Assassin of thousands on left, innocent gorilla on right

Spend a little time getting familiar with General Stanley McChrystal, who soon will take over Obama's Af-Pak war. What the appointment means is the export of the Phoenix Program -- mass assassinations of resistance sympathizers and leaders -- from Iraq to Afghanistan. The following by James Petras is suitably roaring in outrage:

Obama's Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice
by James Petras
May 18th, 2009

"The Deltas are psychos...You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force...", a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980's. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal's rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the `Special Operations' teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT's `counter-terrorism' is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal's SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the `direct action' forces of the `Special Missions Units. `Direct Action' operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in `propaganda of the dead', assassinating local leaders to `teach' the locals to obey and submit to the occupation.

. . . Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism - the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy - at the center of US foreign policy. Obama's quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities.

It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as `Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice'.

More examination of the psychopathy below, by Tom Hayden, Seymour Hersh, and others.

Our enemy as a child, playing marbles in the Rawalpindi, Pakistan dust.

Go here or here to see what the means looks like.

So, the ends must surely be a garden of Hollywood joy. Surely there will, soon, be a Big Mac w cheese in every Af-Pak cooking pot and a Pam Anderson poster by every Af-Pak brat's bed. Surely?

Because the means are heartrending, just terribly sad.

Which is why the media (and Obama) don't show them to you.

-- Barack Obama

[I]mages of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. [E]ach civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people . . .

-- Mike Mullen, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff

Yes, well, 'even remotely responsible' doesn't square with U.S. shrapnel from a U.S. bomb dropped by the U.S. directly implanting itself in a child's face 7000 miles away from the U.S. That said, here are the results of the May 4-5 U.S. bombardment and killing of at least 147 civilians in Farah, Afghanistan. Nothing has changed post-Bush, so now I bring you, because the mainstream media refuses to, Obama's latest "recruiting tools for al-Queda":

New symbol, dying days.

It's not yer rage act yer age girl.

Gentleman's drone war

Smiles on his children.

Hooverville, Seattle, 1937

Whiteysphere, you elected no hope. So, youve gotten more empire and war, but of course that matters only to `those people over there, the ones not like me.' No, what actually will matter to you, you've gotten no hope economics. Specifically, Mr. No Hope predictably has squandered trillions on terminally ill financial titans. You needed that money, Whiteysphere.

No hope economics means get ready in four or five months for economic Titanic. It's already well underway, of course, but by that time happy & thrifty talk will be overwhelmed and you'll see it on yer corporate media TV. See millions of Americans - many of them `people like you' - living in Obamavilles. See armed security on your sidewalks as bank robberies and other people's economic crime skyrockets. See unwashed youth prowling city streets - even in neighborhoods where `people like you' live - begging or stealing, doing anything to feed their bellies.

On the other hand, those people way over there, the ones our empire is injuring, impoverishing, killing and de-housing, they can draw hope from the impending impoverishment of the US economic goliath and its vassals.

Hope, no hope, okay mebbe it depends on your perspective. Whatever, next time how `bout voting for a non-asshole?

Who should be punished?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

- Pablo Neruda

I hope Robinson's students are debating this as intensely as the readers here. If so, this seems a raging success as a learning exercise.

- ProfEd

What is college supposed to be about? Back in my day, younguns, many of us hoped it would be about discovering an intellectual `real world' beyond the borders of our (mainstream media mediated) conventional ideas. Even now, I'm sure for a few freshpeople that is part of what they hope their college academic experience will provide them.

But that's not how it generally works out. Most professors care almost exclusively about tenure and the academic mole hill, and besides, they fear where things might go if they did their duty to nurture or even fucking provoke a `worldly' awareness (however unsettling) in their students. So they think and act `by the book', keeping their ears to the mainstream world and listening for instructions on which thoughts win points there and which are over the line. Boring.

These profs, of course, have long been intimidated into silence or at best muddled concern over the actions of America's number one ally Israel, while happily railing on the evils of official U.S. enemies Iran, `the Taliban', Sudan, and, earlier, Serbia, Saddam, and the Soviets.

Nonetheless, Israel's razing of Gaza last January compelled UC Santa Barbara professor William Robinson to rashly provoke his `sociology and globalization' students with an e-mailed photographic comparison of the Gaza and Warsaw ghettoes. Over the line.

Two of his 80 students complained, saying the Jewish professor was anti-Semitic. Because criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, and because comparisons between barbed-wire-enclosed ghettoes - no one in or out enforced with deadly force - created by Nazi-era Germany and GWOT-era Israel are anti-Semitic.

TRIPLE SHOOTING IN ATHENS: Slaying motive unclear
Police issue nationwide alert for UGA professor

By Marcus K. Garner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, April 27, 2009

Authorities still don't know the motive for the shooting, and the search for Zinkhan, 57, continued Monday. Police said they had no leads on his whereabouts.

"I've talked to my friends who were there, and they said he was very methodical and went in and just started (shooting)," said Dina Canup, a Town & Gown member since 2001. "It's just unfathomable."

It's very sad, but we see these motiveless mass homicide stories repeatedly (standing out in recent memory was the 'anti-depressants in his system' Northern Illinois U. mass murderer). Combine mild to severe depression, drug companies' & doctors' profit motives, anti-depressants and American gun laws and what do you get? Guy probly killed himself too, another fairly safe prediction.

Should anti-depressants carry bigger fatter bolder warnings that they 'have been known to cause severe persecution complex, suicides, and mass homicides'? Yes. That doesn't mean they should never be prescribed, but amateurish drug-company-advertising-addled doctors need to get it straight in the in-your-face bold: DANGERous. Not that the warnings will do much good, but bigger and clearer is a start.

Should drug companies be allowed to advertise dangerous drugs to encourage people to go to doctors and ask for anti-depressants? Of course not.

Recently and further info on anti-depressants:

Pepe Escobar: . . . the success rate of the Barack Obama administration's "hell from above" Predator drone war over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is a mere 6%. Of "60 Predator strikes between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, only 10 hit their targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders" but most of all "killing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians".

Our biggest problem is with the foreigners - we just hate them. Our families, our children, our women - everyone hates them. -- Pashtun village elder

Damn, I hope Obama doesn't ruin his whole presidency trying to prove how tough he is by waging an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Yes, unwinnable. -- Howie Klein (aka DownwithTyranny!)

Some of the mydd commenters on my previous diary -- Obama's Afghan War: kill Pashtuns, destroy their villages, leave -- I feel need to ignore for a moment scaremongering labels -- Al Queda! Militants! Taliban! Bin Laden! Islamic extremists! -- and get to know objectively what the U.S. is doing and involved with in Afghanistan. Absolutely the best place to start (in my humble . . .) is Afghanistan: chaos central in Le Monde diplomatique. Chris Sands gives you that ground-level view on how and why the Taliban's fortunes have turned around so sharply since the summer of 2005. It's not actually because "they hate us for our freedoms," or because they're a bunch of Bin Laden fanboys. It's the hopeless economy (especially in the South and East), it's Karzai's toothlessness and corruption, it's the occupying American troops and the deaths from U.S. missile strikes, and it's the insecurity, chaos and kidnappings. These things are what the United States is fighting for. What we may think we are fighting against -- Bin Laden, Al Queda, The Taliban of 2001-2 - are a mirage. I don't think people who look seriously at the situation will think differently.

Sands' article begins:

As the summer of 2005 faded, everyone in Kabul had forgotten there was a war on. American soldiers bought carpets in Chicken Street bazaar; mercenaries downed vodka in restaurants before wandering upstairs to sleep with Chinese prostitutes. The brothels were in the same neighbourhoods as the mansions that militia commanders were building themselves with CIA funds and drug money. . . .

Something not right about the smell of the above, and the Taliban knew its time was coming.

In the spring of 2006, Kabul's imams complained publicly that officials were corrupt and alcohol was easily available. They were also angry at house raids by foreign soldiers in rural areas and accused them of molesting women. . . . When rioters tore through Kabul on 29 May, it was no big surprise.

The voices of ordinary Afghans are what best thing about Sands' article. Just after the May, 2006 riot, Sands was in an Afghan village:

I couldn't find anyone in Ghazni who admitted to taking the insurgents' side: they said poverty and a lack of reconstruction caused people to rebel. Looking at the broken roads and crumbling homes, I saw what they meant.

Sands adds:

Chilly drafts of wind pour through cracked windows and holes in the roof of Bethlehem Steel's tool shop. The interior looks like life had suddenly stopped, as though men had simply abandoned work stations and left their equipment to rot. Pigeon dirt covers rolling tables where streams of steel billets used to flow. In nearby sheds, hundreds of dies, once meticulously cut by skilled craftsmen, sit rusting and neglected because someone else's dies are now shaping this nation's tool steel.
     - - John Strohmeyer, 1985

Abandoned oil refining plant, near Philadelphia, 2007

America began de-industrializing 35-40 years ago, but the process continues. It is a problem that free market capitalism cannot solve, because it is natural for capital to avoid long-term investment, in particular avoiding high-wage nations. It will be hard on us here in the U.S. if our Ivy League masters fail to understand what America's basic economic problem is, or are too sold out to do anything about it even if they do understand. Only government can do anything here, and foregoing short-term profit for long-term benefit would involve short-term pain for the capitalist class. One person who does understand the underlying problem is Michael Perelman, who writes (emphasis added):

With all the attention to the current financial crisis, the time has come to look at another part of market failure -- the reluctance to invest in long-lived plant and equipment. I'm not merely thinking about the deindustrialization of the US economy, but a more general reluctance. . . .

The most popular response to this reluctance to invest [was the Joseph Schumpeter concept,] creative destruction.

The idea was that when the economy became sluggish, new innovations would be so profitable that investors would rush in and build up whole new industries. In doing so, they would destroy existing industry, but the net effect was to enliven the entire economy. For Schumpeter, this creative destruction was the lifeblood of capitalism.

Schumpeter liked to use transportation as a dramatic example of creative destruction. [In the early 19th Century, c]anals slashed the cost of transportation, while setting off an economic boom. Railroads followed with another revolution in transportation, setting off another boom. Finally, the internal combustion engine allowed trucks to haul freight with even more savings, creating still another boom.

But wait! Where are the entrepreneurs? Government, not entrepreneurs, provided the wherewithal for these transportation revolutions. Governments built the canals. Governments financed the railroads with land grants and other subsidies. Governments built the highways that made possible freight hauling by trucks. Schumpeter could not have chosen a more perfect example [of how uninvolved entrepreneurs were in the long-term investment that created new transportation infrastructures]..

The Obama doom and gloom vibe is not rooted just in poll numbers, though those are fairly bad, and it's not so much the 'surprised leftist' complaint that he has 'tacked right' in recent weeks and months (he actually hasn't, he was already there (but that's another, deleted by Peeder diary)).

No, it's the smell of fear, insecurity and typical Dem conventional wisdom. The vice president thing showed the real Obama (one I've been talking about for months (in many many deleted by Peeder diaries)), an insecure guy very strictly obedient to wuss party conventional wisdom. The recent sky-is-falling was "They say WE'RE WEAK ON FOREIGN POLICY!!!!" and so (showing poor judgment even there) Obama chose the insider-as-parody Biden.

Then McCain and his advisers, showing good strategic judgment, chose a candidate who resonates with and amplifies McCain's maverick theme. (Biden resonates only to the sound of his own voice.) Obama should've chosen as McCain did, a candidate like Bill Richardson who resonates with and amplifies Obama's (apparent) 'ethnics r the shit' message.  

Spengler, an asshole over at atimes.com, sums up:

McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza [Obama's acceptance speech] yesterday: rejecting Clinton [well, Spengler is wrong on a lot of things] in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event [again, imho Spengler is wrong here and with the economy sucking so bad this still looks like a close election]. Obama [has] a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory. . . .

McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.

As I said, Spengler's an asshole: McCain's as much a maverick as James Garner was, i.e. he plays one on TV (well, in that lame-ass movie with Jodie Foster too). And Palin's 'reform credentials' are all bullshit. But, anyway, Spengler's right about McCain refurbishing his image and Obama messing up his (the article also goes into Spengler's psycho-analysis of Obama, which is a worthwhile read imho).

FAIRLEFT'S Predictable ADVICE TO OBAMA:

As the Daily Howler wrote on Friday, it was a week for peering inside the dead souls of the U.S. media elite. And the most revealing two paragraphs came from the corporate media's least self-aware disinfotainer, Chris Matthews. Jealousy probably underlay the MSNBC Hardballer stating, immediately after hearing of boss Tim Russert's death, that Russert was the targeted dupe for the 'scary nukes' issue that Bush/Cheney used to get us into Iraq. Here's Matthews on Thursday, June 13 (emphasis added):

One other thing, and may be tricky to say this and I'll say it. When we went to war with Iraq, he and I had a little discussion about that and this is where he is every man. This is where Tim is Mr. or Miss America or Mrs. America. He is us as a country. I said, why--how can you believe this war is justified?  And he said, "The nuclear thing. If they have a bomb that they can use, we've got to deal with. We can't walk away from that."

And that to me was the essence of what was wrong with the whole case of the war. They knew the argument that would sell with Mr. America, with the regular guy, with the true American patriot. They used the argument that would sell, that would get us into that war. Tim was right on the nail. He was us, the American people. And that to me is something that has been coming in my head the last couple of hours when Tim and I had that conversation, that that was the thing that sold America. And the guys who wanted the war used that one thing that would sell the patriot in Tim Russert.

In sum, Cheney felt that Russert was the key guy he had to dupe, and it couldn't have been easier: 'TRUST ME TIM, SADDAM'S GOT NUKES!' That's all: no push back, no inquiry, End of F-cking Story. The Howler quotes Matthews and adds (emphasis by fairleft):

Matthews, of course, is describing a private discussion. There's no proof that this discussion occurred . . . But did Russert really get played, as embellishments led us to war in Iraq? You don't have to rely on Matthews. Who can forget the embarrassing exchange Russert had with Bill Moyers, just last year? Had Russert been duped by the war machine? Fairly plainly, Moyers was asking--and as he answered, Russert made one of the most embarrassing statements a big journalist ever has made:

As for US President George W Bush, he had just spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the history of a "free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very foolish. . . .

. . . nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are hit. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran standoff may have just begun.

Yes, the terrorists have won again. Or, as the Asia Times headlines it, Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil. The excellent M K Bhadrakumar writes:

It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations. Suleimani is in charge of the IRGC's operations abroad.

US military commanders routinely blame the Quds for all their woes in Iraq. The fact that the representatives of Da'wa and SIIC secretly traveled to Qom under the very nose of American and British intelligence and sought Quds mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge political message. Iran signals that security considerations rather than politics or religion prevailed.

But the politics of the deal are all too apparent. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army, was not in the loop about the goings-on. As for US President George W Bush, he had just spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the history of a "free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very foolish. . . .

according to the Drum Major Institute, if you average their newly released 2007 grades with earlier ones:

Hillary Clinton:

2007. A+
      
2005. A
      
2004. B
      
2003. A

Barack Obama:

2007. A+
      
2005. C

Obama received a poor grade in 2005 for two votes. First, he voted for H.R. 6, the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The Drum Major Institute commented:

The most startling thing about this legislation is what it does not do. In the first place, the 1,700-page multi-billion dollar bill fails to help middle-class consumers squeezed by high gas and fuel costs. The rollback in public safety protections also puts middle-class families at risk, for example by exempting oil and gas companies from the provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act when these companies inject carcinogenic chemicals into the ground. At the same time, the deregulation of public utilities exposes the middle class to a different kind of risk: stemming from increased consolidation of utilities that could raise electric rates and manipulate energy markets. What the bill does do is provide massive taxpayer subsidies - to the tune of $85.1 billion dollars - for some of the world's most profitable corporations, so that, among other things, they can drill on public land while paying the public less, ultimately leaving middle-class families to pick up a bigger share of the cost of public services. Finally, although the legislation comes at a time of overwhelming scientific evidence about the dangers of global warming and increased concern about the nation's dependence on foreign oil, it does very little to address either problem, neglecting to even increase fuel efficiency standards for cars.