Thursday July 20, 2017
We are witnessing a fascinating phenomenon that may signal that the neoconservative movement is nearing its "sell-by" date. As Glenn Greenwald documents in a recent article, there is a mass migration of neoconservative leaders back to the Democratic Party they left in the early 1970s. Why did they leave in the first place? The McGovernite peaceniks were destroying their party and they saw much potential in a Republican Party that had swung back and forth from the non-interventionism of the Taft wing to the big government, national-security-state Republicanism of the Buckleyites and others.
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Thursday July 20, 2017
Writing in The Independent, veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn reports that as many as 40,000 civilians were killed in the nine month siege of Mosul. That is tens of thousands more than the Pentagon is reporting. The reason for the high figure, Cockburn explains, is that bombs flattened multi-story housing structures, smashing everyone inside. The photos from Mosul are jarring. Who won? Watch today's Liberty Report...
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Wednesday July 19, 2017
According to a new NBC News survey, some 76 percent of Americans are afraid of being drawn into a major war. That is a ten percent increase from just February. What's behind this increased fear? The country that Americans feel most threatened by is North Korea, which has a GDP half the size of the US state of Vermont (which has the smallest GDP in the union). Who's responsible for making Americans so afraid of relatively minor threats? The media? Neocons? Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Wednesday July 19, 2017
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota (1999-2003), was a hot media commodity as the Bush/Cheney administration was preparing for its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ventura, a US Navy veteran who gained notoriety as a professional wrestler before he entered politics, was both popular and outspoken. MSNBC won the bidding war for his services in 2003, signing him to a lucrative three-year contract to create his own show – until, that is, the network learned he was against the Iraq war. Ventura’s show quickly went away, even as the network paid him for three years to do nothing.
I heard this revealing story from a new podcast, the TARFU Report, hosted by Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene. By his own account, Jesse Ventura was bought off by the network, which back then was owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor that was due to make billions of dollars off the war.
Of course, Ventura was hardly the only war critic to run afoul of GE/NBC. Phil Donahue, the famous talk show host, saw his highly rated show cancelled when he gave dissenters and anti-war voices a fair hearing. Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter who covered the Iraq war, gave a speech in late April 2003 that criticized the antiseptic coverage of the war (extracts to follow below). For her perceptiveness and her honesty, she was reassigned and marginalized, demoted and silenced.
So much for freedom of speech, as well as the press.
As Phil Donahue said, his show “wasn’t good for business.” NBC didn’t want to lose ratings by being associated with “unpatriotic” elements when the other networks were waving the flag in support of the Iraq war. In sidelining Ventura and Donahue, NBC acted to squelch any serious dissent from the push for war, and punished Ashleigh Banfield in the immediate aftermath of the war for her honesty in criticizing the coverage shown (and constructed) by the mainstream media, coverage that was facilitated by the US military and rubber-stamped by corporate ownership.
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Wednesday July 19, 2017
A new investigation shows that President Donald Trump's bombing campaign against ISIS (the Islamic State) over several months has already led to nearly as many civilian deaths as those overseen by the Obama White House over several years.
According to an Airwars investigation conducted for The Daily Beast, at least 2,300 civilians were killed by coalition strikes from 2015 until the end of Obama's term earlier this year. But as of July 13, roughly six months into Trump's presidency, over 2,200 civilians have likely died from coalition strikes.
That translates to roughly 80 civilian casualties each month in Iraq and Syria during the Obama White House; during Trump's short tenure in the White House, it's been roughly 360 per month.
Samuel Oakford writes. "Airwars estimates that the minimum approximate number of civilian deaths from Coalition attacks will have doubled under Trump's leadership within his first six months in office."
The reason for the trend may be attributed to the result of new war plan to defeat ISIS. It includes a shift to what Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis called "annihilation tactics" to defeat ISIS fighters and the president's having "delegated authority to the right level to aggressively and in a timely manner move against enemy vulnerabilities."
In March, the "month after Mattis delivered the new plan, U.S.-led forces likely killed more civilians than in the first 12 months of Coalition strikes—combined," Oakford writes.
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Tuesday July 18, 2017
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a fiery speech yesterday to the National District Attorneys Association. Unfortunately his fire was all directed at our civil liberties. He wants to crack down on guns, ramp up the drug war (including more harassment of doctors), lengthen prison sentences and reduce sentencing flexibility, and expand the government theft of private property known as "asset forfeiture." Sessions' speech was pure authoritarianism from top to bottom. Endless wars overseas expand a war mentality at home, which governments love to exploit. More on Sessions' war declaration in today's Liberty Report...
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Tuesday July 18, 2017
There are signs that a US military operation against Iran is imminent. The administration is pushing Congress for the authority to build new "temporary" facilities in Iraq and Syria. Its policy statement says the armed forces are hamstrung by legal restrictions on the ability to expand military infrastructure in Syria and Iraq. The Trump administration wants the existing authorities that only cover the "repair and renovation" of facilities extended to also encompass "temporary intermediate staging facilities, ammunition supply points, and assembly areas that have adequate force protection."
According to a 2016 Defense Department of Defense (DoD) report, the Pentagon wastes money on maintaining 22 percent excess infrastructure unnecessary infrastructure. The House and Senate Committee versions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) deny the military the right to spend money on a new round of Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC), making it pay for the real estate it does not need. Now new military bases in the Middle East may be added to the financial burden.
The added flexibility is supposed to boost the capabilities against the Islamic State (IS) but it does not sound credible. After all, the group is already retreating everywhere and the process is unstoppable. But boosting military infrastructure is the right thing to do if the enemy is a strong military power such as Iran. President Trump appears to have decidedly hardline leanings on that country.
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Tuesday July 18, 2017
Sustaining America’s state of post-9/11 perpetual war requires skillful manipulation of the public at home. The key tool used for this purpose is the bloodless narrative, a combination of policy, falsehoods and media manipulation that creates the impression that America’s wars have few consequences, at least for Americans.
How can the American government sustain its wars in the face of dead soldiers coming home? Why is there no outcry among the American people over these losses? The answer is the narrative of bloodless war.
The Dead
The bloodless war narrative’s solution to the dead is a policy of don’t look, don’t tell.
Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense for George H. W. Bush, helped decide in 1991 the first Iraq War would play better if Americans did not see their fallen return home. He recalled the images of coffins from the 1989 invasion of Panama on television, transposed against the president speaking of victory, and banned media from Dover Air Force Base, where deceased American personnel would arrive from the Persian Gulf.
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Monday July 17, 2017
The UN has identified four countries where the threat of major famine -- with potentially millions dead -- is becoming reality. Though there are many factors contributing to famine, including bad economic policies, weather disturbances, and so one, in fact these four countries all have one thing in common: US military intervention. From Sudan to Somalia to Yemen to Nigeria, US foreign policy produces famine and death rather than destabilization overseas.
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Monday July 17, 2017
When taxi and bus drivers take journalists into Syria via the Beirut-Damascus Highway these days, there's a common greeting that has become a kind of local tradition as the drivers pull into their Damascus area destinations. They confidently tell their passengers: "welcome to the real Syria." Local Syrians living in government areas are all too aware of how the outside world perceives the government and the cities under its control. After years of often deceptive imagery and footage produced by opposition fighters coordinating with an eager Western press bent on vilifying Assad as "worse than Hitler", many average Syrian citizens increasingly take to social media to post images and scenes of Syria that present a different vision: they see their war-torn land as fundamentally secular, religiously plural, socially tolerant, and slowly returning to normalcy under stabilizing government institutions.
As the most intense phase of fighting in Aleppo was unfolding in 2016, veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer took to the editorial pages of the Boston Globe to remind Americans that the media has created a fantasy land concerning Syria. Kinzer painted a picture quite opposite the common perception:
Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press... For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it...
The United States has the power to decree the death of nations. It can do so with popular support because many Americans — and many journalists — are content with the official story.
Now, during the first summer of relative calm Aleppo residents have seen in over four years of grinding conflict, the city commonly referred as "the jewel of Syria" is once again rising from the ashes.
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