How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State Page 27

  There is no good answer to this question. Lacking evidence for a case against Iran, Washington and Israel have substituted demonization. A lie has been fabricated that the current president of Iran [no longer in office] intends to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

  This lie has succeeded as propaganda even though numerous language experts have proven that the intention attributed to the Iranian president by American-Israeli propaganda is a gross mistranslation of what the president of Iran said. Once again, for Washington and its presstitutes, facts do not count. The agenda is all that counts, and any lie will be used to advance it.

  Washington’s sanctions could end up biting Washington harder than they bite Iran. What will Washington do if India, China, Turkey and South Korea do not succumb to Washington’s threats?

  According to recent news reports, India and China are not inclined to inconvenience themselves and harm their economic development in order to support Washington’s vendetta against Iran. Having watched China’s rapid rise and having observed North Korea’s immunity to American attack, South Korea might be wondering how much longer it intends to remain Washington’s puppet state. Turkey, where the civilian and somewhat Islamist government has managed to become independent of the US- controlled Turkish military, appears to be slowly coming to the realization that Washington and NATO have Turkey in a “service role” in which Turkey is Washington’s agent against its own kind. The Turkish government appears to be reassessing the benefits of being Washington’s pawn.

  What Turkey and South Korea have to decide is basically whether their countries will be independent countries or be subsumed within Washington’s empire. The success of the American-Israeli assault on Iran’s independence depends on India and China.

  If India and China give the bird to Washington, what can Washington do? Absolutely nothing. What if Washington, drowning in its gigantic hubris, announced sanctions against India and China?

  Wal-Mart’s shelves would be empty, and America’s largest retailer would be hammering on the White House door.

  Apple Computer and innumerable powerful US corporations, which have offshored their production for the American market to China, would see their profits evaporate. Together with their Wall Street allies, these powerful corporations would assault the flunky in the White House with more force than the Red Army. The Chinese trade surplus would cease to flow into US Treasury debt. The offshored-to-India back office operations of banks, credit card companies, and customer service departments of utilities throughout the US would cease to function.

  In America, chaos would reign. Such are the rewards to the Empire of globalism.

  Obama and the neoconservative and Israeli warmongers who urge him on to more wars do not understand that the US is no longer an independent country. America is owned by offshoring corporations and the foreign countries in which the corporations have located their production for US markets. Sanctions on China and India (and South Korea) mean sanctions on US corporations. Sanctions on Turkey mean sanctions on a NATO ally.

  Do China, India, South Korea and Turkey realize that they hold the winning cards? Do they understand that they can give the bird to the American Empire, or are they brainwashed like Europe and the rest of the world that the powerful Americans cannot be resisted?

  Will China and India exercise their power over the US, or will the two countries fudge the issue and adopt a pose that saves face for Washington while they continue to purchase Iranian oil?

  The answer to this question is: how much will Washington pay China and India in secret concessions for their pretense that China and India acknowledge Washington’s dictatorial powers over the world?

  Without concession to China and India, Washington is likely to be ignored while it watches its power evaporate. A country that cannot produce industrial and manufactured goods, but can only print debt instruments and money is not a powerful country. The American empire can continue to strut around until the proverbial boy says: “The Emperor has no clothes”.

  Update: China is responding to the sanctions by taking advantage of the drop in demand for Iranian oil to negotiate lower prices for its purchases. The result of Washington’s sanctions on Iran is to lower the cost of energy for China and to raise it for everyone else.

  HOW LIBERTY WAS LOST

  April 24, 2012

  When did things begin going wrong in America?

  “ From the beginning,” answer some. English colonists, themselves under the thumb of a king, exterminated American Indians and stole their lands, as did late 18th and 19th century Americans. Over the course of three centuries, the native inhabitants of America were dispossessed, just as Israelis have been driving Palestinians off their lands since 1948.

  Demonization always plays a role. The Indians were savages and the Palestinians are terrorists. Any country that can control the explanation can get away with evil.

  I agree that there is a lot of evil in every country and civilization. In the struggle between good and evil, religion has at times been on the side of evil. However, the notion of moral progress cannot so easily be thrown out.

  Consider, for example, slavery. In the 1800s, slavery still existed in countries that proclaimed equal rights. Even free women did not have equal rights. Today no Western country would openly tolerate the ownership of humans or the transfer of a woman’s property upon her marriage to her husband.

  It is true that Western governments have ownership rights in the labor of their citizens through the income tax. This remains as a mitigated form of serfdom. So far, however, no government has claimed the right of ownership over the person himself. A large part of a citizen’s income and wealth can be seized, but the person himself cannot be seized and sold to another.

  Sometimes I hear from readers that my efforts are pointless, that elites are always dominant and that the only solution is to find one’s way into the small, connected clique of elites either through marriage or service to their interests.

  This might sound like cynical advice, but it is not devoid of some truth. Indeed, it is the way Washington and New York work, and increasingly the way the entire country operates.

  Washington serves powerful private interests, not the public interest. University faculties in their research increasingly serve private interests and decreasingly serve truth. In the US the media is no longer a voice and protection for the people. It is becoming increasingly impossible in America to get a good job without being connected to the system that serves the elites.

  The problem I have with this “give up” attitude is that over the course of my life, and more broadly over the course of the 20th century, many positive changes occurred through reforms. It is impossible to have reforms without good will, so even the elites who accepted reforms that limited their powers were part of the moral progress.

  Labor unions became a countervailing power to corporate management and Wall Street.

  Working conditions were reformed. Civil rights were extended. People excluded by the system were brought into it. Anyone who grew up in the 20th century can add his own examples.

  Progress was slow—unduly so from a reformer’s standpoint—and mistakes were made. Nevertheless, whether done properly or improperly there was a commitment to the expansion of civil liberty.

  This commitment ended suddenly on September 11, 2001. In 11 years the Bush/Obama Regime repealed 800 years of human achievements that established law as a shield of the people and, instead, converted law into a weapon in the hands of the government. Today Americans and citizens of other countries can, on the will of the US executive branch alone, be confined to torture dungeons for the duration of their lives with no due process or evidence presented to any court, or they can be shot down in the streets or exterminated by drone missiles.

  The power that the US government asserts over its subjects and also over the citizens of other countries is unlimited. Lenin described unlimited power as power “resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restric
ted by any laws, nor any absolute rules.”

  Washington claims that it is the government of the indispensable country representing the exceptional people and thereby has the right to impose its will and “justice” on the rest of the world and that resistance to Washington constitutes terrorism to be exterminated by any possible means.

  Thus, the American neoconservatives speak of nuking Iran for insisting on its independence from American hegemony and exercising its rights to nuclear energy under the non-proliferation treaty to which Iran is a signatory.

  In other words, Washington’s will trumps international treaties that have the force of law, treaties which Washington itself imposed on the world. According to the neoconservatives and Washington, Iran is not protected by the legal contract that Iran made with Washington when Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty.

  Iran finds itself seen by the forces of evil that dominate Washington, D.C. as just another 17th or 18th century American Indian tribe to be deprived of its rights and exterminated.

  The vast majority of “superpower” Americans plugged into the Matrix, where they are happy with the disinformation pumped into their brains by Washington and its presstitute media, would demur rather than face my facts.

  This raises the question: how does one become unplugged and unplug others from the Matrix? Readers have asked, and I do not have a complete answer.

  It seems to happen in a number of ways. Being fired and forced to train your H-1B foreign replacement who works for lower pay, being convicted of a crime that you did not commit, having your children stolen from you by Child Protective Services because bruises from sports activities were alleged to be signs of child abuse, having your home stolen from you because a mortgage based on fraud was given the force of law, being laid off by “free market capitalism” as your age advanced and the premium of your employer-provided medical insurance increased, being harassed by Homeland Security on your re-entry to the US because you are a non- embedded journalist who reports truthfully on US behavior abroad. There are many instances of Americans being jolted into reality by the “freedom and democracy” scales falling away from their eyes.

  It is possible that becoming unplugged from the Matrix is a gradual lifelong experience for the few who pay attention. The longer they live, the more they notice that reality contradicts the government’s and media’s explanations. The few who can remember important stuff after watching reality shows and their favorite sports teams and fantasy movies gradually realize that there is no “new economy” to take the place of the manufacturing economy that was given away to foreign countries. Once unemployed from their “dirty fingernail jobs,” they learn that there is no “new economy” to employ them.

  Still seething from the loss of the Vietnam War and angry at war protesters, some flag-waving patriots are slowly realizing the consequences of criminalizing dissent and the exercise of First Amendment rights. “You are with us or against us” is taking on threatening instead of reassuring connotations, implying that anyone who opens his or her mouth in any dissent is thereby transformed into an “enemy of the state.

  ”

  More Americans, but far from enough, are coming to the realization that the extermination of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 was a test run to confirm that the public and Congress would accept the murder of civilians who had been demonized with false charges of child abuse and gun-running. The next test was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Whose explanation would prevail: the government’s or that of experts? Air Force General Partin, a top expert on explosives, proved conclusively in a heavily documented report given to every member of Congress that the Murrah Federal Office Building blew up from the inside out, not from the outside in from the fertilizer car bomb. But General Partin’s facts lost out to the government’s propaganda and to Congress’ avoidance of cognitive dissonance.

  Once the “national security” government learned that its pronouncements and those of the presstitute media carried more weight than the facts presented by experts, conspiracies such as the earlier abandoned Operation Northwoods could be put into play. A 9/11 became possible.

  The Pentagon, CIA, and military/security complex were desperate for a new enemy to replace the “Soviet threat,” which had ceased to exist. The military/security complex and its servants in Congress were determined to replace the profits made from the Cold War and to preserve and increase the powers accumulated in the Pentagon and CIA. The only possible replacement for the Soviet threat was “Muslim terrorists.” Thus, the creation of the “Al Qaeda threat” and the bizarre conflation of this new threat with secular Arab governments such as Iraq’s and Syria’s, which were the real targets of Islamists.

  Despite the evidence provided by experts that secular Arab governments, such as Saddam Hussein’s, were allies against revolutionary Islam, US government propaganda linked the secular Iraqi government with Iraq’s Islamist enemies.

  Once Washington confirmed that the American public was both too ignorant and too inattentive to pay any attention to events that would alter their lives and jeopardize their existence, everything else followed: the PATRIOT Act, the suspension of the Constitution and destruction of civil liberty, Homeland Security which has quickly extended reach from airports to train stations, bus terminals, highway road blocks, and to locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs in a search for one 19 year old wounded kid, the criminalization of dissent, the equating of critics of the government with supporters of terrorism, the home invasions of antiwar protesters and their arraignment before a grand jury, the prosecution of whistleblowers who reveal government crimes, and the equating of journalism organizations such as WikiLeaks with spies. The list goes on.

  The collapse not only of truth but also of interest in truth both in the US and in its puppet states is a major challenge to my view that truth and good will are powers that can prevail over evil. It is possible that my perception that moral progress has occurred in various periods of Western civilization is mistaken and that reforms were granted in order to lull populations to new evils being perpetrated.

  But I think not. Reason is an important part of human existence. Some are capable of it. Imagination and creativity can escape chains. Good can withstand evil. The extraordinary film, The Matrix, affirmed that people could be unplugged. I believe that even Americans can be unplugged. If I give up this belief, I will cease writing.

  TRIALS WITHOUT CRIMES OR EVIDENCE

  April 25, 2012

  Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture.

  For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured through torture has been impermissible as evidence for centuries. So also has the withholding of evidence from the accused and his attorney. Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as made- up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because it cannot stand the light of day.

  The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against alleged terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened if the evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an absurd claim that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes the national security of the United States.

  To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.

  Secret evidence destroys the concept of a fair trial. It eliminates justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial, people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and
convicted.

  This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not led to impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional scholars, and bar associations.

  Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value detainees” with Arab or Muslim names.

  But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create, through the application of pain and psychological breakdown, guilt by self-incrimination in order to fabricate a case against them.

  The government has been unsuccessful and has nothing that it can bring to a real court. So the Bush/Obama Regime created and recreated “military tribunals” to lend “national security” credence to the absolute need that non-existent evidence be kept secret.

  Andy Worthington in his numerous reports does a good job in providing the history of the detainees and their treatment. He deserves our commendation and support. But what I want to do is to ask some questions, not of Worthington, but about the idea that the US is under terrorist threat.

  By this September, 9/11 will be eleven years ago. Yet despite the War on Terror, the loss of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, an expenditure of trillions of dollars on numerous wars, violations of US and international laws against torture, and so forth, no one has been held accountable. Neither the perpetrators nor those whom the perpetrators outwitted, assuming that they are different people, have been held accountable. Going on 11 years and no trials of villains or chastisement of negligent public officials. This is remarkable.