Author: Dave LIndorff

The forces arrayed in Washington propelling the nation into a war against Syria, including the Pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, the cabal of neo-conservative pundits and “think” tanks, whose ranks include President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, the arms industry, the oil industry and other groups, are very powerful, and it may well be that eventually sheer momentum will lead to a US bombing attack on Syria. But for the moment, a grass-roots global anti-war campaign has triumphed.

Only days ago, the corporate media were shamelessly beating the drums for war, quoting “official sources” as saying the decision to attack had already been made with the only question being the timing of an attack, and with some saying bombing could begin as early as Thursday, Aug. 29. Meanwhile, leaders of countries around the world, especially in Europe, were voicing their support for a US plan to “punish” the Syrian military and government for an alleged gas attack on civilians.

On August 29, however, instead of a US bombing blitz there was a debate in the British Parliament on a motion by Prime Minister David Cameron to authorize Britain to join the US in an attack on Syria. It was to have been a token display of democratic debate, with the outcome — approval of the motion — foreordained. Instead, Cameron’s support, even among members of his own Tory party, withered, as the evidence he presented was skewered, as memories of the lies of the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, were revived, and as the British public demonstrated and demanded that there be no attack. Cameron, by day’s end, conceded defeat, and Britain was no longer “America’s poodle.”

Since then, support for an American attack to “punish” Syrian leader Bashar al Assad for an alleged gas attack has eroded further. Earlier this week, the media were reporting as fact Obama administration claims that the Arab League was in support of a US-led airstrike on Syrian government forces. By Saturday, the media were reporting that the Obama administration was “struggling to locate” just one Arab state that would endorse an attack on Syria.

There are no takers. Not even Saudi Arabia (which some reports suggest was actually behind the gas attack on civilians in Damascus, rather than Syrian government forces as claimed by the US), is willing to publicly back a US attack.
Obama faces a spreading global opposition to his illegal plan to launch a bombing attack on Syria, like this mass demonstration (left) Saturday in London

If you needed more evidence that former president Jimmy Carter was correct when he said, in response to reports of the massive National Security Agency spying program exposed by Edward Snowden, that that democracy no longer exists in the US, just look at Washington’s push to launch a new war against Syria. According to the latest Reuters poll, 60 percent of Americans, despite weeks of propaganda out of Washington, and cheerleading in the corporate media, oppose a US war in Syria. Only nine percent are in favor of the US launching an attack.

Does that matter? Clearly not. The aircraft carriers and cruise missile-armed submarines and surface ships have been moved into position. The corporate media quote unnamed government “sources” as saying that “only the timing of an attack” is in question, and suggesting that an attack could come as early as Thursday.

UN inspectors have just gone to the site of an alleged gas attack to see if such a thing actually happened, as charged by Syrian rebels. But is the US (which reportedly tried to scuttle the independent UN investigation into the alleged gas attack) waiting to see whether there even was an attack, and to hear whether if there was one, it was the work of the Syrian government, or, as some have charged, of the rebels themselves? No. Rather, the Obama administration and the war-mongers in Congress are already declaring that the attack “certainly” occurred, and that it was the Syrian government’s doing. (Hey, if the US really wanted a justification for a war, and was “certain” Syrian troops were behind the poison gas attack, wouldn’t they have wanted UN investigators’ confirmation of the crime and the guilty party?)

US Navy ships line up to join in the latest American war crime: an assault on Syria, which poses no threat to the US.

The military judge in Pvt. Bradley Manning’s kangaroo trial has announced his sentence, but right now I’m thinking about another soldier: William Laws Calley.

A Second Lieutenant in the Army during the Vietnam War, Calley famously was convicted of slaughtering 22 innocent men, women and children, including babies, during a day-long slaughterfest in which he and his men massacred over 500 unarmed Vietnamese.

It was an appalling war crime, and Calley, far from accepting his responsibility, initially tried to blame the atrocity on a helicopter gunship. But at least one of the men in his unit eventually told the truth and ratted him out. If Calley had any mitigating defense it was that he, like many other unit commanders in the field in Nam, were being ordered to do this kind of thing by their senior officers, who were getting promotions based on the “body counts” of “Viet Cong” that their men could rack up, and just as today the Pentagon calls every human being in Afghanistan or Yemen or Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province that it blows up or guns down a “terrorist,” back in the Vietnam War, killed Vietnamese, even those that were still too young to stand up, were labeled “VC.”

I’m thinking about William Laws Calley because, after he was convicted of killing those 22 human unarmed beings by a military court, he was sentenced to life in prison, doing hard labor at Leavenworth. But his trial was always controversial. The pro-war crowd had a “Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out” mentality when it came to the Vietnam War, and to many, Calley was a hero. Jimmy Carter, who at the time was governor of Georgia, was running for the redneck vote back in 1971, not the Nobel Peace Prize, and he protested the verdict by signing an order establishing a “American Fighting Man’s Day” and by calling on all red-blooded American Georgians to drive with their lights on for a week.

In fact, Calley never served a day of that richly deserved hard time. The following morning, President Richard Nixon commuted it to house arrest at Ft. Benning, pending his appeal of the conviction. Later, a general reviewing the sentence reduced it to 20 years, which was later reduced to 10 by the Secretary of the Army.
Lt. Calley (l), Pvt. Manning and their respective crimes.

It is becoming perfectly clear that the outrageous detention of American journalist Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian partner David Miranda by British police during a flight transfer at London’s Heathrow Airport was, behind the scenes, the work of US intelligence authorities.

British police and the British Home Office (the equivalent of America’s Department of Homeland Security) are claiming that the action was taken by them on the basis of an anti-terrorist statute, passed in 2000, with the Orwellian name “Schedule 7.” The give-away that this was not something that the British dreamed up on their own, however, is their admission that they had given Washington a “heads up” in advance about their intention to detain Miranda, a Brazilian national, before the detention actually occurred.

Note that the British did not notify Brazilian authorities. It was the Americans who got the call. Why would British police notify American authorities about the detention of a Brazilian citizen except to ask what US authorities wanted done ? Clearly, Miranda was on one of America’s “watch lists” and the British police called because they needed instructions from their superiors in the US regarding whether to detain him and what to do with him once they had him. It looks like that call to Washington, rather than a “heads up,” was actually more of a request for a “thumbs up” from Washington to go ahead and detain and interrogate Miranda. (The ironically named new White House press secretary, Josh Ernest, denied any involvement by the US in Miranda’s ordeal, saying, “This is a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement – and not at the request – of the United States government. It is as simple as that.” He was not pressed on the matter by the assembled members of the White House press corps–a group that is not known for its aggressiveness even when its own interests are at stake.)

Miranda, subsequent to the UK police’s call to the US, was detained and held, without access to a lawyer, for nine hours — the maximum amount of time allowed under the draconian terms of Schedule 7 — and was during that time questioned by at least six security agents, whom Miranda says threatened him with jail and asked him about his “entire life.” Never was there any suggestion that he was a terrorist or that he had any links to terrorism. Rather, the focus was on journalist Greenwald’s plans in relation to his writing further articles about the data he had obtained from US National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, now living in Russia under a grant of political and humanitarian asylum.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald (r) with David Miranda following Miranda's release from 9-hour bogus "terror" detention in the UK

There was an old 1978 Saturday Night Live skit that hit dangerously close to the truth about how modern US society deals with those it fears. Steve Martin, playing a 12th century judge, Theodoric of York, is confronted with the case of a woman, Lorraine Newman, charged with being a witch. With the townsfolk calling for her to be burned at the stake for “consorting with the devil,” he says the only way to determine her guilt or innocence is to put her in the “trough of justice” — a deep vat of water into which her bound body will be cast. Theodoric advises the woman that she has “nothing to fear” since if she is guilty her body will float, rejected by the waters of justice, but if she’s innocent she will sink. When her body sinks, leaving just a few rising bubbles which indicate she has drowned, Theodoric announces: “Ah! Not guilty!” Leaving her in the tank, he then moves on to the next case.

The trial of Pvt. Bradley manning has far too much in common with this skit to be funny. Manning, a young man of principle who said he had decided to release hundreds of thousands of documents exposing the true brutal nature of the US war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, as well as the self-serving crudeness and imperial corruption of US global diplomacy, stood accused in a military court of hugely inflated “crimes,” including causing death and injury of American troops, aiding the enemy, harming America, and treason. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, proved to be an even a more ludicrous mockery of justice than Martin’s Theodoric of York. Blatantly promised a big promotion by the Obama Pentagon as an inducement to assure her reaching a guilty verdict against Manning, she assured that the trial was conducted largely in secret, and denied all efforts by the defense to have Manning freed based on the year he spent being tortured and held without charge by his military captors in what was a transparent effort to get him to cut a deal blaming his document release on the organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

In the end, Manning was tossed into the trough of justice and found duly guilty of all but the most specious and overblown charge of “aiding the enemy,” and was left to face a possible 90 years in jail which, for a 26-year-old man, would be a life sentence.

Okay, I admit it. I helped my father last year to die quicker in a Connecticut rehab center, and I was also witness to an assisted suicide in New York.

It’s time that we put this stuff out in the open and stopped the brutal prosecutorial nonsense around this issue.

As I write this, Barbara Mancini, a 57-year-old nurse here in the punishment state of Pennsylvania, has been charged with a serious felony, and is facing up to 10 years in jail because she put the morphine prescription for Joseph Yourshaw, her dying 93-year-old father, who was in home hospice care but in pain from terminal diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease, into his hands as he requested, so he could terminate his life.

Her father, a decorated WWII veteran, had expressed a desire to end his life at home and to receive no further medical intervention. He understood that he could do that by taking too many doses of morphine, and his daughter gave him the opportunity to make it happen. Unfortunately, the hospice nurse arrived at the home after he had done so, was informed of the action by Mancini, and called 911. Against his earlier stated wishes, Yourshaw was hauled off, comatose, to the hospital, where he was subjected to the medical establishment’s most strenuous efforts to perversely prolong his doomed life, and he died four days later just where he didn’t want to be: hooked up to life support in a hospital bed.

Then, piling on, the prosecutors stepped in, and went after Mancini.

Don’t they have anything better to do?

So back to my father and that New York assisted suicide.

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Like an obnoxious drunk harassing everyone and spilling drinks at a party, the US has continued to make itself both loathed and laughed at in the wake of the revelations about the National Security Agency’s global spying program as revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

The latest example of this was the report in Germany last week that the US had been massively spying on millions of German people based upon a tortured interpretation of a secret Cold War-era agreement foisted upon the then Bundesrepublik back in the early 1960s. That agreement gave the US and Britain the authority to surveil Soviet and East German spying activities inside what was commonly referred to as West Germany, and also to conduct spying operations to “protect” US troops based there. Obviously, spying on Soviet and East German spies is a far different thing from spying on Germans themselves, and clearly the Cold War is long gone. As for spying on Germans who might threaten the bases, that clearly could have been handled by police in Germany, and in any even would only involve a small and discrete program, not the monitoring of millions people’s electronic communications.

Angela Merkel, the conservative German Chancellor whose governing coalition is facing a critical national election in a few weeks, and who has been taking a lot of heat from Germans over disclosures that her government knew all along about the American spying program, has been trying to look proactive, and so the her government announced that it was canceling the spying agreement and ordering a halt to the NSA’s spying activities in the country.

The US response: nothing public, but unidentified “sources” in the US government made it clear that, agreement or no agreement, the NSA’s spying would continue (a German government official also stated that the supposed termination of the secret Cold War agreement would have “little effect” on continued spying by the US in Germany).
I'm Uncle Sham and I want YOU to forsh Evo Moraleshs' plane to land!

BREAKING!: It could well be that the harsh pretrial treatment of Bradley Manning and the harsh verdict handed down against him Tuesday may have been what convinced Russian authorities of the validity of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s appeal for asylum, which his Russian attorney and his father have both now announced has been granted this morning. (Snowden in his application asserted that he cannot hope to receive a fair trial in the US, where Washington leaders have been publicly calling him a traitor and have been clamoring for harsh punishment, and where even the president has condemned him as a “hacker,” instead of a whistleblower who exposed the nation’s ubiquitous spying on all electronic communications of all Americans in wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution). Snowden has reportedly left the Moscow airport where he had been stranded by US revocation of his passport, and has entered Moscow as a political refugee from US state terror.
 

ALSO BREAKING The Obama administration and leaders in Congress are behaving like spoiled brats over Russia’s principled stand in granting Snowden political asylum. Their impotent raging is pathetic and must have the rest of the world wondering whether the US is a actually a great power at all. The White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is the official voice of President Obama, said that the Russian decision “undermined” law enforcement cooperation between the two countries — a silly claim since Russia is simply following international law on asylum and has no extradition agreement with the US. In fact, it is the US which has been violating international law by doing such things as forcing down a presidential aircraft carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales in a clumsy attempt to capture Snowden, whom the US believed, wrongly, to be on the plane. As we wrote earlier, one reason Snowden got asylum was because he convincingly argued that he could be tortured by the US if he were returned here, a true claim that led US Attorney General Eric Holder to send a letter to Russian authorities promising “not to turture” Snowden if they sent him back (a promise no one believes, since the US these days claims things like waterboarding, lengthy solitary confinement, lengthy periods of sensory deprivation and wall slamming are not “torture”). Sen. John McCain, who almost became president running against Obama in 2008, blustered that Russia’s decision was a “slap in the face” to all Americans, though actually a majority of Americans are sympathetic to Snowden and think his leak exposing the unprecedented NSA spying on them was a good act. Sen. Chuck Schumer, New York State’s senior senator, called for cancellation of the G-20 summit set to be hosted by Russia because of the decision — surely the most absurd of demands, since most other leaders in the group would go anyway, making the US look even more childish. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who really appears to have lost his wits these days, called the decision a “game changer” in US-Russian relations, and said it showed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lack of respect for President Obama. But then, Republicans like Graham have been doing that for five years now, and polls show that most Americans don’t respect the US president much either.
 

The New York Times, in an editorial published the day after a military judge found Pvt. Bradley Manning “not guilty” of “aiding the enemy” — a charge that would have locked him up for life without possibility of parole and could have carried the death penalty — but also found him guilty on multiple counts of “espionage,” called the verdict (not guilty of aiding the enemy, guilty of espionage) “Mixed.”

The Times editorial writers were as mixed up as the judge, though.

Challenging fascism and the national security state: Bradley Manning, Aaron Swarz and Edward Snowden

I have been deeply ashamed of my country many times. The Nixon Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was one such time, when hospitals, schools and dikes were targeted. The invasion of Iraq was another. Washington’s silence over the fatal Israeli Commando raid on the Gaza Peace Flotilla–in which a 19-year-old unarmed American boy was murdered–was a third. But I have rarely been as ashamed and disgusted as I was Saturday reading that US Attorney General Eric Holder had sent a letter to the Russian minister of justice saying that the US would “not seek the death penalty” in its espionage case against National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, promising that even if the US later brought added charges against Snowden after obtaining him, they would not include any death penalty, and vowing that if Snowden were handed over by Russia to the US, he would “not be tortured.”

So it has come to this: That the United States has to promise (to Russia!) that it will not torture a prisoner in its control — a US citizen at that — and so therefore that person, Edward Snowden, has no basis for claiming that he should be “treated as a refugee or granted asylum.”

Why does Holder have to make these pathetic representations to his counterpart in Russia?

Because Snowden has applied for asylum saying that he is at risk of torture or execution if returned to the US to face charges for leaking documents showing that the US government is massively violating the civil liberties and privacy of every American by monitoring every American’s electronic communications.

Snowden has made that claim in seeking asylum because he knows that another whistleblower, Pvt. Bradley Manning, was in fact tortured by the US for months, and held without trial in solitary confinement in a Marine military brig for nearly a year, part of the time naked, before being finally put on trial in a kangaroo court, where the judge (a mid-ranking officer surely thinking about the impact her verdict will have on her promotion prospects) is as much prosecutor as jurist, and where his guilt was declared in advance by the President of the United States — the same president who has also already publicly declared Snowden guilty too. (How, incidentally, can a military “court” render any real justice, when the Judge and Jury are officers who are beholden to superior officers, up to and including their commander in chief, and who have to consider how their decisions will affect their careers in the service?)

US Attorney General Eric Holder (l) and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden