This Can't Be Happening!

“No, Charlotte, I’m the jury now. I sentence you to death.”
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step.
“How c-could you?” she gasped.
“It was easy.”
– Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury
 

The news that Barack Obama — a Constitutional scholar and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — has taken personal charge of lethal US drone hits in Yemen and Pakistan is one of those stories that takes time to sink in.

The New York Times stresses how serious the issue has become. “With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.” It’s no longer a cool video-game experiment; it’s the beginning of robot warfare, and, if history is a lesson, it will have unanticipated consequences and our enemies will learn to counter the weapon with imaginative weapons of their own, including drones. We should expect to be surprised and blindsided. Martin Luther King spoke of it as a futile rising cycle of violence.

Exactly how many non-combatants and innocent people are being killed is the big question. There’s no way to know. One, there’s a pathological level of secrecy in our militarized government and, two, we can’t believe a word the government says anyway.

The President’s counterterrorism adviser John Bennan, for example, makes the preposterous claim that “not a single non-combatant has been killed in a year of strikes.” The Times interviewed former intelligence officials familiar with the issue and they “expressed disbelief.” It recalls the days during the Vietnam War when all Vietnamese corpses were VC.

We know of entire families killed in Yemen, as reported by Jeremy Scahill. And Britain’s Sunday Times reports since Obama began the campaign, 300 to 500 civilians have been killed, more than 60 of them kids.

Back in the sixties, during Operation Rolling Thunder, Lyndon Johnson took personal charge of targeting for the aerial bombing of North Vietnam. And George W. Bush was notorious for the little check-off list squirreled away in his desk drawer of men he wanted whacked. So the idea of a US President personally overseeing hits like a gang boss is not that novel. What’s new is the means of killing and the fact Mr. Obama is so lawyerly about it.

A US drone and an angry man protesting US drones on the street in Sanaa, Yemen

We’re told it’s a matter of the President manning-up and taking responsibility for a morally gray activity. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It’s lonely at the top. He’s reportedly reading up on Just War Theory and other international legal precedents. But Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Harriet Miers set the tone for this a decade ago, when all a President had to do was dial up the OLS, the Office of Legal Sophistry.

“You want language saying it’s legal to whack somebody? No problema! We’ll send it right up.” Since it was coming from the White House, who in government was going to question it? Clarence Thomas?

The History Channel mini-series “Hatfields & McCoys” reminded me of Clint Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven.” Both productions showed a lot of violence in all its fascination while making it squalid, absurd, arbitrary and devastating to the victims and everyone around the victims. Both productions take as their theme men creating theaters of heroism for themselves out of their own hatred and sense of honor. Both productions show the theaters crumbling in the end as the violence becomes too stupid and meaningless even for the prime agents to continue.

“Hatfields & McCoys” also reminded me of football. You’ve got two well-defined teams who place group loyalty above all other values, even as they claim the ethics of Christianity, which does not place group loyalty above all other values. So there is no substantive moral difference between the Hatfields and McCoys any more than there is a substantive moral difference between the Minnesota Vikings and the Arizona Cardinals. The only reason to join or root for one side over the other is because it makes you feel good to be part of something bigger than yourself. That’s attractive, and indeed the series attracted huge numbers of viewers. “Hatfields & McCoys” is reported to be the second biggest non-sports event on basic cable ever with over 13 million viewers.

I myself sat through all three two-hour segments, even though that meant watching about 20 commercials for every sordid killing. It’s hard keeping your head in a 19th century family feud when somebody is touting car insurance or credit cards every eight minutes, just as it is hard to keep your head in the game when someone is touting car insurance or credit cards with every change of possession.

Does the United States make anything besides car insurance and credit cards?

What if Shakespeare was interrupted by a talking lizard every eight minutes?

“Hatfields & McCoys” reminded me not only of football but of Democrats & Republicans, who also have very little substantive moral difference and a need to believe that there is a substantive moral difference, or else no one would pay attention to them.

The patriarch of the McCoys (Bill Paxton) looked to Christianity for justice and predictably descended into nihilistic alcoholism and madness, ultimately dying in a house fire of his own making. He seemed like a parable for the Tea Party. The patriarch of the Hatfields (Kevin Costner) looked to Christianity for forgiveness. He ended up a sadder but wiser old man in the tradition of Jimmy Carter and Al Gore who improved on morally substantive issues immediately upon leaving power.
Johnse Hatfield, circa 1882 and 2012, hated by both sides

Whether he ever said it or not, I’m going to borrow from a quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln and alter it a bit to say: “American politicians must love war veterans — they keep making so many more of them.”

The ugly truth though, is that American politicians, and in fact the American public as a whole, don’t really give a damn about veterans. Sure, the politicians will go to the parades and wear their American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars hats (some even if they never really served in uniform or went to war), and sure ordinary Americans will applaud in the airport as a bunch of men and women in uniform walk by, but that’s about it.

When it comes to adequately funding health services and pensions for vets after they’ve put in their time, or paid a price in terms of lost limbs, disease or mental trauma, though, the government is always ducking responsibility and the public is whining for lower taxes, not calling for more money for veterans’ benefits.

My mom, a WWII Navy veteran who in 1944 selflessly answered the call for women to sign up so that more men would be freed up for combat duty, currently suffers from Alzheimer’s and other health problems. She has a modest pension from my late father’s job, and from his Social Security, but that’s all eaten up by the cost of her live-in companion and other health care assistance that is not covered by Medicare. We helped her apply for a veteran’s pension that could provide another up to $17,000, but were told it could take up to a year from the time of filing the rather simple paperwork before she’ll see a dollar.

Vets for Peace join in support of the Occupy protests

Lahore — US Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), the chair and ranking minority member respectively of the Senate Armed Services Committee, say the US must not pay $5000 per truck as demanded by Pakistan, for supplies being shipped through this country to American troops in Afghanistan. McCain went further, calling the Pakistani demand “extortion.”

He also stated, on the TV show “The Cable,” that “We can’t look at aid in that light. It’s now becoming a matter of principle”.

I love it!

Extortion, dear Sen. McCain, is defined as the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value through the abuse of one’s office or authority.

Is it the first time US would be paying for transit of NATO supplies? They have long been paying an average of about $250 a truck for transit, as a senior US official has stated in a report by David S. Cloud in the Los Angeles Times published May 19th.

So the question dear Sen. McCain, is not about principle but rather about principal. The question could have been one of principle had the US not been paying anything at all, and then one fine day, Pakistan had woken up to the idea of…what did you say…ah yes…extortion. The question here though, is simply about the amount.

More US extortion? A US Senate committee voted to withhold $1 million in aid for each year of a 33-year sentence handed down by a Pakistani court to doctor Shakil Afridi, whose fake Hepatitis-B ‘vaccination’ program helped the US locate and assassinate Osama Bin Laden, unless Pakistan overturns that conviction.

 
If all else fails, lower your standards.

This has been my philosophy for years. My wife likes to joke it’s how she picked me; instead of prince charming, I’m “prince somewhat-charming.” So you can imagine how delighted I am that the United States of America and its NATO military allies have decided to apply that philosophy to US foreign policy in Afghanistan.

They’re calling their version “Afghanistan Good Enough.”

The notion of lowering ones standards to get out of a human mess is, of course, not my idea. The idea resides in the Pragmatic wing of philosophy and shares something with the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer, which is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, who stole it from the Greek slave and stoic philosopher Epictetus, who probably borrowed it from some poor slob in chains breaking stones in a quarry in Asia Minor.

Here’s how Alcoholics Anonymous phrased the idea:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

The point is, if you’re struggling with a monkey on your back — whether it’s an addiction to booze or keeping up with the Myth of American Exceptionalism — your life will be more serene and you will be more content with yourself if you drop the unrealistic expectations you’ve set for yourself or that someone else has set for you.

President Obama in a NATO mood in Chicago and soldiers in Afghanistan

So after ten years of trying to control Afghanistan militarily, US/NATO war planners have lowered their standards and, with the help of their top-of-the-line, multi-billion-dollar public relations wing, they came up with the stirring slogan “Afghanistan Good Enough.”

It seems pretty clear by now that the three young “domestic terrorists” arrested by Chicago police in a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily basis in Afghanistan, are the victims of planted evidence — part of the police-state-style crackdown on anti-NATO protesters in Chicago last week.

The Chicago Police clearly realized that it would be hard to convince a jury that the homemade beer-making equipment in the house was some dreaded bio-terror weapon, so for good measure they apparently dropped off some glass jars with gas in them and tried to make out that the kids were preparing molotov cocktails. That’s the word from National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing the men. They say their clients and others like them coming into Chicago from out of town to join in protests against the NATO summit were “befriended” by police informants and undercover Chicago Police, who then offered to obtain gasoline or explosive materials like toy rocket motors, and who proposed actions like firebombing police stations.

This kind of entrapment and official deceit by police should alarm every American. It’s bad enough when police plant evidence and lie about evidence in order to win convictions, since it means innocent people will be sent to prison or worse. But with the new post 9-11 terrorism laws, like the state terrorism statutes in Illinois being applied in these cases, it becomes far more difficult for a victim of such police and prosecutorial misconduct to challenge the case against her or him. In terror cases, the government can claim “national security” to hide the evidence and even the identity of the witnesses from the defendants and the courts, the jury and the public, and can avoid ever being questioned about it publicly. In a worst case, the federal government doesn’t even need to bring the case to trial. If the victim is accused of being a terrorist, under the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and various executive orders, that person can be locked away indefinitely without trial — exactly the kind of abuse that led American colonists to rise up against their British colonial overlords 237 years ago.

Residents like me from Philadelphia know all about this stuff. Planting evidence on people you want to lock away has a venerable history in this once revolutionary town.

Who are the terrorists in Chicago? Peaceful demonstrators or thug cops who entrap and who plant bogus evidence? (photo by Damon J Hartley)

John Kerry, back before he was a pompous windsurfing Senate apologist for American empire, back when he wore his hair long and was part of a movement of returned US military veterans speaking out against the continuation of the Vietnam War, famously asked the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a hearing, “How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?”

That was 1971, and the Vietnam War continued to drag on for two more years, with more Americans dying, and with many more Vietnamese being killed, until finally the last US combat troops were gone. But even then the fighting continued, with the Army of South Vietnam armed and financed by the United States, until April 30, 1975, when the last resistance ended and Vietnam was liberated and reunified and finally at peace.

During those two terrible years between Kerry’s statement and the end of US combat operations, American soldiers stationed in Vietnam knew that the war was lost, and knew they were there for no reason other than keeping President Nixon from looking like he had lost a war, particularly as he faced re-election during the campaign year of 1972. There was, understandably, massive resort to drugs, including marijuana, opium, heroin, LSD and others, as well as alcohol. There was the fragging of commanding officers who were too aggressive about sending their troops into danger. There was insubordination and insurrection and there was desertion.

Now consider the situation in Afghanistan. Once again a war has been lost by the US, this time to forces far weaker and more poorly organized than the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army.
Once again American troops are being asked to keep fighting for a mistake — this time the 2001 fantasy of the Bush/Cheney administration that it could make a client state out of Afghanistan, a mistake that President Obama doubled down on after taking over the White House, when he called Afghanistan the “good war” and committed another 30,000 troops there, plus ordering up an aggressive kill campaign of night raids, assassinations and the heavy use of pilotless armed drone aircraft.

John Kerry (l) testifying at the Senate in '71 and Iraq/Afghan War vets lining up to return medals to NATO in Chicago a few days ago

The Iranian military must be enjoying the latest spectacle of Pentagon waste and bungling.

Only a few weeks ago, the US attempted to ramp up the pressure on Iran by deploying to the Persian Gulf at the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, just across the gulf from Iran, a squadron of the Air Force’s spanking new and never battle-tested supersonic F-22 stealth fighter-bombers.

The F-22: A $400-million flying coffin built by Lockheed Martin. If half of the 180 planes on order were cancelled, the savings would fund the entire troubled $40-billion Pell Grant program that provides college funding to poor and moderate-income students. (Pentagon photo)
 

Stealth technology would be a key to any US attack on Iran because a central tenet of US imperial war strategy is that US losses have to be kept to a very low number so that the American public will continue shopping and watching American Idol and ignoring the endless wars. Since the Iranians, over the years, have been supplied with sophisticated Russian and Chinese radars and anti-aircraft missiles, a conventional attack could lead to heavy and politically dangerous losses.

The problem is that those F-22 Raptors are duds.

In Zone R
You push a green button and wait for assistance.
In Zone R there are two doors
With combination boxes on the handles –
One for men and one for women.
In Zone R you hear a voice summoning an Associate to Zone R.
You hear this voice every sixty seconds.
In Zone R
A small disheveled man appears
Who tries every combination of numbers in the universe.
(You know that he will fail but you root for him anyway. . .)
In Zone R
You begin to question
If you should wait a little longer
Just because you have already waited so long,
So you wait
Until you don’t think you can wait any longer
But the longer you wait,
The more sense it makes to wait a little longer.
In Zone R
The disheveled man speaks:

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

A better description for a fascist police state network could not be written.
Homeland Security: Behind the Crackdown on Occupy, documents show