other hospitals were also leveled in the round-the-clock onslaught.

Bach Mai Hospital, 1972, and Kunduz Hospital, 2015. 'America doesn't intentionally bomb hospitals'? You decide
 

In considering the terrifying but also sadly predictable news of a Russian fighter jet being downed by two Turkish fighters, let’s start with one almost certain assumption — an assumption that no doubt is also being made by the Russian government: Turkey’s action, using US-supplied F-16 planes, was taken with the full knowledge and advance support of the US. In fact, given Turkey’s vassal status as a member of US-dominated NATO, it could well be that Ankara was put up to this act of brinksmanship by the US.

Let’s be clear, with the US the major supplier of Turkey’s military, and also its major guarantor vis-a-vis Russia, there is simply no way Turkey would have taken the huge risk of downing a Russian fighter aircraft without first clearing that action with it’s US master.

What makes the downing of the Russian jet, and the incendiary videotaped machine-gunning, by Turkmen or Syrian rebels, of the plane’s pilot as he helplessly descended to earth by parachute, so dangerous is that, with Turkey a member of NATO — supposedly a “mutual assistance” treaty that binds all members to come to the defense of one that is attacked — it means if Russia were to retaliate by downing a Turkish military plane, NATO countries including the US would be obligated to come to Turkey’s defense. (The Russian plane’s navigator was rescued by Russian marines via helicopter.)

Russia knows this, and that is why so far Moscow’s response to the downing has been relatively measured. Had it been a Jordanian, Saudi or Kuwaiti jet that downed the Russian SU-24, Russia’s response would have been instantaneous and brutal. The guilty party would have had some of its planes shot down, or perhaps even bombed on the ground. But Russia so far has limited itself to demanding a meeting with Turkey’s ambassador, and to warning that Russian-Turkish economic relations would be threatened, etc.

The Russian restraint so far is good, but clearly, President Vladimir Putin will not stop there (already, late in the day of the plane’s downing, in a sign of what may be coming, Putin put the Russian cruiser Moskva, stationed off the Syrian coast and equipped with state-of-the art long-range anti-aircraft rockets, on hair-trigger alert, letting Turkey know that any planes headed its way will be presumed hostile and downed immediately, with no warnings give.). Even putting aside domestic considerations (imagine the public clamor for a military response here in the US if some small country shot down a US plane!), he will have to respond resolutely to Turkey’s action or his whole project — so far stunningly successful — of restoring Russia to its pre-USSR-collapse position as a global power, would be a failure.

Putin’s options are actually quite broad, though some carry considerably more risk for everyone, not just for Russia and Turkey. He could have his own air force in Syria, where Russia is legally acting at the request of the Syrian government to defend it against rebel forces of ISIS and Al Nusra, some of which are backed by both Turkey and the US, calmly wait for a Turkish military jet to cross into Syrian airspace. At that point it could be downed by Russian planes or missiles. No doubt Turkey will be extraordinarily careful going forward to have its pilots keep well away from Syrian air space to avoid that happening, but it could happen nonetheless. My guess is that Russian fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries in Syria already have their marching orders and are itching to take that action, which probably would not activate NATO confrontation with Russia and lead to World War III, as long as there was a reasonable case to be made that Turkey’s plane was in Syrian airspace.

A Russian Sukhoi SU-24, like the one shot down yesterday along the Syrian-Turkey border by two Turkish F-16s
 

Are the American corporate media largely propaganda organs, or news organizations?

Here are a few points to consider, and then you the reader can decide. Check out how one should objectively answer these questions below, and then check how the US corporate media generally answer them:
 

1. If ISIS or Al Qaeda deliberately attacks a civilian venue as in Paris, killing dozens of civilians indescriminately, is it terrorism?

Objective answer: Yes
US media answer: Yes

2. If the US deliberately attacks a a civilian venue as in the case of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing dozens of civilians indescriminately, is it terrorism?

Objective answer: Yes
US media answer: No

3. If the Chinese government takes control of a tiny island claimed by another nation, expands it, and puts a military installation on it, is it an example of aggression, a violation of international law, and a provocation?

Objective answer: Yes
US media answer: Yes

4. If the US government takes control and then refuses to relinquish a portion of a tiny
island owned by another country, in this instance Cuba, expands it and puts a military installation on it (as it has done now for decades in the case of Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba, is it an example of aggression, a violaton of international law and a provocation?

Objective answer: Yes
US media answer: No

5. If the leader of a party that wins a national election by a landslide is not herself elected, but announces that she will in fact be making all the important decisions for the newly elected government, as Suu Ky just announced she will do in Myanmar, is it an example of undemocratic behavior, or caudillismo?

Objective answer: Yes
US Media answer: No

6. If the leader of a party steps down as president but then continues behind the scenes to act as the real authority on important issues even though someone else (his brother) was elected president, as Fidel Castro has done in Cuba, is this an example of undemocratic behavior and a kind of caudillismo?

Objective answer: Yes
US media answer: Yes

Truth and Lies: Myanmar's and Cuba's behind-the-scenes leaders, Russian missiles en route to Cuba, and US missiles in Poland

I had two grandfathers who fought — and I mean fought — in World War I. Both of them were in the trenches in France. One, my paternal grandfather William Lindorff, received a Silver Star for heroism under fire. He was an ambulance driver on the front lines because although he had been in the US since he was three, he had been born in Germany, and knew German from his German mother, so the US military in its wisdom wouldn’t let him carry a gun. My other maternal grandfather, a sprinter who missed the Olympics because of the war, was hit with German mustard gas, and with his lungs permanently scarred, never got to excel as an athlete after that, but had a career as a high school coach in Greensboro, NC.

Neither of my grandfathers ever spoke about their wartime experiences.

My father and mother both served in WWII — my dad as a Marine and my mother as a Navy WAVE. Mom found her experience doing secretarial work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to be an adventure, and talked fondly of it often when I was growing up. But my dad, who worked as a technician in the top-secret Radiation Lab crash program to miniaturize radar so it could be put on planes, hated the military and loathed the Marines as an organization. Both my parents were pacifists by the time I was old enough to be thinking about such issues.

I thought about this today, on a date that once was all about pacifism, back when it was established as Armistice Day at the end of the first World War, but which has become a day for glorifying war and the veterans who have had to fight in our nation’s countless wars.

Bodies of the dead: World War I, World War II, Vietnam War. A never-ending slaughter

There is something fishy going on in the way the US is talking about civilian plane crashes that are in some way linked, or said to be linked to Russia.

In the case of the latest tragic mid-air break-up of Russian Metrojet Flight 9268, which killed all 224 people aboard on a flight from Egypt back to Russia a few days ago, CNN is reporting US that intelligence sources say US spy satellite showed a “heat signature” that could indicate an explosion aboard the plane.

Here’s the CNN report:
 

A U.S. military satellite detected a midair heat flash from the Russian airliner before the plane crashed Saturday, a U.S. official told CNN.

Intelligence analysis has ruled out that the Russian commercial airplane was struck by a missile, but the new information suggests that there was a catastrophic in-flight event — including possibly a bomb, though experts are considering other explanations, according to U.S. officials.

Analysts say heat flashes could be tied to a range of possibilities, including a bomb blast, a malfunctioning engine exploding or a structural problem causing a fire on the plane.
 

Now note that this information about a spy satellite image comes just days after the crash.

Meanwhile, it’s been over a year and a half since the 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine — an incident that also saw a civilian airliner destroyed in midair. In this case, the US insists the crash was caused by a Russian-built BUK anti-aircraft missile provided to, and launched by pro-Russian separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine.

The US has made this claim ad nauseum, but has never provided a shred of evidence to support its charge. Meanwhile, as a number of critics have pointed out, with Ukraine in a hot civil war in which one side — the post-coup Ukrainian government forces — were getting NATO backing, and the other, the two breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, were receiving Russian backing, it is a certainty that the US had moved not one but multiple spy satellites into position to monitor the region around the clock by the time of the Flight 17 shoot-down.

So where are the satellite images to support a claim that a BUK missile fired from rebel-held territory and by rebel forces downed that plane, killing all 298 people aboard?

As critics like award-winning journalist Robert Parry and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have pointed out, if the US had satellite imagery showing a BUK missile contrail — and this large, fast-moving rocket leaves a dramatic contrail all the way from its launch site to its high-altitude target (see below), making assessing of blame quite easy — it would long since have been released or leaked to a US corporate media that have been quick to rub with anti-Russian assertions and propaganda put out by the US government.
The BUK antiaircraft missile leaves a clear contrail from its launch site to its target, which any satellite image would clearly show.
 

In what might be an opening salvo in the undermining of Social Security benefits by a coalition of Republicans in Congress, President Obama, and many corporatist Congressional Democrats, the new “Bipartisan Budget Agreement of 2015” has eliminated a provision in the Social Security Act which, since 2000, has allowed older American married couples who have both reached age 66 to have one spouse receive spousal benefits on the other’s account, helping both to hold off until 70 before claiming their own maximum monthly benefit.

Let me explain. In 2000, Congress amended the Social Security Act of 1936 to allow one spouse in a married couple to file for their Social Security at the so-called Full Retirement Age of 66, and then suspend any payment of benefits out until they reached the maximum benefit age of 70. By doing this, the act, as amended, allowed the other spouse, if also age 66 or older, to begin collecting spousal benefits on the first spouse’s suspended account. Spousal benefits at age 66 are 50% of whatever the suspending spouse would be receiving if benefits had been started at that age.

For example, if a wife who, at age 66, could retire and begin receiving $2000 a month on her account, chose to file and then suspend benefits, her husband, if also age 66, under the 2000 amendment, immediately begins receiving $1000 a month in spousal benefits without having to file for his own benefits. What this meant was that for the next four years this couple, often by that time both retired, could count on receiving (in constant dollars, not counting for upward inflation adjustments) about $12,000 a year in Social Security benefits, which could help many such people hang on until age 70 before having to file for Social Security benefits on their own accounts. Since waiting four years past 66 increases those monthly benefit checks by 32%, the strategy was enabling such couples to boost their combined benefits from 70 until death by a substantial sum.

Taking the above example, and assuming that both husband and wife were eligible to receive benefits of $2000 a month if they filed for benefits at age 66, and $2640 if they waited until age 70, and assuming they both could expect to live to age 80, the difference in their income in retirement between just taking benefits at 66, and using the file-and-suspend option and taking benefits at 70 (again in constant dollars) would be $672,000 and 681,6000. That’s almost $10,000 in extra income in retirement for an average lifespan. The difference, of course, grows significantly if the couple or one member of the couple, lives much longer. For example, if one spouse died at 80, and the other lived to 90, the difference in income that surviving spouse would receive between the options of both filing at 66, and instead using file-and-suspend and both starting benefits at 70, would be $76,800. Double that for a couple living to age ninety to an extra $153,600 in total benefits over their retired lives.

This was all taken away by the budget agreement’s sleight-of-hand, as offered up by Obama for the cutting block. And incidentally, it isn’t just married couples that have been hurt. The ending of the file-and-suspend strategy also applied to filing-and-suspending by a widowed spouse to allow his or her dependent children to receive benefits while holding off on collecting benefits his or herself until age 70.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, running for president as a porported “defender” of Social Security, hasn’t said a word about the elimination of a long-standing benefit for married couples in the Budget Deal
 

Most Americans living in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic region of the country probably didn’t realize that for the last year or so they’ve been being spied on from the sky by a sophisticated ‘eye-in-the-sky’ blimp tethered to the ground in Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Air Force jets, which notoriously were not scrambled as four commercial jets were commandeered and flown into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, were scrambled quickly in this case to track the wayward blimp as it drifted with the wind into Pennsylvania.

It just goes to show you that the military can do the job when it wants to.

It will be interesting to see what they do if this thing comes down. It’s big enough to do some damage, but my guess is the feds will do a good job of keeping the public from getting too close to it.

As it is, they’re not saying much about what this thing was doing in the first place.

The Army has claimed the purpose of this and a second blimp has been to defend the US against an attack by cruise missile, but that seems strange, given that most of its cameras point groundward. According to a December 2014 report in Intercept magazine, these two blimps, built by Ratheon Corp. have the ability to scan 340 miles in all directions, covering an area the size of Texas, and to see and track vehicles within that range.

Ominously, while one blimp has high definition radar equipment, the other is equipped, according to the Army, to provide detailed “targeting information.”

I’m wondering where spotting and defending against cruise missile attack, which after all would likely come from the ocean, not from a 340-degree radius, comes into any of that.

Giant government spy blimp cuts loose and heads for the open ocean
 

The police slaying of musician Corey Jones in South Florida highlights one of the most reprehensible aspects of law enforcement in America — the ubiquitous undercover cop.

As yourself: What was a police officer doing driving along the highway at 3 in the morning wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap in the posh neighborhood of Palm Beach Gardens? He wasn’t undercover for the purpose of infiltrating a gang. He wasn’t trying to fit into some commercial or street scene where there was a lot of suspected crime going on. He was just driving around randomly on patrol in a community known for its paucity of crime. And when he stopped at the dark entrance ramp to I-95, allegedly to check on what he claims he thought was an abandoned vehicle on the side of the road (where Jones’ van had stalled out on him and he was waiting for road assistance to arrive), this cop didn’t turn on any flashing police lights, which at least would have suggested to anyone in the van that he was a almost certainly a cop.

He just walked towards the van.

Now if you were someone like Jones, a lone black musician with some valuable drums and equipment in your vehicle, and you saw someone like Officer Nauman Raja approaching you in the dark, you’d be scared — especially if Raja had his gun drawn, as he well might have, given how he was approaching the vehicle unannounced.

The last thing you’d suspect would be that he was a police officer.

In Jones’ case, we know he had a licensed handgun. In the US that’s not illegal. In fact, many Americans say it’s a common-sense precaution. You can agree or disagree with that argument, but it was a purely legal thing for him to do.

If Officer Raja was actually on patrol hoping to “catch burglars” as claimed, he should certainly have been equipped with a car that could flash its lights alternately, if only for safety purposes. Parking on the side of a highway or on ramp late at night presents hazards simply because tired or inebriated drivers may not see the stopped vehicle and could plough into it injuring or killing both officer and driver. As well, as mentioned above, it would also allow the officer making a stop to alert the driver that he is a cop, and not a criminal. Many undercover police cars are even equipped with flashing blue lights which appear when flipped on, but which are not visible otherwise. Clearly, Raja’s vehicle either did not have those signal options, or he chose not to use them for some inexplicable reason.

Musician Corey Jones and his killer, Police Officer Nauman Raja