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Let's Call Bolton What He Is, a War Criminal With Terrorist Ties, Not Just "Hawkish" |
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Monday, 26 March 2018 08:41 |
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Cole writes: "John Bolton helped lie our country into an illegal war of aggression that killed several hundred thousand Iraqis, wounded over a million, and displaced 4 million from their homes, helped deliver Baghdad into the hands of Iran, and helped create ISIL, which blew up Paris."
John Bolton speaking at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit in Nashua, New Hampshire, on April 17, 2015. (photo: Darren McCollester/Getty Images/JTA)
Let's Call Bolton What He Is, a War Criminal With Terrorist Ties, Not Just "Hawkish"
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
26 March 18
 ohn Bolton helped lie our country into an illegal war of aggression that killed several hundred thousand Iraqis, wounded over a million, and displaced 4 million from their homes, helped deliver Baghdad into the hands of Iran, and helped create ISIL, which blew up Paris. In a just world, Bolton would be on trial at the Hague for war crimes. Instead, he has been promoted into a position to do to Iran what he did to Iraq.
He is also in the back pocket of the MEK Iranian terrorist organization, which despite its violent and smelly past has proved so useful to those plotting the apocalyptic destruction of Iran that the Washington elite decided to take it off the list of terrorist organizations in 2012.
The acceptable political spectrum inside the Beltway in Washington DC is a marvel to behold. Bernie Sanders, a long-serving senator and public servant won 13.2 million popular votes to 16.8 million votes for Hillary Clinton (i.e. he was backed by 43% of one of the two major parties in the country). But Sanders was virtually blacked out from corporate television coverage during his impressive presidential bid, while Jeff Zucker turned CNN over to Trump every night at 7:30 pm throughout the summer and fall of 2016 and just let him talk, or whatever he does, for an hour without even a semblance of journalistic analysis. Supposedly left-leaning MSNBC did the same thing.
America’s corporations love the fascist side of the spectrum, which is obvious from the way they promoted Trump and Trumpism. Zucker also hired Cory Lewandowski, who was at the time contractually obligated to avoid criticizing Trump, as a CNN commentator. Fascism after all favors big corporations and vilifies and punishes workers and the poor. Under Mussolini, the Italian poor were plunged into much deeper poverty.
Television news also loves the maniacal side of the spectrum. You seldom see normal people as commentators on cable news, and much of the commentary is polarized and superficial and often simply incorrect on the facts of the matter. Sometimes it is even just a criminal conspiracy. During the Iraq War, the NYT revealed that the Pentagon successfully pressed on CNN a gaggle of former generals, many of them actively making money off of the Iraq War through contracting while they were promoting it on television. They presented an Alice in Wonderland view of the brutal US occupation of that country as a shining success. Tom Fenton, a career television journalist, once wrote a book suggesting that television news is so bad that it is actually a standing risk for US security, since an uninformed or misinformed public cannot play the democratic role of watchdog and is not being alerted to genuine threats. Maybe the maniacs draw eyeballs and increase advertising dollars. Maybe Wall Street doesn’t see people as maniacs as long as they advocate giving billionaires more money.
The fascination with the far right wing and with the maniacal dovetails in the person of Bolton, now Trump’s National Security Adviser. Jesus said that if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch. The ditch in this case could well be a ruinous war with Iran.
In a sane society, people like Bolton wouldn’t be allowed on television, much less put in charge of American security.
Bolton has assiduously tried to do the same thing he did to Iraq to Iran. Big corporations like wars. Wars mean you have to manufacture more shiny children-murdering weapons and bombs, the ultimate in planned obsolescence. No war, and the factories fall silent and the money-counting stops. People called “hawks” in Washington, a euphemism for “murderous maniacs,” often get supported one way or another by the arms industry. Sometimes it is direct and their bank accounts should be examined.
Iran has never had a nuclear weapons program, and as long as the nuclear deal holds, it has no opportunity to develop them. It has no heavy water reactor. It has a limited number of centrifuges. It destroyed its stockpile of uranium enriched to 19.5% for its medical reactor. It is being actively inspected. No country under active UN arms inspections has ever developed a bomb.
Bolton wants to bomb Iran so badly that he does not care about these facts. He wanted to bomb Iran himself if he could, sort of like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. If not he wanted to have the Israelis do it.
He has a list. He’d like to bomb nuclear-armed North Korea, too.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that keeps that clock showing how many minutes the world is away from a nuclear midnight can put it away. With Bolton’s appointment, it is past midnight.
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The March for Our Lives Could Not Possibly Have Been Scripted |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15772"><span class="small">Dahlia Lithwick, Slate </span></a>
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Sunday, 25 March 2018 13:51 |
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Lithwick writes: "Since it's very hard to hate child victims of school shootings, the best available critique that could be mustered for Saturday's March for Our Lives was the familiar refrain that 'these children are puppets.'"
Tears roll down the face of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez as she observes 4 minutes and 25 seconds of silence while addressing the March for Our Lives rally on Saturday in Washington. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: 'Vote Them Out!': Thousands Register
to Vote at US Gun-Control Marches
The March for Our Lives Could Not Possibly Have Been Scripted
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
25 March 18
What we saw on Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., was stunningly original.
 ince it’s very hard to hate child victims of school shootings, the best available critique that could be mustered for Saturday’s March for Our Lives was the familiar refrain that “these children are puppets.” What began in the days immediately after the shootings as a widespread internet claim that the victims were paid crisis actors morphed rapidly into the allegation that student leader David Hogg had been “coached” on what to say during his TV interviews. That was followed by former Rep. Jack Kingston demanding on CNN, “Do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?” CNN was accused, falsely as it turned out, of “scripting” student questions during a town hall. On Saturday, the NRA said on Facebook, “Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.”
The notion that the whole operation was choreographed by George Soros and Hollywood meant that if, as I did, you watched Saturday’s event on Facebook Live, you were barraged by comments that the entire event was “fake,” and that the sheep-like students had been unwittingly conscripted into a vicious liberal fake media stunt.
If this had been tightly scripted, made-for-TV viewing it’s unlikely Samantha Fuentes, one of the Parkland survivors— overcome with emotion and nerves—would have stopped halfway through her poem, titled “Enough,” to throw up behind the podium. She then managed to finish the poem and stick the landing by grinning into her microphone that “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great!”
Were it all made for TV, the unannounced and uncomfortable 4 minutes and 25 seconds of silence led by Emma González as tears dripped down her face would have been cut after a half-minute.* It took all those stretched-out moments of awkward silence for the crowd to even register what was happening.
And had it been scripted by Soros, these students wouldn’t have been onstage barefaced, scuffed, and in pain. “There might be musicians of this stage, but this is not Coachella. We might have movie stars in the crowd … but this is not the Oscars. … This is real life,” said Parkland survivor Ryan Deitsch. “People have said that I am too young to have these thoughts on my own,” added 11-year-old Naomi Wadler of Virginia. “People have said that I am a tool of some nameless adult. It is not true.”
We may now be living through a reality-show presidency, but American high schoolers don’t watch much TV. They Instagram and Snapchat, watch Netflix and YouTube. Fifty percent of American millennials don’t watch any television at all. Members of Generation Z—the kids who organized the rally Saturday in Washington D.C.—watch even less. One study shows only about 36 percent of them watch traditional programs. That means these kids aren’t influenced by standard reality television tropes and probably explains why they would not bother to perform them, as they’ve been accused of doing.
What we saw on Saturday afternoon in Washington, D.C., was stunningly original media, as far removed from the hackneyed conventions and archetypes of cable television as you could imagine. The irony is that great masses of adults who have been brainwashed by television believe that young people behaving like genuine young people can only have been scripted and staged. What seems “real” these days is a president with handwritten instructions telling him to remember to say “I hear you.” Spontaneous outpourings of grief or even uncomfortably long silences must be fake and staged, because the sort of emotional behavior that currently resonates as authentic is a person raving about the “WITCH HUNT!” against him.
If you want to understand the way TV flattens real people into angry and irrational caricatures, watch the NRA’s Dana Loesch.
Now contrast Loesch with Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Sarah Chadwick and ask yourself who’s genuine and who’s reading hackneyed lines for a paycheck.
The irony of the not-made-for-TV nature of the March for Our Lives is that the president and Fox News and Conspiracy Television Incorporated would in fact like nothing better than to brainwash an entire generation of young people. Their entire future depends on ensuring that the generation that comes after Jeanine Pirro and Alex Jones consumes canned television narratives uncritically. The whole project of Trumpism demands that young people parrot received truths about the immutability of American exceptionalism and the fixed necessity of arming everyone, everywhere, always. The children who marched for their lives Saturday are only dismissed today as “sheeple” because they steadfastly refuse to sheeple along behind the desired shepherd.
Emma González’s extraordinary, uncomfortable, unexplained silence was one of the most transformational political moments of my lifetime precisely because it was impossible to understand in the moment what exactly was taking place. The TV script that’s narcotized us for decades tells us that women are all white and thin and paid for sex and children are silent and pure and built to deliver the punchline and the good guys with guns are expert marksmen who always save the day. For this generation of activists, all of that is as fake as the Love Boat was to their parents. And the script in which a “powerful” “sexually attractive” “billionaire” who is none of the above gets to make and destroy lives in 10-minute segments between commercials for stuff that nobody needs? That script is over, too. These children are awake. We can choose to meet them where they are or go back to sleep in front of the big screen.
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America's Next Referendumb Is for Keeps |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27921"><span class="small">Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 25 March 2018 08:44 |
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Rosenblum writes: "Okay, I stopped in this old settlement near Tucson just for the dateline. I wanted to reflect on some accidental Delphic prescience back in May 2016, I thought Hillary would be a shoo-in, but reporting out in the real world had me worried."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
America's Next Referendumb Is for Keeps
By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
25 March 18
 RACLE, Arizona — Okay, I stopped in this old settlement near Tucson just for the dateline. I wanted to reflect on some accidental Delphic prescience. Back in May 2016, I thought Hillary would be a shoo-in, but reporting out in the real world had me worried.
Here is what I wrote then:
“PARIS — After five months back in America, I can’t imagine any day in human history more fraught with peril than next November 8. Elections will weigh how much we have lost of our values and our good sense: a national referendumb.
“The world is scared witless. Wars flare. Climate chaos worsens. Desperate migrants are on the move. Youthful nihilism feeds a clash of civilizations. This is no time for America to retreat into hateful, us-first ignorance.
“Whatever Donald Trump isn’t, he is good at selling snake oil. And far too many angry, confused Americans can’t, or won’t, separate fact from flimflam. Let’s make no mistake here. He could win.
“When I left in November (2015), Europeans were laughing off our multibillion-dollar campaign spectacle. Now it seems about as funny as the Black Death.”
Back then, a worldly Parisian told me, “Of course, he can’t win,” then added, “Or can he?” Pondering that, he shuddered. His disbelief has since evolved to contempt for the society that chose Trump. That pretty much typifies the wider world.
Lots of Americans get that. John Brennan, CIA director until 2017, is among the more articulate. He served under six presidents, silently watching bad decisions made in good faith. He is no longer silent. Russia, he says, seems to have something on Trump.
After Trump fired Andrew McCabe with vindictive glee hours before his retirement, Brennan tweeted: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.”
That rings true. But what happens in the meantime? Many domestic depredations can be undone by regime change. The real dangers, largely unseen and little understood, are beyond our borders. Already, America is the incredible shrinking superpower.
Brennan compares Trump to an animal that lashes out when cornered. He could trigger a diversionary Wag-the-Dog war. Timothy Snyder at Yale, author of “On Tyranny,” fears he might magnify some perceived threat from abroad to attempt postponing elections.
Global war is unlikely. Neither Russia nor China wants Armageddon. Instead, they watch happily as America tears itself apart, ready to remake the world in their own image: few human rights, a muzzled press, no pressure to save resources for the future.
Tyrants in Africa and Asia can now plunder in peace. A Middle Eastern despot bombs and gases his own people with impunity. As America slams its doors, European neo-fascists exploit fear of hordes at their borders fleeing conflict and climate calamity.
Germany was rescued and rebuilt thanks largely to America. Its chancellor, born behind an Iron Curtain, now upholds free-world values. But Europeans need a wise NATO ally. Taught in school to think, they’ve read Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
As I pack up after my yearly Arizona teaching gig, the rest of that stanza worries me: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The Irish Nobel laureate died in 1939 in Menton, on the French-Italian border, just as two world-class despots set Europe ablaze. “The Second Coming” ends: “And what rough beast, its hour come around at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
Today, a hypocritical faux-Christian American “president” is slouching toward Jerusalem to build an embassy. Sheldon Adelson, his Zionist pal in Las Vegas, offers to pay for it. In today’s Animal Farm America, the porcine class rules deluded beasts of burden.
This alone is enough to chuck our “president” into that dustbin of history. In the unholy land, opposing people have been arguing for millennia over who is David and who is Goliath. Today, however, the weapon of choice is no longer a slingshot.
Step back for the big picture.
China now eats our lunch and an hour later is hungry again. Xi Jinping, now Great Helmsman for life, doesn’t fear musclebound U.S. military power. No one wins a nuclear war. He responds to deft diplomacy, not some real-estate shark’s one-sided “deals.” Those tariffs will backfire.
Xi relies on a Harvard-trained vice premier to streamline clunky systems of economic management. China plunders ocean fisheries and global mineral wealth. Authoritarian control can achieve wonders if unhindered by messy democracy. Look at Singapore.
Trump’s sniveling subservience to Russia amounts to a sort of treason America has not seen in 200 years. That his partisans reject out of hand the Christopher Steele report signals to the world that America is controlled by a plurality of deluded fools.
This is Putin’s wet dream: Russia redux. He left his fingerprints all over that poisoning in Britain. He corrupts American politics with a clear message: Deal with it, losers. And then Trump congratulates him on a sham election, failing to mention his crimes against humanity.
Anyone can keep up with the world if they find actual reporters who cover it. Too much “news” is fragmented third-hand bits relayed by like-minded friends. Without broad context and detailed focus from credible sources, the overall picture is lost.
Newsfeed algorithms that decide what interests us mean we miss crucial stories simmering toward a boiling point. And some of our old stalwarts now let us down, driven by profit rather than public responsibility.
I like dogs. Odious Beast, my Congo-born Belgian shepherd, flew with me around the world for 17 years. But Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s genocide, say, deserves more air time than a bulldog pup suffocating in a United Airlines overhead bin.
Take CBS, which once gave us Murrow and Cronkite. Today, focus is on American inside baseball, inspiring features, and isolated snow storms with little mention of the climate collapse making freak weather our new normal.
In Norah O’Donnell’s admiring “60 Minutes” interview with Mohammed bin Salman, she asked only one question on Yemen. That let the crown prince dismiss eyewitness accounts of U.S.-backed atrocities as Yemeni lies to make Saudi Arabia look bad.
Then there is North Korea, the Wall, and so many other impetuous, dumbass policies designed with a single purpose: Trump’s deluded sense of personal glory. His sleazy liaisons titillate and define his character. His assaults on the world matter more.
Our self-focus is hardly new. George Washington warned of “foreign entanglements.” That, however, was an age of slow ships and muskets, even before Mitch McConnell. Today, “America First,” telling the world that no one else matters, is fatal thinking.
Those Florida kids offer hope, yet this goes way beyond gun laws and 17 victims of a homegrown deviate. Leaders at every level must take into account the other 95 percent on our overheating planet. If not, we don’t need a Delphic oracle to see the future.
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On Torture, War Crimes and Trump's Pick for CIA Director |
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Sunday, 25 March 2018 08:38 |
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Beinhart writes: "Within the United States, there is a 'debate' over whether 'enhanced interrogation' was legitimate or illegitimate. Here's a test for Americans who can't figure it out."
Screengrab of Gina Haspel leading a toast to Ambassador Hugh Montgomery at an awards dinner in October 2017. (photo: YouTube)
On Torture, War Crimes and Trump's Pick for CIA Director
By Larry Beinhart, Al Jazeera
25 March 18
Gina Haspel, Trump’s CIA director pick, oversaw the torture of dozens of people.
 onald Trump has nominated a woman who ran a torture site to be head of the CIA.
Within the United States, there is a "debate" over whether "enhanced interrogation" was legitimate or illegitimate.
Here's a test for Americans who can't figure it out.
If Iraqis or Iranians or Russians treated captured Americans the same way, would Americans say that water-boarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other forms of enhanced interrogation were fair and appropriate, given the stress of circumstances, or would they say such actions were war crimes?
The test works for anyone. Just put in a member of your tribe as the captive and a chosen enemy as the abuser.
The nomination should be a huge problem.
Torture is against US law. Against several US laws.
The US "ratified" the UN Convention Against Torture as a "treaty" in 1994.
"Treaty" has two meanings in the US. The first is the simple and ordinary one of an agreement between nations. However, under Article II, Section 2, of the US Constitution, if the president gets the "advice and consent" of two-thirds of the Senate, it becomes a "treaty" as the term is used in Article VI, Section 2. "Treaties made ..." by that process "... shall be the supreme Law of the Land".
Ratifying that treaty was a long process. The US was involved from its inception. Nonetheless, the Senate was reluctant to let it be a "self-executing treaty". If only to satisfy issues of sovereignty, it would only be accepted if the US passed its own anti-torture laws first. The US then passed 18 US Code 2340A, "which made it a crime for a US national or foreigner present in the US to have committed torture outside the US". Torture inside the US was already covered by existing statutes.
18 US Code 2340A is clear and blunt:
Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
Also, the perpetrator need not personally turn the thumb screws, do the waterboarding or execute the beatings.
Supervising, directing, aiding and abetting all come under section (c) Conspiracy - "A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death)."
Then there's 18 US Code 2441, the War Crimes Act of 1996. It defines a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions, including torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, and sexual assault or abuse. The penalty is to be "imprisoned for life or any term of years ... if death results to the victim ... the penalty of death."
The high ground of War Crimes morality and law was established after WWII at the Nuremberg Trials.
At the time, the accused Nazis said the charges were only the vengeance of the victors. The Americans and the Allies claimed that this was not so and that they would apply the same standards to themselves.
To a certain degree, they did so. There is no doubt that in World War II, Korea, and in various operations around the world, Americans committed actions that could be charged as war crimes. The Phoenix Program in Vietnam, designed to use terror to counter what Americans considered the Viet Cong's and the North's use of terror, definitely falls under that definition. Yet these were regarded as aberrations, and, from time to time, the US has prosecuted Americans for War Crimes. There was a degree of hypocrisy, but the commitment to the higher values remained.
Until the 9/11 and the Bush Administration.
The excuse was fear. The people who wrote the Convention Against Torture - which is supposed to be America's "supreme law of the land" - understood the temptation, the lure of opportunity, and power of panic. Right in the law, it says: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture".
Antonin Scalia, one of the most influential recent Supreme Court Justices, and widely considered to be brilliant, made the case for using torture. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," he once said. For those who might not know, Bauer was not real. He was the made-up hero of the TV show 24. Its conceit was to have 24 episodes with each representing a sequential hour. If Jack was to save anything, it had to happen in a rush. Naturally, that led to "ticking bomb" storylines, and the demands of television action dramas made the solutions physical. Torture.
However dangerous al-Qaeda was at the time, they hardly had the firepower of the Third Reich or Imperial Japan, let alone both together. Germany had conquered Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, and France, was halfway to Moscow, and was bombing Britain, before the US even entered the war. Japan had taken over Manchuria, Indochina, and part of China, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was quickly followed by their invasions and conquests of the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. These would be wars in which the United States lost over 400,000 people, but Americans did not decide that they had to embrace torture. Instead of abandoning such things as the Geneva Convention, they fought back by championing them.
The other excuse that the Nazis offered was that they were only following the orders of a duly constituted government and military. At Nuremberg, the judges said that people had a positive duty - if it was possible - to refuse orders that were common crimes or crimes against humanity. For decades afterwards, "I vas only following or-ders!" became a ubiquitous tag-line and gag line.
Still, when the lawyers for the Bush Administration had to come up with an argument to convince CIA operators, military personnel, and others that they could commit war crimes without finding themselves on trial for war crimes sometime in the future, that's exactly where they went. First, they made the claim that the president's powers as "commander-in-chief" trumped all other laws and limitations - including the Constitution. Therefore, anything done at his behest was, by extension, also legal. In sum, the Nazi defence, "I vas only following or-ders!" was declared valid.
Then photos of Abu Ghraib came out along. Also the stories about black sites, extreme rendition, and torture. That was followed by internal studies by the military and intelligence services and a congressional investigation. Within and without, the split was between the fact-checkers and the ideologues. The former concluded that torture didn't work. That was the conclusion that the professionals went with. The ideologues also had their victories, in that they avoided prosecutions and, for the most part, retained their positions, status, and money.
Now, Trump, has reached out, and taken one of the torturers from an obscure - though high - bureaucratic position and offered her up as the next head of the CIA. The report of Gina Haspel being a villainess out of James Bond movie, who took joyful glee in torture and mocked her victim, had been retracted. But it is a fact that she was in charge of a black site in Thailand where she supervised "enhanced interrogations". They were videotaped. She had the evidence hidden away, lobbied to be rid of them, then participated in their destruction, so the world would not be able to see what she had done.
She has reputable supporters. They describe her as being very professional, thorough, and competent. As were so many of the German war criminals tried at Nuremberg. If there is such a thing as the moral high ground and if it matters, this is profoundly self-destructive.
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s Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, told the story to Anderson Cooper on “
