Citoyen Max Blumenthal dares enter inner sanctum of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex as MICIMATT meets in Washington
Citoyen/nes should do this: Allons enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
By Ray McGovern, June 11, 2022
After a half-century of active involvement in U.S. foreign policy (whether trying to inform it, or critiquing it), I had been gravitating slowly to some understanding of this key question: In what way is the USA is ‘exceptional’.
Duh! It should not have to take a Harvard professor to ‘splain it to me. But Dani Rodrik’s article (full text below) says it all. Short answer: The U.S. is exceptional because it is the only country that (a) considers itself exceptional and (b) continues to throw its weight around on that misbegotten premise. If exceptionalists like
Antony Blinken continue to run U.S. foreign policy, ‘This will come to a no-good end’, as the Chinese used to put it back in the day.
Rodrik’s article is below. (N.B.: It will be on the final exam.)
In the eyes of others, the US is not the benign power it thinks it is
By Dani Rodrik
When I started teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was the dominant preoccupation of US economic policy. The book Japan as Number One by Harvard’s premier Japan expert at the time, Ezra Vogel, set the tone of the debate.
I remember being struck back then by the degree to which the discussion, even among academics, was tinged by a certain sense of American entitlement to international pre-eminence. The United States could not let Japan dominate key industries and had to respond with its own industrial and trade policies – not just because these might help the US economy, but also because the US simply could not be No 2.
Until then, I had thought that aggressive nationalism was a feature of the Old World – insecure societies ill at ease with their international standing and reeling from real or perceived historical injustices. American elites, rich and secure, may have valued patriotism, but their global outlook tended towards cosmopolitanism.
But zero-sum nationalism was not far from the surface, which became clear once America’s place atop the global economic totem pole was threatened.
After three decades of US triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a similar process is now playing out on a vastly greater scale. It is driven both by China’s rise – which represents a more significant economic challenge to America than Japan did in the 1980s and is also a geopolitical risk – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The US has responded to these developments by seeking to reassert its global primacy – a goal American policymakers readily conflate with that of establishing a more secure and prosperous world. They regard US leadership as central to the promotion of democracy, open markets and a rules-based international order.
What could be more conducive to peace and prosperity than that? The view that US foreign policy goals are fundamentally benign underpins the myth of American exceptionalism: what is good for the US is good for the world.
While this is undoubtedly true at times, the myth too often blinds American policymakers to the reality of how they exercise power. The US undermines other democracies when it suits its interests and has a long record of meddling in sovereign countries’ domestic politics. Its 2003 invasion of Iraq was as clear a violation of the United Nations Charter as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.
US designs for “open markets” and a “rules-based international order” often primarily reflect the interests of US business and policy elites rather than smaller countries’ aspirations. And when international rules diverge from those interests, the US simply stays away (as with the International Criminal Court, or most of the core International Labour Organization conventions).
Many of these tensions were evident in a recent speech by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on America’s approach to China. Blinken described China as “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”, arguing that “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress”.
Blinken is correct that many of the elements of the post-World-War-II order, such as the UN Charter, are not purely American or Western. But it is far from certain that China poses a greater threat to those truly universal constructs than the US does. For example, much of the trouble that US policymakers have with Chinese economic practices relates to domains – especially trade, investment and technology – where universal rules hardly prevail.
According to Blinken, the US “will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system”. Again, who could possibly oppose such a vision?
But China and many others worry that US intentions are much less benign. To them, Blinken’s statement sounds like a threat to contain China and limit its options, while bullying other countries into siding with America.
None of this is to claim an equivalence between current US actions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s gross human rights violations in Xinjiang and land grabs in the Himalayas and South China Sea.
For all its faults, the US is a democracy where critics can openly criticise and oppose the government’s foreign policy. But that makes little difference to countries treated as pawns in America’s geopolitical competition with China, which often struggle to distinguish between the global actions of major powers.
Blinken drew a clear link between China’s authoritarian practices and the country’s presumed threat to global order. This is a mirror-image projection of America’s belief in its own benign exceptionalism. But just as democracy at home does not imply goodwill abroad, domestic repression need not inevitably lead to external aggression. China also claims to be interested in a stable, prosperous global order – just not one arranged exclusively on US terms.
The irony is that the more the US treats China as a threat and attempts to isolate it, the more China’s responses will seem to validate America’s fears.
With the US seeking to convene a club of democracies openly opposing China, it is not surprising that President Xi Jinping cosied up to Putin just as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. As the journalist Robert Wright notes, countries excluded from such groupings will band together.
To those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, US foreign policy elites respond with a rhetorical question: would you rather live in a world dominated by the US or by China?
In truth, other countries would rather live in a world without domination, where smaller states retain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with all others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not become collateral damage when major powers fight it out.
The sooner US leaders recognise that others do not view America’s global ambitions through the same rose-tinted glasses, the better it will be for everyone.
Dani Rodrik is professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Copyright: Project Syndicate
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3180953/eyes-others-us-not-benign-power-it-thinks-it
Joe Biden, “You’re no Jack Kennedy”, BUT ‘for god’s sake’, man, you COULD be. Read JFK’s American University speech from 59 yrs ago and the commentary by James Carden and Peter Kuznick (link below) and rise to the occasion. They may do you in as well. Try it anyway. https://simoneweilcenter.org/publications/2022/6/9/jrivlo7nbn9hvjemaxnmr4kjjpy2w5
by Jenny Farrell in Winter 2022 Edition of “Peace and Planet News”
https://peaceandplanetnews.org/northern-ireland-murders/
Originally published at People World
A newly released report revealed that throughout the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland the British military and police, waged a “dirty war.” They used tactics developed in anti-colonial wars in Kenya, Malaysia, Aden and Oman.
In a report released Jan. 13, Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland Marie Anderson said there was evidence of “collusive behavior” by some British officers in the murder of 19 people and the attempted murder of two others over a four-year period by unionist terror groups. “Operation Greenwich,” led by Ms. Anderson, dealt with the activities of the unionist death squads in two counties between 1989 and 1993.
As to the precise nature of the covert collaboration, the report cites the following facts, among others:
Last December, a Belfast court paid substantial compensation to the victims and relatives of a deadly 1975 attack on Ireland’s best-known pop group, the Miami Showband. Three musicians were killed and two injured in the attack. They were on their way to Dublin from a gig in Northern Ireland when they were stopped at a fake British Army roadblock manned by members of the UDR and Unionist death squad plus a British military officer who, according to one survivor, had “a posh English accent.”
The British government is seeking an amnesty for its armed forces.
These developments come at a time when the British government is seeking an amnesty for its armed forces, halting investigations and denying victims access to the courts and to a legitimate trial. This amnesty scheme has been rightly condemned by all Northern Ireland political parties, by the Irish government, and by international human rights organizations.
The purpose of the amnesty is to sweep under-the-carpet British atrocities such as Derry’s Bloody Sunday and Belfast’s Ballymurphy massacres of 50 years ago. In Derry on Jan. 30, 1972, 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were slain. In the Catholic estate Ballymurphy between Aug. 9 and 11, 1971, 10 defenseless people, including a priest, were killed in cold blood. A plan drawn up in London by the highest government circles aimed at crushing resistance through committing acts of “collective punishment” of the Catholic community in the North of Ireland.
Various investigations made varying efforts to illuminate or obscure the masterminds and circumstances of these attacks on the Catholic population. Despite overwhelming evidence against the actions of the military, only one paratrooper, “Soldier F,” was initially charged 49 years later with murder of two of the 14 dead on Bloody Sunday. The charges were dropped last fall. It is worth noting the same “Soldier F” received a commendation for gallantry for his role in the Ballymurphy massacre.
This amnesty is intended to ensure that both the actual killers, but also those in senior political and military circles who pulled the strings never come before a court of law for their crimes. “Soldier F” was part of the punitive shock troops deliberately deployed in both Derry and Ballymurphy. This British force, 1 Para of the Parachute Regiment, was under the command of Brigadier Kitson, the British Army’s guru in counter-insurgency. He had honed his “skills” fighting anti-colonial resistance movements in Malaya, Kenya, Aden, and Oman and penned several books on the topic. His 1960s book Gangs and Counter-gangs dealt with setting up pseudo-gangs in Kenya. And under his watch in September 1970 in Northern Ireland, similar proxy forces were formed.
Systematic collusion between British security forces and unionist terror gangs that resulted in hundreds of murders.
The use of such pseudo-gangs continued throughout the conflict and they were used against the Catholic community. In 1970, senior political figures including British Prime Minister Edward Heath approved of these illegal state-controlled gangs, which would have been discussed at the “GEN 42” military meetings at 10 Downing St., which were chaired by the PM and attended by cabinet ministers and senior military representatives. In other words, the amnesty is covering more than just ordinary squaddies.
The newly released report is just one of many investigations that revealed that throughout the 30-year conflict the British military, police, and military intelligence waged a “dirty war.” Various sources point to systematic collusion between British security forces and unionist terror gangs that resulted in hundreds of murders. The killing in February 1989 of lawyer Pat Finucane, who was murdered in front of his wife and children by a unionist killer squad, got international headlines. The masterminds behind this murder included police officers, British military personnel, and leading British politicians. The Finucane family have been battling for 30+ years for a public inquiry, but the British continue to block their efforts because it would show his execution goes to the very top of the Westminster establishment.
In early 2020, a British government-commissioned inquiry established that 85% of the pro-British terror gangs’ intelligence information came from a number of British security agencies. It also discovered that these killers “relied heavily on [British] security forces’ tips to identify Republican [Catholic] targets” and that “many attacks could be traced to support originally provided by one of their [British] security contacts.”
Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly said after the release of the latest report, “The families of the victims of these killings investigated by the Ombudsman, like all bereaved in the conflict, are entitled to know the truth about the deaths of their loved ones and should not have to wait any longer for truth and justice.” This comment applies to the entire Northern Ireland tragedy and the British policy of collusion and obfuscation.
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Ray comment: The British have long since razored out the word ‘accountability’ from the English Lexicon. My Irish grandmother told me many years ago about the cruelty of “the landlords” and the impunity they enjoyed.
The Navy “followed orders” to cover it up
By Ray McGovern, June 8, 2022
The murder of journalist Shereen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022 (See:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-jenin-killing-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html ) is, sadly, not the first time Israeli forces have killed American citizens and gotten away with it.
The Israeli bulldozer that ran over — and then backed up over — 23 year-old Rachel Corrie to ensure her back was broken on March 16, 2003 is another sad example.
Today, we call to mind the most egregious example 55 years after June 8, 1967, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 and wounding more than 170 (total crew was 294). At the height of the attack, Seaman Terry Halbardier jerry-rigged an antenna so an SOS could be sent. The Israelis heard the SOS and broke off the attack.
The attack on the Liberty is not in dispute. Israel claimed it was a mistake. Intercepted Israeli communications and copious other evidence tell a different story. Below is an article I wrote to mark the 50th anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/08/a-uss-libertys-heros-passing/
By Ray McGovern, June 5, 2022
It still makes me sick to my stomach — this time the sworn testimony of CIA contract psychologist/torturer James Mitchell that Gina Haspel was watching as he and psychologist/torturer colleague John Bruce Jessen waterboarded Saudi captive Ab al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Thailand. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/politics/cia-gina-haspel-black-site.html
For services performed (and obfuscated), Haspel passed muster in the Senate and was confirmed as CIA Director on May 17, 2018. It was hard for me to believe she had been nominated, harder still to believe the Senate Intelligence Committee, knowing what they knew about Haspel, would give her a pass. So I went to the Committee hearing on May 9, 2018.
Letting Haspel Off the Hook
It was very difficult to watch some of my former colleagues file into the front rows in full support of the nomination of a torturer to head the CIA. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who had published a damning report on CIA torture in Dec. 2014, lost her nerve and let Haspel off the hook when she asked her if she had overseen the interrogation of al-Nashiri. Haspel: it’s classified. And, in fact, the answer was successfully kept out of the media until now, with Mitchell’s testimony.
Intelligence Committee Chair, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) waxed eloquent, telling Haspel:
“You are without a doubt the most qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency. You have acted morally, ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”
See what I mean by getting sick to my stomach?
Point of Order!
I interrupted the hearing to expose the farce, reminding the senators that they knew a boatload of disqualifying facts about Haspel — including the answer to Feinstein’s question; and that, yet, they were about to approve her nomination to be director of the CIA.
Burr had me seized. Joe Lauria described what happened next: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/10/haspel-says-cia-wont-torture-again-as-ray-mcgovern-is-dragged-out-of-hearing/ . The 24 hours I had to spend in a very small cell in a dank DC jail felt right — even at the time. Feels more so in retrospect.
I have this moral thing about torture; I had thought almost everyone did! It turns out that Pete Hoekstra, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (2004-2007), had a different view. On March 2, 2006. I visited Hoekstra’s office to return the Intelligence Commendation Medallion given me at retirement for “especially meritorious service,” explaining, “I do not want to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture.” It was no secret he fully supported the CIA methods; I did not hear back from him.
Years later, however, I welcomed the chance to elicit from Hoekstra open acknowledgement that he knew of and condoned the abuses carried out by the CIA (over which his committee was supposed to exercise oversight). On Dec. 11, 2014, I confronted the former Congressman live on CCTV’s “The Heat”, while discussing the Senate Intelligence Committee findings released two days before damning CIA torture. It was a unique chance to hold Hoekstra publicly accountable for condoning torture, and the Michigan congressman rose to the occasion better than I could have hoped. (See minutes 8:15 to 10:41 of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfCjS2B1ShY).
Not Only Intrinsic Evil; Also Ineffective
For me torture belongs in the category of intrinsic evil — always wrong — in the same category as rape and slavery. Human beings simply do not do such things to other human beings. As an Army Combat Intelligence officer, I also knew that torture does not “work”. So, four months after I gave back my commendation medallion, I felt affirmed and gratified that the head of Army Intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes”, insisted:
“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”
Gen. Kimmons’s integrity and guts also made me proud again of my parent service, the U.S. Army. And get this: Kimmons chose to say this at a Pentagon press conference he himself arranged for Sept. 6, 2006, the same day on which he knew President Bush would publicly advertise the efficacy of an “alternate set of procedures” for interrogation. These were given the euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” They include, under the exact same title in German (verschaerfte Vernehmung), interrogation “techniques” listed in the Gestapo Handbuch.
The NY Times story reporting that Haspel watched the waterboarding, typically of such stories, was buried on page 17 in the Saturday edition. The good news, I suppose, is that the draft got past the NYT censors and (I’m guessing here) that those censors may have shunned the usual procedure of seeking a prior nihil obstat from Headquarters in Langley. Below is a trimmed-down version of Saturday’s article, which was written by Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes:
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Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at C.I.A. Black Site, Psychologist Testifies
The testimony emerged in pretrial hearings in the Cole bombing case at Guantánamo Bay, where the war court is wrestling with the legacy of torture after 9/11.
By Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes
WASHINGTON — During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.
Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.
While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.
But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s torture program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.
Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.
The C.I.A. has never acknowledged Ms. Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time Mr. Nashiri was being tortured, which Dr. Mitchell described in his testimony.
Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.
Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.
Dr. Mitchell described how in late 2002 he and another C.I.A. contract psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, waterboarded Mr. Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000. Seventeen American sailors were killed in the attack.
During three separate sessions, Dr. Mitchell held a cloth over the man’s face and adjusted it to direct the water as Dr. Jessen poured. …
The interrogation team shifted to other “coercive techniques,” including forcing the prisoner to spend time in a small confinement box. Dr. Mitchell said he had a “general memory of what was done” — the detainee, who was nude and sometimes hooded, was probably slapped and had the back of his head slammed into a burlap-covered wall — but testified that he did not have a “blow-by-blow recollection of any of that stuff.”
It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.
But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them. [Emphasis added.] …
The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., agreed to allow Dr. Mitchell to testify because the C.I.A. had destroyed videotapes that defense lawyers argue showed the psychologists torturing and interrogating Mr. Nashiri and another prisoner at the black site in Thailand. Defense lawyers said that deprived them of potential evidence, including something they might have wanted to show a military jury deciding whether to impose a death penalty.
The disclosure that the C.I.A. had destroyed the tapes — most of them showing Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee taken into custody and known to be tortured by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks — prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the black site program.
Ms. Haspel has acknowledged her role in the destruction of those tapes as a chief of staff to the operations chief, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her confirmation hearing, she said, “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.”
Observers at the site in Thailand watched waterboarding and other interrogations via a closed-circuit video feed to a separate room. … The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the C.I.A. program, only a part of which is public, said that interrogators wanted to stop using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Mr. Nashiri because he was answering direct questions, but they were overruled by headquarters.
Mr. Nashiri would also be tortured later, after Dr. Mitchell had taken him to a different C.I.A. black site. Another interrogator revved a drill next to the naked detainee’s hooded head, apparently to try to get him to divulge Qaeda plots. At another black site in 2004, the C.I.A. infused a dietary supplement into his rectum for refusing to eat. His Navy lawyer has called the procedure rape.
At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.
END of NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/politics/cia-gina-haspel-black-site.html
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Anybody else sick to their stomach?
Ray’s remarks at conference on ‘Insanity of Politicians Threatens Nuclear War’
By Ray McGovern, May 26, 2022
https://larouchepub.com/other/2022/4922-why_not_a_win_win_situation.html
The video of Ray’s talk is posted at: https://raymcgovern.com/2022/05/27/why-is-win-win-a-no-no/
(That video posting has already gotten an unusually high number of views.)
