Category Archives: War in the Middle East

How Iraq Made Big Bucks for Wall Street

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The Role  of CACI, Titan, Blackwater and Halliburton

Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers (Robert Greenwald 2006) is about the privatization of the war in Iraq and four of the Wall Street corporations that endangered enlisted troops, committed war crimes and cheated taxpayers out of billions of dollars. The film has just become available for free viewing on YouTube.

The film’s most shocking revelation is that torture at Abu Ghraib was primarily the responsibility of two private corporations, CACI International and Titan. CACI was originally contracted to perform database services in Iraq. The contract was expanded to include army intelligence work and eventually the interrogation and torture of prisoners.

Titan was originally contracted to provide translation services. According to GIs interviewed for the film, Titan never assessed their translators for their language skills and provided no training nor supervision of their ongoing work.

The GIs who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib were ordered to do so by these civilian contractors. When the scandal broke, the GIs were court martialed and faced average sentences of eighteen years. The civilian contractors who ordered the torture were merely sent home. Many went to work for new contractors and returned to Iraq within weeks.

Gouging the Taxpayer

The role of Halliburton (the company Dick Cheney ran before becoming vice-president) and Blackwater in Iraq has been well publicized thanks to a series of high profile scandals.

Even before the war started, the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) was awarded a no-bid contract to provide meals, water and construction, laundry, repair and transport services. Because it was a no limit cost-plus contract, there was a strong incentive for Halliburton/KBR to add on and inflate billable services.

Specific examples include charging the Pentagon $45 for a can of Coke, $99 for a bag of laundry and $250,000 on a three year lease for a $25,000 SUV. Instead of repairing trucks and SUVs that broke down, KBR would order GIs to burn or blow them up so they could charge the taxpayer for new ones. Hundreds of millions of dollars simply disappeared.

n 2005, Pentagon auditors ascertained that Halliburton had overcharged them by more than $1 billion. Despite a high profile Congressional investigation, the Pentagon paid the $1 billion over charge. Not only was there no effort to prosecute Halliburton, but their contract in Iraq was expanded.

Placing GIs at Risk

In addition to gouging the taxpayer, Halliburton/KBR placed GIs at significant risk in the slipshod way they provided water and food service. Out of the sixty-seven water treatment plants they operated in Iraq, sixty-three were unsafe due to contamination with giardia, cryptosporidium and other infectious organisms.

The mess halls Halliburton/KBR provided ran also placed GIs at substantial risk because the company refused to provide a twenty-four hour food service. Iraqi insurgents were quick to learn the meal schedules and frequently attacked as GIs waited an hour in line to be fed.

Obama Forced to Address Israel’s Oil Smuggling

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oil tanker

US Backs Russian UN Resolution Targeting ISIS

According to Bloomberg’s, on Feb 10 the UN Security Council adopted a binding Russian resolution threatening economic and diplomatic sanctions against countries and individuals that help ISIS and other terrorist groups profit from trading oil, antiquities or hostages. As the US vetoes most Russian Security Council resolutions, this was an historic event.The resolution requires governments to ensure that they aren’t engaged in direct or indirect trade with ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated groups such as the al-Nusra Front in Syria. According to Bloomberg’s, the resolution will significantly impact Turkey and Syria, which allow the purchase of oil from the militant group.Facts the article omits are probably more significant than the omissions.

First Bloomberg’s neglects to mention that the US initially opposed the resolution and spent three days frantically trying to counter and/or change the draft language.  Presumably this relates to inconvenient truth that Israel is one of the main destinations of the smuggled oil

Second it fails to comment on an extremely odd scenario in which the Assad government is purchasing smuggled oil from ISIS:

Thirdly it (deliberately?) leaves Israel and unnamed EU nations off the list of countries buying oil from ISIS.

The text of the resolution, which stops short of threatening the use of force, urges governments to share information on ISIS  financing networks, bans exports of all antiquities from Syria and reiterates the call on countries to prevent ISIS from benefiting from political concessions or ransom payments made to secure the release of hostages.

It also requires countries to block aircraft, auto and truck traffic, including oil tankers, traveling to or from areas in Syria and Iraq where the extremist groups operate.

ISIS earns about $1 million a day from oil sales.

In addition, according to a recent BBC investigation, ISIS also receives substantial income from looting and smuggling of antiquities from historical and archaeological sites in both Iraq and Syria. The primary market for the stolen objects is Europe and the Gulf states. Ten thousand year old artifacts can bring in as much as $1 million each. An Iraqi intelligence official told the Daily Mail that ISIS earned £23 million in early 2014 alone by selling 800 items stolen from the ancient city of Al-Nabk near Damascus.

In 2014, ISIS also brought in approximately $45 million in 2014 from kidnapping for ransom.

The resolution doesn’t spell out specific penalties for countries found guilty of helping ISIS. It would require the Security Council to debate whether any violations have occurred and what punitive measures it would order. The resolution requires all 193 members of the UN to report within 120 days on measures they’ve taken to comply with it. The UN’s existing al-Qaeda sanctions committee will monitor and report on any progress.

All in all, it looks like a pretty shrewd move by Russia. Obama now has 120 days to report back how he plans to sanction US allies Turkey and Israel – or face a UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions on the US. While the US would surely veto such a resolution, it provides an excellent opportunity for Russia to embarrass Obama and Israel by exposing their financial and military ties to ISIS.

This past week, the US also backed a Russian resolution to the UN Security Council supporting the Minsk Ceasefire.

photo credit: Seniority via photopin (license)

Also posted at Veterans Today

Hundreds of Drone Operators Quit Air Force

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predator drone“We didn’t even really know who we were firing at.”

The traumatic nature of their work is leading drone operators to quit the Air Force by the hundreds.

In the following video, former senior drone operator Brandon Bryant expresses deep regret for the six years he spent with the US drone program between 2005 and 2011. It especially bothered him that he was expected to fire on targets without being clear of their identities: “We didn’t even really know who we were firing at.”

Last November the human rights group Reprieve published a study indicating attempts to kill 41 alleged terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen resulted in more than 1100 civilian deaths.

photo credit: KAZVorpal via photopin cc

 

Also published in Veterans Today

 

Blackwater: the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

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blackwater

 

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

2008 (with 2013 epilogue)

Book Review

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill (2008 with 2013 epilogue) is an in-depth examination of the systematic privatization of the US military. In 1988, as Secretary of Defense to Bush senior, Dick Cheney initiated the process of outsourcing to private companies of military training and security and intelligence roles. Thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Rumsfeld Doctrine, this outsourcing would extend to combat roles during the 2003-2008 occupation of Iraq.

Scahill’s book places special emphasis on the US failure to hold mercenary soldiers accountable for human rights violations. It also highlights the total absence of financial oversight, allowing Blackwater, Halliburton and other private military contractors to bilk taxpayers out of hundreds of billions of dollars. Finally it raises the troubling specter of corporations or even wealthy individuals hiring a standing mercenary army, such as Blackwater, to declare war against sovereign states.

Cheney Downsizes the US Military

Scahill begins by discussing the major downsizing of the US military that began in 1988, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and break-up of the former Soviet Union. In his first year as Secretary of Defense, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion, by canceling expensive weapons systems and decreasing US troop strength from 2.2 to 1.6 million. As the cuts continued, there was a growing tendency to outsource various non-combat functions to private contractors. Clinton continued the trend, when he hired Military Professionals Resources Inc (staffed by retired military officers) to “train” the Croatian military* in their secessionist war against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Following George W Bush’s election in 2000, Rumsfeld pursued even more aggressive privatization of the Pentagon bureaucracy. The primary neoconservative rationale for shifting both combat and non-combat duties to private mercenaries was to allow the President to engage in potentially unpopular overseas military interventions.

Other advantages included the ability of private mercenaries to engage in unlawful activities (such as extraordinary rendition**), for which regular forces would be subject to court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice – and a massive gravy train of unmonitored, no-bid contracts for wealthy Republican donors. In June 2004, after only fifteen months of US occupation, $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for.

The Blackwater Lodge and Training Center

Blackwater itself was first formed in 1996. It felled a big hole in training capacity, particularly in the Navy, resulting from Cheney’s extensive DOD cuts. Former Navy SEALS Erik Prince and Al Clark initially established the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center in North Carolina to offer private tactical training to Special Forces and local law enforcement personnel. A long time SEAL trainer, Clark supplied the concept. Prince, who came from a wealthy conservative Christian family, bankrolled it.

In 2002, Blackwater branched out into providing personnel as well as training. Their first contract would be to provide twenty security guards for Kabul’s CIA station in Afghanistan. In 2003, the State Department would award their largest documented (non-classified) contract providing security for US officials in Iraq. This included a $27.7 million no-bid contract to protect Paul Bremer. Bremer, who Bush appointed to run Iraq during the US occupation, quickly became the most hated man in Iraq.

Iraqi Resistance to Occupation

The book provides an interesting historical perspective on the rise of the Iraqi resistance movement in reaction to the virtual takeover of Iraq by US corporate interests. Contrary to the US media portrayal of the Iraqi opposition as al Qaeda terrorists, it was a genuine home grown movement which formed in reaction to Bremer’s refusal to allow free elections and his de-Baathification program. The latter instantly plunged the vast majority of Iraqis into abject misery. In addition to decommissioning 350,000 former Iraqi troops, it also threw hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, teachers, government workers out of work (who were required to join the Baath party as a condition of employment). The loss of these front line personnel would result in the total collapse of Iraqi society.

As Scahill carefully documents, the original Iraqi resistance was peaceful and nonviolent until the US military and Blackwater contractors deliberately fired on peaceful civilian protestors.

Blackwater and other mercenaries are typically paid $600-800 a day for mercenaries. This contrasts with an average of $270 a day for active duty GIs.

The Ambush in Fallujah

Blackwater devotes five chapters to the horrific ambush in Fallujah on March 30, 2004, in which a local mob killed, burned and dismembered four Blackwater contractors before hanging them from a bridge. It was this event that would bring Blackwater to world attention, while setting off a chain of events that would compel (due to an overstretched enlisted force) the Pentagon to hire Blackwater and other private security contractors* as mercenary soldiers in Iraq.

At a pay rate of $600-800 a day (in contrast to an average of $270 for active duty GIs), private security companies had no difficulty recruiting mercenaries. In fact, the worse the violence got, the more profits rolled in for Blackwater.

By June 2004, there were 20,000 private mercenaries in Iraq. By the time Rumsfeld resigned in 2006, there was a one to one ratio between troops and mercenary soldiers maintaining the US occupation in Iraq (100,000 mercenaries vs 100,000 troops).

In 2004-2005, the Blackwater role expanded to guarding the US oil industries pipeline in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, to “protecting” FEMA reconstruction contracts in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and to providing immigration security at the Mexican border. By 2007, Blackwater had 2300 private soldiers fighting in nine countries, as well as a database of 22,000 former troops, special forces operatives and retired law enforcement officers who could be deployed at short notice.

Immunity from Prosecution

As of 2013, when Scahill published the revised edition, no Blackwater contractors had ever been prosecuted for criminal human rights abuses. Under an edict Bremer enacted in 2004, US mercenaries were immune from prosecution under Iraqi law. Prosecuting them in American courts is extremely difficult owing to the difficulty of transporting foreign witnesses to the US. However in October 2014, a Washington DC federal district court found four of them guilty of murder and manslaughter for the 2007 shooting of seventeen civilians in Baghdad.

Erick Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 and it has since merged with its main rival Triple Canopy to form Academi. Although Blackwater was banned from Iraq in 2009,  Academi still provides security for State Department personnel across many countries.They also continue to receive contracts from the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies.

Links to free epub and kindle versions of Blackwater are available at Blackwater the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

*In the mid-1990s, the Croatian military was dominated by right-wing Nazi sympathizers similar to those in the present Ukrainian government.
** Extraordinary or irregular rendition is the US sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person to countries known to practice torture. It’s also known as torture by proxy.
***Other companies that entered the lucrative mercenary market in 2004 include Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Algis, Armor Group, Hart, Kroll and Steele Foundation. British security contractors were also extremely pro-active in Iraq. By October 2006, there were 21,000 British mercenaries in Iraq, in contrast with 7.200 conventional duty troops.

Also published at Veterans Today

Obama Gives Republicans (and Israel) the Finger

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Khamenei

 “The F***s Up Everything”

There’s an article on the Fox News site this morning entitled “Source Says Reported Letter from Obama to Ayatollah F***s Up Everything.”

It quotes a pre-election article from the Wall Street Journal that Obama secretly wrote Ayatollah Khameni in mid-October stressing that any cooperation on dealing with the Islamic State, or ISIS, was tied to Iran striking a deal over its nuclear program. The U.S., Iran and other negotiators are facing a Nov. 24 deadline for such a deal.

The congressional source told Fox News that the letter would upset the inroads they’ve tried to make with “the Sunni league,” noting that the president should have informed Congress of this back-channel if it was in fact going on.

“This f***s up everything,” the source said.

Just to clarify “the Sunni league” refers to the despotic dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Qatar that stone people for blasphemy and behead even more people than ISIS. And which have been the primary funders and arms suppliers for ISIS and the jihadist mercenaries attempting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina issued a joint statement Thursday night saying it was “outrageous that, while the cries of moderate Syrian forces for greater U.S. assistance fall on deaf ears in the White House, President Obama is apparently urging Ayatollah Khamenei to join the fight against ISIS.”

The move will also anger AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israeli lobby group. Israel seems really keen on provoking an all-out war between the US and Iran.

It’s gratifying to see the President show some backbone. The move, in my view, is long overdue.

Read more here:  Reportedly letter fs up everything

Photo credit: Wikimedia commons

Also posted at Veterans Today

Farrakhan’s Views on Obama

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Below is a fascinating excerpt from Part 8 of Louis Farrakhan’s lecture series The Time and What Must Be Done. Farrahkan is the present leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), best known for its most famous member Malcolm X.

It’s been more than ten years since I heard Farrakhan speak. He has made remarkable progress from his overt antisemitism and talk of white people as blue-eyed devils. I still have a slight problem with the “666” symbolism of the year 2013, which he links with the “beasts” (America, England, Germany and France).

Otherwise his analysis is remarkably similar to that of white economist, journalist and former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts. The NOI leader is highly critical of Obama’s murderous policies in Libya and Syria and his use of drones for targeted assassinations, as well as his apparent willingness to support an Israeli-inspired war with Iran. He also condemns the President’s destruction of American democracy. He describes the US as an oligarchy leading the American people into fascism.

The video is nearly two years old. Amazing how little US foreign policy has changed.

US Begins Airstrikes in Syria

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cruise missile

According to NBC, the United States and Arab partner nations launched massive airstrikes in Syria against ISIS targets for the first time Monday, the Pentagon said. In a major escalation of the U.S. war against ISIS, the U.S. military plans to strike up to 20 targets in and around Raqqa, Syria — logistics, fuel and weapons depots; training sites; troop encampments; command and control sites; and headquarters for the Sunni fighters. The bombing began at approximately 8:30 p.m. ET Monday, a senior U.S. defense official told NBC News.

Read more here http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/u-s-arab-allies-strike-isis-syria-n209286

photo credit: Defence Images via photopin cc

The Neocon Myths Behind Afghanistan and Iraq

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The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 3 Shadows in the Cave

Film Review

Part 3 concerns the mythology the neoconservatives created around international terrorism to justify the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US Invents al Qaeda

The final video starts with the car bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. These were the first attacks Bin Laden and Zawahiri organized against US interests as part of their new international jihad (see How the CIA Funds Jihad). They recruited four bombers from training camps Abdullah Azzam started during the Soviet occupation.

Contrary to the myth promoted by the neocons, these camps were exclusively dedicated to training Muslims to conduct jihad in their own countries (e.g. Uzbekistan and Chechnya). Their leaders wanted absolutely nothing to do with international terrorism or Bin Laden’s jihad against the US. They allowed Zawahiri and Bin Laden to recruit from these camps because he was financing them. Nevertheless, even members of Islamic Jihad opposed what they were doing.

In Jan 2001 the US government brought the embassy bombers to trial in the US. They also tried Bin Laden in absentia. To charge him under existing US law, federal prosecutors had to prove an organized group he commanded carried out the bombings. Because no such group existed, they invented one. The name al Qaeda came from a paid FBI informant.

9-11

Immediately following his election George W Bush, like his father, totally rejected the neoconservative’s insistence that the US should invade other nations and “dictate how to run their countries.”

9-11 would change all this, propelling Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld to international power with four terrifying myths:

  1. That Bin Laden was responsible for the 9-11 attacks (according to official FBI accounts, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was responsible for the “plane operations).”*
  2. That “al Qaeda,” a phantom organization the neocons latched onto for propaganda purposes, was a genuine international entity running sleeper cells in 50-60 countries.
  3. That “al Qaeda’s” ultimate goal was to force the US to live under Islamic fundamentalism.
  4. That the invasion of Afghanistan was essential to destroy the heart of “al Qaeda.”

During the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the US and NATO allied themselves with the Afghan Northern Alliance. The latter hated the foreign Muslims who came to came to Afghanistan for training and received a generous bounty for handing them over to US troops. Nearly all of them ended up in Guantanomo, despite having no connection with bin Laden or international terrorism.

The Role of Hollywood

Following the US invasion, the neocons invested two new myths. The first was that bin Laden was hiding out in a sophisticated bunker built into the Torah Borah caves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The second was that the US was harboring a vast network of terrorist sleeper cells preparing a new attack on US soil. Although both were totally discredited by mid-2003, these myths would be solidified in the public mind by dozens of TV dramas about hidden terrorist sleeper cells in major US cities.

A popular theme of these dramas was the dirty bomb*, which according to actual DD tests was unlikely to kill anyone because the radiation produced by a dirty bomb was so dispersed.

So-called “dirty bombs** featured prominently in most of these productions, despite numerous Pentagon tests demonstrating dirty bomb radiation is too widely dispersed to kill anyone.

World Leaders Rush to Sign On

Inspired by the immense power this ideology of fear gave political leaders, other western leaders quickly signed on to the terror agenda. When the neocons began circulating the new mythology in mid-2002 that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda and 9-11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair became one of its most vocal proponents. Despite knowing from the outside that the war on Iraq was based on fabricated evidence.

*This video was produced in 2003, when it was still widely believed that 19 Muslim hijackers were responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers. This version of events is now totally discredited.
**A dirty bomb is an explosive device made from nuclear waste combined with conventional explosives – with the intent of spreading radioactive material over a widely populated area
***This revelation is all the more remarkable given that Curtis made this documentary prior to Dr David Kelly’s so-called “suicide” in 2003. Kelly worked for the British Ministry of Defense and was a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003, when a BBC journalist published an-off-the record discussion about the British role in fabricating evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He died under extremely suspicious circumstances in later that month. A group of British doctors is demanding a fresh investigation into Kelly’s death: Doctors Claim Cover Upl

http://vimeo.com/84421510

How the CIA Funds Jihad

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The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 2 The Phantom Victory

Film Review

Part 2 focuses on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 – and how the CIA funded and trained the Islamist Mujahideen to combat the occupation.

Both Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and the neoconservatives claim credit for the hare-brained and incredibly short sighted scheme to recruit, fund and train a jihadist army in Afghanistan. In addition to providing sophisticated weaponry, the CIA trained the Mujahideen in terror techniques, such as assassination, car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IDEs).

Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian who led the Mujahideen, put out a call for all Muslims to join Afghanistan’s holy war. He believed that victory in Afghanistan would inspire foreign fighters to return to their homelands and overthrow corrupt secular dictators the US was propping up.

One Saudi who answered this call was a phenomenally wealthy construction contractor named Osama bin Laden. He, too, provided funding for the Mujahideen.

Arab governments, recognizing a unique opportunity to expel their own jihadist troublemakers, opened their jails and exiled their Islamic extremists to Afhanistan. Egypt released Islamic Jihad founder Dr Zawahiri and his followers.

Gorbachov Orders Soviet Withdrawal

In 1987 when Gorbachov came to power, the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic collapse. Believing he could still save it through political reform, Gorby quickly commenced Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also reached out to the Bush senior administration to help install a stable government in Kabul. He warned that failure to do so would allow the Mujahideen to install an Islamic dictatorship. The neoconservatives who ran the Pentagon and State Department refused. With Pakistani support, the Mujahideen (renamed the Taliban) took control of Afghanistan and installed a brutal fundamentalist regime.

Both the neoconservatives and the Taliban/Mujahideen would claim sole credit for victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both groups (and Zbigniew Brzezinski) would also credit US intervention in Afghanistan for the demise of the Soviet Union. In reality the USSR collapsed due to gross economic mismanagement and internal decay.

The Split Between Azzam and Zawahiri

Following the Soviet withdrawal, a major rift occurred between Zawahiri and Azzam. As it turned out, torture also radicalized Zawahiri. Who now proclaimed that politicians who were in bed with the Americans – and their civilian supporters – were legitimate targets for assassination.

Azzam, in contrast, compelled Islamic freedom fighters to swear an oath not to kill innocent civilians. Osama Bin Laden, former deputy to Azzam, joined forces with Zawahiri shortly before the latter’s assassination in 1989.

By the early nineties, powerful movements the Islamic Jihad (and related groups) had built in Egypt and Algeria were on track to win national elections. Aided by the US and France, the Algerian military launched a coup and cancelled the Algerian elections. Egypt, in turn, banned the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested and tortured their leadership.

Islamic Jihad responded by attempting to launch violent jihad in both countries. Owing to their failure to attract a mass following, in May 1998 Zawahuri and Bin Laden would announce a new strategy: taking jihad to their real enemies: the US and Israel.

Meanwhile Back in Washington

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives were more committed than ever to promoting the myth that the US was the sole force for good in a world of evil regimes. Fingering Saddam Hussein as the next satan to be overthrown, in 1990 they put immense pressure on Bush senior to overthrow the Iraqi government during the first Gulf War. Bush wisely took the sage advice of Pentagon advisers who warned that a full scale invasion of Iraq would result in a hopeless quagmire.

Mainstream Republicans Back Clinton

In 1992, mainstream Republicans, frightened by the religious fundamentalism that had overtaken the Republican Party, voted for Clinton in droves. The neocons, in turn, latched onto Clinton as the new evil. They began a vicious propaganda campaign against him, spearheaded by the conservative American Spectator. The campaign widely disseminated spurious allegations that the Clintons had committed financial fraud in Whitewater*, murdered their friend Vince Foster and participated in drug smuggling at the Mena Airport in Arkansas.**

Under immense pressure, Clinton agreed to appoint Kenneth Starr as special prosecutor to investigate these allegations. Starr couldn’t find any evidence of Clinton wrongdoing until he stumbled onto the President’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Following their failure to impeach Clinton, the neocons became as marginalized in the US as Bin Laden, Zawahiri and their ragtag followers in the Arab world.

All this would change with 9-11, which would propel both the Islamists and the neocons.

*The Whitewater controversy involved a questionable real estate deal Clinton engaged in while he was attorney general of Arkansas. The Whitewater investigations would result in criminal convictions for several of Clinton’s associates. Although there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges against the President, his conduct was clearly unethical: see Whitewater Scandal

**While there’s no evidence Governor Clinton was directly involved in cocaine smuggling, he was unresponsive to strong grassroots demand that he investigate the CIA’a drug-gun smuggling operation at the Mena Airport – and to Ross Perot’s (presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996) request that Clinton back the Internal Revenue’s investigation of Menta.

Marketing Terror

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The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 1 Baby It’s Cold Outside

Film Review

This final series of Adam Curtis documentaries is the oldest and, in my view, the best. It has special relevance given the current western crusade against evil incarnate (and CIA creation) ISIS.*

The Power of Nightmares traces the parallel movements of radical Islam and neoconservativism – how both rose to power by inventing terrifying fantasies which they promise to protect us from them.

Curtis begins by tracing the roots of radical Islam, which dates back to 1949 when Egyptian scholar Sayed Qutb attended college briefly in Greely Colorado. Qutb was instantly repelled by the pervasive decay, crassness and vulgarity stemming from America’s fanatical devotion to individualism (an ideology perpetuated by saturation pro-consumption messaging by Edward Bernays’ public relations industry – see The Science of Thought Control).*

The Americans Qutb met were unbelievably selfish and materialistic and lived lonely, sterile lives surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns.

Returning to Egypt in 1950, he was horrified to see that that western individualism, materialism and moral degradation had corrupted his own country, thanks to the invasion of American pop culture.

Believing Islam provided a moral framework to protect Egypt from this selfish individualism, in 1952 he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and supported Gamal Nasser in overthrowing British rule in Egypt.

The CIA Teaches Egypt How to Torture

As Nasser’s vice president, Anwar Sadat (who would become president in 1970) invited the CIA to set up Egypt’s security services and train them how to torture members of the growing Muslim Brotherhood.

As often happens, torture radicalized Qutb. He came to believe that individualism unleashes a barbarous violence and that Muslims infected by materialism cease to be true Muslim. This, in turn, makes them legitimate targets for assassination.

Following Qutb’s execution for treason in 1966, Dr Ayman Zawahari assumed leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. After Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Zawahiri founded the Islamic Jihad (IJ). The treaty was taken as evidence that Sadat was no longer a true Muslim and thus a legitimate assassination target. In 1981, IJ members of his military guard would assassinate him.

Leo Strauss: Father of Neoconservatism

Leo Strauss, German-American political philosopher and Zionist, is considered the father of neoconservatism. Refusing to give interviews or publish articles, Strauss spread his ideas by surrounding himself with a dedicated band of students at the University of Chicago.

Like Qutb, Strauss was horrified by the moral degeneration and social decay he witnessed in the fifties and sixties. He blamed it on liberalism, with its claims hat morality his relative ( i.e. that each individual is entitled to set their own standards of morality). He taught that political leaders had an obligation to set strong moral standards by creating powerful myths for the masses to live by.

In the early seventies, his students, Irving and William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukyama, would formally launch the neoconservative movement to disseminate the myth that the US is the only force for good in a world full of evil.

According to this world view, any country or individual that opposes US policies is satanic. The neoconservatives were perfectly aware they were deliberately creating a fear-inducing myth. Yet according to their Straussian belief system, this was a necessary myth and a necessary fear for the overall good of society.

The Neocons Target Henry Kissinger

Their initial target in their crusade against evil was Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. In 1972, Kissinger was trying to reduce fear and instability through world cooperation, détente with the Soviets and propping up fascist dictators (he called this Realpolitik).

Recruiting Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney (Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford) to the neoconservative cause, they blanketed the media with claims that the Russians were cheating on the nuclear test ban treaty. This directly contradicted CIA evidence that Soviet air defenses were on the verge of collapse, owing to the sorry state of the Soviet economy. So the neocons claimed the Soviets had devised methods of cheating the CIA was incapable of detecting.

When Carter assumed the presidency in 1976, they would revive the Committee on the Present Danger to promote their mythology that the Soviet Union posed a growing threat to the US. Ronald Reagan would be their most prominent recruit.

Politicizing Christianity

Simultaneously, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the neocons embraced fundamentalist Christianity as a vehicle for enforcing socially redeeming moral values. Fundamentalist pastors had always discouraged their congregations from participating in the political process. Guided by the neocons, they reversed themselves, transforming millions of fundamentalists into popular force to lobby for the neoconservative world view.

In 1980, millions of them voted for the first time for Ronald Reagan.

*See excellent article by British historian Nafeez Ahmed tracing the history of ISIS: How the West Created ISIS

** As I am. What emotionally balanced rational being wouldn’t be repulsed by the empty sterile lives Americans lead?

 

http://vimeo.com/84414208