American War Porn: From WWII to That Sniper Movie

War Corn: Hollywood and War from World War II to American Sniper

by Peter Van Buren  - TomDispatch

 

In the age of the all-volunteer military and an endless stream of war zone losses and ties, it can be hard to keep Homeland enthusiasm up for perpetual war. After all, you don't get a 9/11 every year to refresh those images of the barbarians at the airport departure gates.

In the meantime, Americans are clearly finding it difficult to remain emotionally roiled up about our confusing wars in Syria and Iraq, the sputtering one in Afghanistan, and various raids, drone attacks, and minor conflicts elsewhere.

Fortunately, we have just the ticket, one that has been punched again and again for close to a century: Hollywood war movies (to which the Pentagon is always eager to lend a helping hand).American Sniper, which started out with the celebratory tagline “the most lethal sniper in U.S. history” and now has the tagline “the most successful war movie of all time,” is just the latest in a long line of films that have kept Americans on their war game. 

Think of them as war porn, meant to leave us perpetually hyped up. Now, grab some popcorn and settle back to enjoy the show.

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Watching the Same Movie About American War for 75 Years

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a small reminder that, in return for a donation of $100 or more to this site, you can choose between signed, personalized copies of two top-notch cultural histories of American war in our time: Christian Appy’s superb new book, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, and my own The End of Victory Culture. Just check out our donation page for details and for other book possibilities as well, including my new book Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. And remember that your donations really do keep this site rolling along! Tom]

Yes, they’ve become “the greatest generation” (a phrase that’s always reminded me of an ad line for a soft drink), but they didn’t feel that way at the time. As Susan Faludi pointed out in her classic book Stiffed and as I experienced as a boy, the men who came home from World War II were often remarkably silent about their wartime experiences -- at least with their children. My father, who had been the operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had a couple of pat stories he would fall back on, if pressed, but normally only spoke of the war when angry. I can, for instance, remember him blowing up and forbidding my mother and me from using a nearby grocery store because, he claimed, its owners had been “war profiteers.” On rare occasions, he might pull out of the closet an old duffel bag filled with war souvenirs, including a Nazi armband (undoubtedly traded with someone who had been on the European front) and several glorious orange or white silk maps of Burma, assumedly meant to take up no space in a commando’s kitbag. These were thrilling moments of my childhood, though again my dad had little to say about what we looked at.

Otherwise, his war was a kind of black hole in family life. But for boys like me, that mattered less than you might expect for a simple reason: we already knew what our fathers had experienced at war. We had seen it at the movies, often with those fathers sitting silently beside us. We had seen John Wayne die on Iwo Jima and war hero Audie Murphy (playing himself) gun down the Germans. We had been with Doolittle’s Raiders over Tokyo for more than 30 seconds, had won back Burma, landed on Omaha beach, and fought island by island across the Pacific toward Japan. And of course, as our “victory culture” assured us we would, we had won.

It’s hard to emphasize just how formative those war movies were for so many of us, especially if you add in the cheap, all-green sets of World War II toy soldiers with which we reenacted movie versions of our fathers’ war on our floors and, of course, the sticks, and later toy guns, with which we so gloriously shot down “Japs” and “Nazis” in any park or backyard. A whole generation of young Americans would go off to Vietnam stoked on John Wayne & Co. -- on a version of war, that is, that our fathers never told us hadn’t happened.

Ron Kovic, who came back from Vietnam in a wheelchair and wrote the memoir Born on the Fourth of July, recalled the experience vividly: "I think a lot of us went to Vietnam with movie images of John Wayne in our minds. On a reconnaissance patrol, I remember once imagining that I was John Wayne."

Today, former diplomat and whistleblower Peter Van Buren explores the way American war movies, from World War II to today, have produced a remarkably uniform vision of how American war works, one that, in its modern form, is undoubtedly once again lending a helping hand to our latest conflicts. In May 2011, Van Buren arrived at TomDispatch, just back from a 12-month State Department assignment in Iraq embedded with the U.S. military. In his first piece for this site, he reported on the heroic balderdash that embedded reporters -- think, for instance, of Brian Williams -- delivered to the American people about the U.S. military. It was, he wrote then, a kind of “war cornography.” (“Let me tell you that nobody laughed harder at the turgid prose reporters used to describe their lives than the soldiers themselves.”) So think of today’s piece, almost four years later, as a reprise on that theme with an embedded Hollywood stepping in to take the place of all the Brian Williamses of our world. Tom

 

War Corn: 

Hollywood and War from World War II to American Sniper

by Peter Van Buren

 

There’s Only One War Movie

Wandering around YouTube recently, I stumbled across some good old government-issue propaganda. It was a video clearly meant to stir American emotions and prepare us for a long struggle against a determined, brutal, and barbaric enemy whose way of life is a challenge to the most basic American values.

Here's some of what I learned: our enemy is engaged in a crusade against the West; wants to establish a world government and make all of us bow down before it; fights fanatically, beheads prisoners, and is willing to sacrifice the lives of its followers in inhuman suicide attacks. Though its weapons are modern, its thinking and beliefs are 2,000 years out of date and inscrutable to us.

Of course, you knew there was a trick coming, right? This little U.S. government-produced film wasn’t about the militants of the Islamic State. Made by the U.S. Navy in 1943, its subject was “Our Enemy the Japanese.” Substitute “radical Islam” for “emperor worship,” though, and it still makes a certain propagandistic sense. While the basics may be largely the same (us versus them, good versus evil), modern times do demand something slicker than the video equivalent of an old newsreel. The age of the Internet, with its short attention spans and heightened expectations of cheap thrills, calls for a higher class of war corn, but as with that 1943 film, it remains remarkable how familiar what’s being produced remains.

Like propaganda films and sexual cornography, Hollywood movies about America at war have changed remarkably little over the years. Here's the basic formula, from John Wayne in the World War II-era Sands of Iwo Jima to today's American Sniper:

*American soldiers are good, the enemy bad. Nearly every war movie is going to have a scene in which Americans label the enemy as “savages,” “barbarians,” or “bloodthirsty fanatics,” typically following a “sneak attack” or a suicide bombing. Our country’s goal is to liberate; the enemy's, to conquer. Such a framework prepares us to accept things that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster. Racism naturally gets a bye; as they once were “Japs” (not Japanese), they are now “hajjis” and “ragheads” (not Muslims or Iraqis). It’s beyond question that the ends justify just about any means we might use, from the nuclear obliteration of two cities of almost no military significance to the grimmest sort of torture. In this way, the war film long ago became a moral free-fire zone for its American characters.

*American soldiers believe in God and Country, in “something bigger than themselves,” in something “worth dying for,” but without ever becoming blindly attached to it. The enemy, on the other hand, is blindly devoted to a religion, political faith, or dictator, and it goes without saying (though it’s said) that his God -- whether an emperor, Communism, or Allah -- is evil. As one critic put it back in 2007 with just a tad of hyperbole, “In every movie Hollywood makes, every time an Arab utters the word Allah… something blows up.”

*War films spend no significant time on why those savages might be so intent on going after us. The purpose of American killing, however, is nearly always clearly defined. It's to “save American lives,” those over there and those who won’t die because we don't have to fight them over here. Saving such lives explains American war: in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, for example, the main character defuses roadside bombs to make Iraq safer for other American soldiers. In the recent World War II-themed Fury, Brad Pitt similarly mows down ranks of Germans to save his comrades. Even torture is justified, as in Zero Dark Thirty, in the cause of saving our lives from their nightmarish schemes. In American Sniper, shooter Chris Kyle focuses on the many American lives he’s saved by shooting Iraqis; his PTSD is, in fact, caused by his having “failed” to have saved even more. Hey, when an American kills in war, he's the one who suffers the most, not that mutilated kid or his grieving mother -- I got nightmares, man! I still see their faces!

*Our soldiers are human beings with emotionally engaging backstories, sweet gals waiting at home, and promising lives ahead of them that might be cut tragically short by an enemy from the gates of hell. The bad guys lack such backstories. They are anonymous fanatics with neither a past worth mentioning nor a future worth imagining. This is usually pretty blunt stuff. Kyle’s nemesis in American Sniper, for instance, wears all black. Thanks to that, you know he’s an insta-villain without the need for further information. And speaking of lack of a backstory, he improbably appears in the film both in the Sunni city of Fallujah and in Sadr City, a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad, apparently so super-bad that his desire to kill Americans overcomes even Iraq's mad sectarianism.

*It is fashionable for our soldiers, having a kind of depth the enemy lacks, to express some regrets, a dollop of introspection, before (or after) they kill. In American Sniper, while back in the U.S. on leave, the protagonist expresses doubts about what he calls his “work.” (No such thoughts are in the book on which the film is based.) Of course, he then goes back to Iraq for three more tours and over two more hours of screen time to amass his 160 “confirmed kills.”

*Another staple of such films is the training montage. Can a young recruit make it? Often he is the Fat Kid who trims down to his killing weight, or the Skinny Kid who muscles up, or the Quiet Kid who emerges bloodthirsty. (This has been a trope of sexual porn films, too: the geeky looking guy, mocked by beautiful women, who turns out to be a superstar in bed.) The link, up front or implied, between sexuality, manhood, and war is a staple of the form. As part of the curious PTSD recovery plan he develops, for example, Kyle volunteers to teach a paraplegic vet in a wheelchair to snipe. After his first decent shot rings home, the man shouts, “I feel like I got my balls back!”

*Our soldiers, anguished souls that they are, have no responsibility for what they do once they’ve been thrown into our wars. No baby-killers need apply in support of America's post-Vietnam, guilt-free mantra, “Hate the war, love the warrior.” In the film First Blood, for example, John Rambo is a Vietnam veteran who returns home a broken man. He finds his war buddy dead from Agent Orange-induced cancer and is persecuted by the very Americans whose freedom he believed he had fought for. Because he was screwed over in The 'Nam, the film gives him a free pass for his homicidal acts, including a two-hour murderous rampage through a Washington State town. The audience is meant to see Rambo as a noble, sympathetic character. He returns for more personal redemption in later films to rescue American prisoners of war left behind in Southeast Asia.

*For war films, ambiguity is a dirty word. Americans always win, even when they lose in an era in which, out in the world, the losses are piling up. And a win is a win, even when its essence is one-sided bullying as in Heartbreak Ridge, the only movie to come out of the ludicrous invasion of Grenada. And a loss is still a win in Black Hawk Down, set amid the disaster of Somalia, which ends with scenes of tired warriors who did the right thing. Argo -- consider it honorary war porn -- reduces the debacle of years of U.S. meddling in Iran to a high-fiving hostage rescue. All it takes these days to turn a loss into a win is to zoom in tight enough to ignore defeat. In American Sniper, the disastrous occupation of Iraq is shoved offstage so that more Iraqis can die in Kyle’s sniper scope. In Lone Survivor, a small American “victory” is somehow dredged out of hopeless Afghanistan because an Afghan man takes a break from being droned to save the life of a SEAL.

In sum: gritty, brave, selfless men, stoic women waiting at home, noble wounded warriors, just causes, and the necessity of saving American lives. Against such a lineup, the savage enemy is a crew of sitting ducks who deserve to die. Everything else is just music, narration, and special effects. War cornos, like their oversexed cousins, are all the same movie.

A Fantasy That Can Change Reality

But it's just a movie, right? Your favorite shoot-em-up makes no claims to being a documentary. We all know one American can't gun down 50 bad guys and walk away unscathed, in the same way he can't bed 50 partners without getting an STD. It's just entertainment. So what?

So what do you, or the typical 18-year-old considering military service, actually know about war on entering that movie theater? Don’t underestimate the degree to which such films can help create broad perceptions of what war’s all about and what kind of people fight it. Those lurid on-screen images, updated and reused so repetitively for so many decades, do help create a self-reinforcing, common understanding of what happens “over there,” particularly since what we are shown mirrors what most of us want to believe anyway.

No form of corn is about reality, of course, but that doesn’t mean it can’t create realities all its own. War films have the ability to bring home emotionally a glorious fantasy of America at war, no matter how grim or gritty any of these films may look. War porn can make a young man willing to die before he’s 20. Take my word for it: as a diplomat in Iraq I met young people in uniform suffering from the effects of all this. Such films also make it easier for politicians to sweet talk the public into supporting conflict after conflict, even as sons and daughters continue to return home damaged or dead and despite the country’s near-complete record of geopolitical failures since September 2001. Funny thing: American Sniper was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture as Washington went back to war in Iraq in what you'd have thought would be an unpopular struggle.

Learning From the Exceptions

You can see a lot of war corn and stop with just your toes in the water, thinking you've gone swimming. But eventually you should go into the deep water of the “exceptions,” because only there can you confront the real monsters.

There are indeed exceptions to war porn, but don’t fool yourself, size matters. How many people have seen American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, or Zero Dark Thirty? By comparison, how many saw the anti-war Iraq War film Battle for Haditha, a lightly fictionalized, deeply unsettling drama about an American massacre of innocent men, women, and children in retaliation for a roadside bomb blast?

Timing matters, too, when it comes to the few mainstream exceptions. John Wayne’s The Green Berets, a pro-Vietnam War film, came out in 1968 as that conflict was nearing its bloody peak and resistance at home was growing. (The Green Berets gets a corn bonus star, as the grizzled Wayne persuades a lefty journalist to alter his negative views on the war.) Platoon, with its message of waste and absurdity, had to wait until 1986, more than a decade after the war ended.

In propaganda terms, think of this as controlling the narrative. One version of events dominates all others and creates a reality others can only scramble to refute. The exceptions do, however, reveal much about what we don’t normally see of the true nature of American war. They are uncomfortable for any of us to watch, as well as for military recruiters, parents sending a child off to war, and politicians trolling for public support for the next crusade.

War is not a two-hour-and-12-minute lard-on. War is what happens when the rules break down and, as fear displaces reason, nothing too terrible is a surprise. The real secret of war for those who experience it isn't the visceral knowledge that people can be filthy and horrible, but that you, too, can be filthy and horrible. You don't see much of that on the big screen.

The Long Con

Of course, there are elements of “nothing new” here. The Romans undoubtedly had their version of war corn that involved mocking the Gauls as sub-humans. Yet in twenty-first-century America, where wars are undeclared and Washington dependent on volunteers for its new foreign legion, the need to keep the public engaged and filled with fear over our enemies is perhaps more acute than ever.

So here’s a question: if the core propaganda messages the U.S. government promoted during World War II are nearly identical to those pushed out today about the Islamic State, and if Hollywood’s war films, themselves a particularly high-class form of propaganda, have promoted the same false images of Americans in conflict from 1941 to the present day, what does that tell us? Is it that our varied enemies across nearly three-quarters of a century of conflict are always unbelievably alike, or is it that when America needs a villain, it always goes to the same script?

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A Tom Dispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Peter Van Buren

A Pathology of Secrecy: President Gollum's Preciousss

President Gollum’s ‘Precious’ Secrets

by Robert Parry - Consortium News

 

President Barack Obama promised a “transparent” administration, reviving democracy by letting Americans see into the inner workings of their government as much as possible, an implicit criticism of the excessive secrecy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But instead Obama’s presidency has been one of the most opaque and deceptive in modern history.

Gollum, a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s 
Lord of the Rings fantasy novels.

Not only has Obama continued to wrap the carry-over anti-terrorism wars in maximum secrecy but he has taken unprecedented steps to shut down leaks by prosecuting whistleblowers who talk to the press. And, he has left standing his administration’s misleading rushes to judgment on key issues after U.S. intelligence analysts have refined or reversed the first impressions.

Whether on the Syrian sarin attack in 2013 or pivotal incidents in the Ukraine crisis – who was behind the sniper attacks in Kiev last Feb. 20 and who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 last July 17 – Obama has withheld evidence developed by U.S. government analysts rather than undercut the propaganda value of the initial accusations.

In the sarin incident, Secretary of State John Kerry and others rushed to blame President Bashar al-Assad’s government – bringing the U.S. military to the brink of war – and similarly the State Department exploited the two most iconic events of the Ukraine crisis by blaming then-President Viktor Yanukovych for the sniper killings and Russia and ethnic Russian rebels for shooting down MH-17 killing all 298 people onboard.

After the State Department had squeezed out the propaganda value of those accusations, U.S. intelligence analysts came to more detailed conclusions with their findings conflicting with the hasty finger-pointing after the events. But instead of refining or correcting the record, the Obama administration typically went silent, leaving the initial impressions in place even when the President knew better.

In the context of Ukraine, I asked one senior administration official about this behavior and he responded that Russia held most of the advantages there by nature of proximity and history but that one advantage the United States wielded was “information warfare” – and it made no sense to surrender that edge by withdrawing accusations that had put Russian President Vladimir Putin on the defensive.

Thus, in this Orwellian world that seems to have swallowed America’s major institutions, what mattered most was how “information” – including false or misleading propaganda – could be deployed for geopolitical purposes even if it also involved deceiving the U.S. public. Or, one might say, especially if it deceived the U.S. public.

‘Perception Management’

This attitude toward manipulating rather than informing the American people has a long and grim history. For instance, President Lyndon Johnson won congressional support for his disastrous Vietnam War escalation by citing the Tonkin Gulf incident, a false claim about North Vietnamese aggression which has since been debunked but still is used historically by the Defense Department to justify the millions killed in that conflict.

After the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, President Ronald Reagan set up inter-agency task forces devoted to the concept of “perception management,” essentially how to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and get back into line behind U.S. military interventions abroad, a CIA-inspired campaign that proved stunningly successful. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of ‘Perception Management.’”]

Last decade, the American people got their perceptions managed once more regarding Iraq’s non-existent WMD, leading to another catastrophic war which continues to spread chaos and death across the Middle East to this day. One might think that with that bloody history, President Obama would want to fulfill his promises of “transparency.”

According to a memorandum instructing Executive Branch department heads, Obama wrote: “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

Instead, Obama has clamped down more than ever on openness and transparency, including the prosecution of more government whistleblowers than all the previous presidents combined and sitting on U.S. intelligence reports that would change how Americans understand major international crises.

By and large, Obama has continued the excessive secrecy of President George W. Bush, including withholding from the American people 28 pages of the 2002 congressional investigation into the 9/11 attack that relate to Saudi financing for al-Qaeda terrorists.

Obama also has refused to give the U.S. public access to the updated intelligence analyses of more current crises, including the near American military entry into the Syrian civil war in 2013 and the potential nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine in 2014. So, even when American lives are being put at risk by rushes to judgment, Obama doesn’t believe that the people have a right to know the facts.

The Pathology of Secrecy

I spoke with one person who has known Obama since he was a senator from Illinois who suggested the President is fearful that if he does release these secrets and some negative consequences result that he’ll be blamed. In order words, Obama in practice is too scared to live up to his commitment about “transparency.”

Another less generous explanation is that Obama is at heart an elitist who likes to surround himself with secrets but doesn’t want to share them with common citizens who are best treated like the proverbial mushrooms kept in the dark and fertilized.

Or put differently, Obama is like the character Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series who is entranced by the power of the One Ring and obsessively pursues it, what he calls “my Precious.” In that analogy, Obama can’t part with his precious secrets despite his promises to the American people about government openness.

Surely, Obama does get warnings against letting the public in on what the U.S. government knows about pivotal events. Government bureaucrats can always find reasons to keep information secret. But presidents have the ultimate say in what is kept secret and what is released.

And, except for a flurry of disclosures immediately after taking office, including Bush’s legal memos justifying torture, Obama has done less about opening up the federal government’s archives than many recent presidents. For instance, President Bill Clinton declassified Cold War-era files on U.S. participation in Guatemala’s decades of brutal repression.

Obama has shown less enthusiasm for giving Americans back their history. More importantly, however, Obama has withheld crucial information about current crises, such as the Syrian sarin attack and events that drove the Ukrainian civil war. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

In both areas, his administration rushed to judgment based on fragmentary information and – as more detailed data became available challenging the earlier claims – Obama clamped down on what the American people were allowed to hear.

Much like the Tonkin Gulf case, war hawks in the U.S. government found the misimpressions useful, so they didn’t want to correct the record. All the better to get an edge on foreign “adversaries” and manage the perceptions of the American people.

And, for whatever his reasons, President Obama couldn’t let go of his “Precious.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Jamie Kneen, Craig Pettitt, Janine Bandcroft Feb. 18th, 2015

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

 

Fifteen years into this new century, the promise of turning a new leaf on the way industry and governments operate in the World is wilted at the edges. But there is still hope and there are still people and organizations working every day to try curb the worst practices of those that would destroy the environment for the profit of their own.

One such organization is MiningWatch Canada. Created in in 1999, MiningWatch says their mission is to provide quote: "[P]ush back against the mining industry’s ability to rewrite laws, mislead the public, and bulldoze communities, workers, and ecosystems – literally – in its  quest for profit."

Both in Canada and abroad, MiningWatch has laboured to empower communities affected by the extractive industries and their not always honourable allies in high places.

Listen. Hear.

Jamie Kneen is Communications Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada and rejoins us in the first half.

And;  the BC government is in the middle of a campaign to wipe out wolf packs in the South Selkirk. It says wolves are the culprits in the disappearance of the area's caribou herd, but local, long-time environmental watchdog group, the Valhalla Wilderness Society begs to differ. Meanwhile, the helicopter assisted hunt goes on.

Craig Pettitt is a former Forest Service employee, and now serves as a VWS Director, and coordinator of the separate Valhalla Forest Watch program. His invaluable experience in the field has enabled him to document numerous violations of the Forest Practices Code, increasingly meaning field investigations of logging practices and landslides. Craig also runs workshops to teach resident groups how to monitor their wilderness neighbourhoods.

Craig Pettitt and fingering the real perps in the South Selkirk caribou disappearance in the second half.

And; Victoria Street News publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of coming good things to do in our town and beyond this week. But first, Jamie Kneen and MiningWatch keeping watch on the extractive industries fifteen years and more.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca. And now heard at Simon Fraser University's http://www.cjsf.ca . He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Helicopter Wolf Hunters After Wrong Prey in South Selkirk

Human Predators, Not Wolves, Decimated South Selkirk Caribou

by Valhalla Wilderness Watch

 

“Kill the wolves, save the caribou!” says the BC government, to excuse the brutality of killing wolves from helicopters. The South Selkirk herd is held up as an example of the big appetite of wolves: only 18 caribou left. However, the government is ignoring human causes of the caribou's disappearance, and not doing remotely enough to correct those causes; instead it's waging a propaganda campaign to blame wolves.

“It amounts to a huge cover-up”, says Craig Pettitt, a director of Valhalla Wilderness Watch. 

“We’re not saying that wolves don’t eat caribou, but they lived in balance with their prey species for thousands of years. We predict that if the government gets by with blaming wolves, every caribou herd in the province will be decimated the way the South Selkirk herd has been. Biologists that we’ve consulted have told us not to expect the killing of the wolves will save the caribou. Much more needs to be done to provide the animals with secure and secluded habitat.”

The real truth is that the South Selkirk herd crashed to 25-30 animals in the early 1970s, when wolves were virtually extirpated from the area. For forty years the herd was never over 51 animals. When BC and Idaho began to talk about recovering the herd in the mid-1980s, it had an estimated 13 animals, and there was no mention by either government of wolves being the cause. Despite receiving transplants of over 100 caribou, the population boost didn’t last.

Government biologists said the main predators were cougars. Even BC’s 2008 Mountain Caribou Recovery Plan mentioned only “cougar management” as predator control for the area. Cougars were killed, but it wasn’t very long after the plan was implemented that biologists noted that wolves had “settled” in the area (if killing the cougars led to an increase in deer, no wonder!)

Historically, the South Selkirk caribou decline has been attributed to settlements, logging and mining, a major highway and, more recently, snowmobiles. Climate change over the last century has brought an increase in fires, and this is probably a major factor, since caribou depend upon old-growth forest.

“Even while knowing that the loss of old-growth was a major factor, the government refused to stop the logging,” says Pettitt. 

 “As late as 2001 I inspected a large, fresh clearcut of old-growth spruce forest — prime caribou winter range right in the herd’s core area next to Stagleap Park. The government boasts about how much habitat it has protected for this herd, but it doesn’t tell you that much of it is in patches between the clearcuts — conditions that caribou cannot tolerate.”

In 2009, three South Selkirk caribou, including a calf and pregnant female, were killed on the highway, on Kootenay Pass. Historically many South Selkirk caribou have been killed on that highway. The speed limit over the pass was at one time 90 km/hr, but the government had raised it to 100. The environmental groups begged the government to reduce it to 60.

“One would think the government was in a hurry to wipe them out,” says Pettitt.

The government claims that a ‘significant’ amount of the core habitat has been closed to snowmobiles.

“Why isn’t all of its core habitat closed to snowmobiling?” asks Pettitt. 

“Anyone visiting Kootenay Pass on Highway 3 this winter can see snowmobile trailers parked alongside caribou winter habitat, some of them with U.S. and Alberta license plates — and logging roads hard-packed by snowmobile tracks going off into the forest.” 

The 2014 census report for the South Selkirk caribou also shows significant snowmobile use in or near closure zones. Numerous scientific studies have documented that packed snowmobile tracks bring wolves into caribou winter habitat, and that the presence of snowmobiles can cause stress to caribou that can affect their reproductive rate.

“Other herds in BC have more habitat left, but the same mistake is being made,” says Anne Sherrod, a director of VWW.

“Logging, mining, drilling, road-building, snowmobiling, heli-skiing go on in caribou habitat today, even while the government that signs the permits cries that the caribou must be saved by killing wolves. It’s a sham. The causes that are never admitted will also never be corrected.”

 
PRESS RELEASE
February 16, 2015

Contact:
P.O. Box 335, New Denver, British Columbia V0G 1S0

Phone: 250-358-2610; wildernesswatch@netidea.com

Valhalla Wilderness Watch is a non-profit organization, with similar goals as the Valhalla Wilderness Society, but without charitable status.

Bringing On the Machine Gun Squad: Permanent War Footing for America's Police Forces

In Whose America? Machine Guns, MRAPs, Surveillance, Drones, Permanent War, and a Permanent Election Campaign

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch

I never fail to be amazed -- and that’s undoubtedly my failing. I mean, if you retain a capacity for wonder you can still be awed by a sunset, but should you really be shocked that the sun is once again sinking in the West? Maybe not.

The occasion for such reflections: machine guns in my hometown. To be specific, several weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced the formation of a new 350-officer Special Response Group (SRG). Keep in mind that New York City already has a police force of more than 34,000 -- bigger, that is, than the active militaries of Austria, Bulgaria, Chad, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kenya, Laos, Switzerland, or Zimbabwe -- as well as its own “navy,” including six submersible drones. Just another drop in an ocean of blue, the SRG will nonetheless be a squad for our times, trained in what Bratton referred to as “advanced disorder control and counterterror.” It will also, he announced, be equipped with “extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns -- unfortunately sometimes necessary in these instances.” And here’s where he created a little controversy in my hometown. The squad would, Bratton added, be “designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris.”

Now, that was an embarrassment in liberal New York. By mixing the recent demonstrations over the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others into the same sentence with the assault on Mumbai and the Charlie Hebdo affair in France, he seemed to be equating civil protest in the Big Apple with acts of terrorism. Perhaps you won’t be surprised then that the very next day the police department started walking back the idea that the unit would be toting its machine guns not just to possible terror incidents but to local protests. A day later, Bratton himself walked his comments back even further. (“I may have in my remarks or in your interpretation of my remarks confused you or confused the issue.”) Now, it seems there will be two separate units, the SRG for counterterror patrols and a different, assumedly machine-gun-less crew for protests.

Here was what, like the sun going down in the West, shouldn’t have shocked me but did: no one thought there was any need to walk back the arming of the New York Police Department with machine guns for whatever reasons. The retention of such weaponry should, of course, have been the last thing to shock any American in 2015. After all, the up-armoring and militarization of the police has been an ongoing phenomenon since 9/11, even if it only received real media attention after the police, looking like an army of occupation, rolled onto the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in response to protests over the killing of Michael Brown.

In fact, the Pentagon (and the Department of Homeland Security) had already shunted $5.1 billion worth of military equipment, much of it directly from the country’s distant battlefields -- assault rifles, land-mine detectors, grenade launchers, and 94,000 of those machine guns -- to local police departments around the country. Take, for example, the various tank-like, heavily armored vehicles that have now become commonplace for police departments to possess. (Ferguson, for instance, had a “Bearcat,” widely featured in coverage of protests there.)

Since 2013, the Pentagon has transferred for free more than 600 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, worth at least half a million dollars each and previously used in U.S. war zones, to various “qualified law enforcement agencies.” Police departments in rural areas like Walsh County, North Dakota (pop. 11,000) now have their own MRAPs, as does the campus police department at Ohio State University. It hardly matters that these monster vehicles have few uses in a country where neither ambushes nor roadside bombs are a part of everyday life.

Post-Ferguson, a few scattered departments have actually moved to turn these useless vehicles back in. It's clear, however, that police forces “kitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling around in armored vehicles” -- that is, almost indistinguishable from soldiers -- are now the future of American policing and there’s no walking that back. Since Ferguson, President Obama has essentially refused to do so and Congress certainly won’t. Despite a small uproar over the pile of military equipment being transferred to the police, there is no indication that the flow will be staunched.

When it comes to all this militarized equipment, as the president has emphasized (and the task force he appointed to look into these matters will undoubtedly reemphasize), “reform” is mainly going to be focused on “better training” in how to use it. In other words, reform will prove to be a code word for further militarization. And don’t count on anyone returning those 94,000 machine guns either in a country that seems to be in some kind of domestic arms race and in which toddlers now regularly find their parents’ loaded guns and wound or kill them.

How the National Security State Outlasted Its Critics

Not so long ago, that 9/11 “changed everything” seemed like the hyperbolic cliché of a past era. From the present moment, however, it looks ever more like a sober description of what actually happened. Congratulations, that is, are due to Osama bin Laden. Even dead and buried at sea, he deserves some credit. He proved to be midwife to the exceedingly violent birth of a new American world. Today, 13 years after the attacks he launched, an exceptionally healthy, well-armed teenage America is growing fast. Under the banner of Fear and Terror that bin Laden inspired, this country has been transformed in myriad ways, even if we only half notice because we’re part of it. And it isn’t a world much interested in walking anything back.

Consider the National Security Agency. In June 2013, it was faced with the beginning of a devastating rollout of a trove of top-secret documents exposing its inner workings. Thanks to Edward Snowden, Americans (and Germans and Brazilians and Mexicans and Afghans) came to know that the agency had, in the post-9/11 years, set up a surveillance state for the ages, one for which the phrase Orwellian might be distinctly inadequate. The NSA was listening in on or intercepting the communications of 35 chancellors, presidents, and other world leaders, the secretary-general of the U.N., the offices of the European Union, foreign corporations, peasants in the backlands of the planet, and oh yes, American citizens galore (and that’s just to start down a far longer list). All of this effort has -- from the point of view of “intelligence” -- been remarkably expensive but (as far as anyone can tell) relatively useless. Few terrorists have been found, next to no plots broken up, and little useful, actionable intelligence provided to the government, despite the yottabytes of data collected. The whole effort should have been written off as a bust and scaled back radically. The agency’s methods arguably violated the Constitution, made a mockery of the idea of privacy, and tore up sovereignties of every sort. Instead, that global surveillance system remains embedded in our world and growing, its actions sanctified.

Clearly, in the new post-9/11 American rulebook, no one was to have the right to keep a secret -- except the national security state itself, which was madly classifying anything in sight, while the Obama Justice Department went after anyone who leaked anything about it or blew a whistle on it with a fierceness never before experienced in our history. Hence, the towering anger of top NSA officials (and their retired colleagues) at Edward Snowden when he exposed their “privacy” to scrutiny, too.

If ever there was a system in need of “reform,” this was it. And yet the NSA has successfully outlasted the long Snowden moment without a single thing being walked back, not even the most shocking revelation for Americans: that the agency was gathering and storing their bulk phone “metadata.” A year ago, a presidential advisory board on privacy concluded that the bulk data collection was “illegal and unproductive” and recommended changes. None have yet taken place. “Reform” efforts on the NSA collapsed in Congress even before the Republicans took the Senate. As with the police, so the president has announced minor “tweaks” to the system of data collection and it’s marching right on.

Similarly, the CIA outlasted Senator Dianne Feinstein. After years of effort, a truncated, redacted version of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report that she oversaw was finally released, filled with American horrors and barbarities. The result, as with Snowden’s revelations, was nada. For torture, no one at the CIA is to be held responsible or accountable; nor did the CIA pay any price for hacking into the computer systems of the committee’s staff or turning on the woman once known as the senator from the national security state. The whole process seemed to signal that congressional oversight of the U.S. intelligence community was now more fiction than fact.

Admittedly, when President Obama came into office, in what may be the single exception to the rule of the era, he walked back one crucial set of Bush administration policies, ending torture and closing the “black sites” at which much of it occurred. Since then, however, the CIA has expanded, while its power, like the national security state within which it is lodged, has only grown.

The process of expanding that shadow government and freeing it from supervision has, in fact, been unending. Only last week, for instance, the Obama administration announced that the 17 intelligence outfits that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community were about to get a new baby. Amid a thicket of outfits now devoted to cyberintelligence, including “cyber-operations centers” at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, the new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, which will be housed in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, will “analyze cyberthreats and coordinate strategy to counter them.” It will assumedly be the civilian equivalent of the military’s 2009 creation, the U.S. Cyber Command. And keep in mind that all this is happening in the country that is responsible for launching the planet’s first cyberwar.

Or consider another growth industry: drones and their progeny. They are spinning off into domestic air space at a startling rate and can now be found from America’s borderlands to thousands of feet up in the skies above commercial jetliners to the White House grounds (reportedly thanks to the recreational activities of a drunken employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency). Abroad, Washington’s drones have been this country's true “lone wolf” hunters, inflicting terror from the skies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya in 2011, and most recently Syria. In five of those seven countries they have been at it for years, in the case of Pakistan flying hundreds of strikes in its tribal borderlands.

Washington’s grimly named Predator and Reaper drones have been hunting their prey in the backlands of the planet 24 hours a day for more than a decade now. Thousands of people have been wiped out, including women, children, and wedding parties, as well as numerous significant and insignificant figures in terror outfits of every sort. And yet in not one of those countries has the situation improved in any significant way in terms of U.S. policy goals. In most of them it has grown worse and the drones have been a factor in such developments, alienating whole populations on the ground below. This has been obvious for years to counterinsurgency experts. But a reconsideration of these drone wars is beyond the pale in Washington. Drone assassination is now a sacrosanct act of the American state, part of a “global” war 13 years old and ongoing. No one in any position of power, now or in the immediate future, is going to consider flying them back.

The CIA has sometimes been called the president’s private army. Today, it's running most (but not all) of Washington’s drone campaigns and so those robotic lone wolves could be considered the president’s private air force. In the process, the twenty-first-century White House has been officially and proudly turned into an assassin’s lair and don’t expect that to change in 2016 or 2020 either.

Permanent War and the Permanent Election Campaign

Similar points could be made about the 13-year-old “global war” the Bush administration launched and the specific wars, raids, conflicts, invasions, and occupations that have been carried out under its aegis. President Obama has been fighting Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0 for six months, claiming that Congressional post-9/11 authorizations allow him to do so. Now, he wants a three-year extension on something he claims he doesn't need and has delivered a text to Congress filled with enough loopholes to send an army (and air force) through -- and not just in Iraq and Syria either. Not getting this authorization wouldn’t, however, significantly affect the administration’s plans in the Middle East. So much for the "power" of Congress to declare war. That body is nonetheless evidently going to spend months holding hearings and “debating” a new authorization, even as fighting goes on without it, based on informal agreements pounded out by the White House and the Pentagon. (Alice would have found Wonderland sane by comparison.)

In this way, the White House has in our time become a war-making and assassination-producing machine. In the same period, terror groups and membership in them have leapt across the Greater Middle East and Africa; no terror organization has been destroyed (though the original al-Qaeda, a modest enough outfit to begin with, has been weakened); most have expanded; the Islamic State, the first mini-terror state in history, has taken over significant parts of Iraq and Syria and is expanding elsewhere; Libya is a chaos of competing militias, some of an extreme Islamic nature; Yemen is believed to be in a state of collapse with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the rise; Afghanistan remains a war disaster area; Pakistan is significantly destabilized; and so on. And yet, as the president’s authorization request indicates, there is no walking any of this back.

In the meantime, on the domestic front in this “too big to fail” century, the country that eternally sallies forth under the banner of democracy has been working on a new political system which, as yet, has no name. Here’s what we do know about our latest version of “democracy”: in a period when plenty of American citizens weren’t too small to fail, the inequality gap has grown to yawning proportions. On the principle that what goes up must come down, some part of the vast infusion of money flowing to the .01% or even the .001% has, with a helping hand from the Supreme Court, been raining down on the electoral system.

In the same way that the national security state was funded to the tune of almost a trillion dollars a year and war became perpetual, the new political system, focused on TV advertising, has created a perpetual campaign season. (It is now estimated that the 2016 presidential campaign alone could cost $5 billion, essentially doubling the $2.6 billion spent in 2012.) And here’s the most recent news from that round-the-clock campaign, whose focus is increasingly on donors, not voters: the Koch brothers and their allied donor networks have pledged nearly one billion dollars for election season 2016 (more than double the amount they contributed in 2012). And they already have pledges for $249 million, which suggests that they may even exceed their present guesstimate.

Despite comments from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg about her personal desire to roll back the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates of money, it’s clear that this court won’t be walking its election-financing positions back anytime soon. In donor terms, think of what that court did as the equivalent of the Pentagon putting all those machine guns and MRAPs in the hands of the police.

And keep in mind that, as the U.S. changes, the world does, too. Consider it a form of reverse blowback, as from drones to surveillance to cyberwar, Washington helps lay the groundwork for a new more extreme century in which, from sovereignty to privacy, boundaries are there to be broken, new kinds of weaponry to be tested out in the real world, and new kinds of conflicts to be launched.

In sum, we, the people, are ever less in control of anything. The police are increasingly not “ours,” nor are the NSA and its colleague outfits “our” intelligence agencies, nor are the wars we are fighting “our” wars, nor the elections in which we vote “our” elections. This is a country walking back nothing as it heads into a heavily militarized future. In the process, an everyday American world is being brought into existence that, by past standards, will seem extreme indeed. In other words, in the years to come an ever-less recognizable American way of life will quite expectably be setting in the West. Don’t be shocked.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His new book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (Haymarket Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt

Venezuelan Revelations: Calling the Coup Masters to Account

Sanctions Imposed on the U.S.?

by Andre Vltchek - CounterPunch

Another year, another set of coups that we can expect to be administered by the West.

This year, it is all beginning in February. First the onslaught against Argentina and following that comes yet another coup against Venezuela, and its democratically elected, progressive government.

The coup has been thwarted. Venezuela prevailed!

As Telesur reported:

“Nicolas Maduro announced Thursday that the government had thwarted a coup attempt which was being coordinated by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition with the support of the U.S. government.

Just the day before the revelations, opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma released a “transition plan” which involved privatization of the country’s oil, deregulation of the economy and accords with “international financial institutions” including the International Monetary Fund.”

The army stood firmly by the government of President Maduro. Most of Latin America, including UNASUR, expressed both their solidarity and support.

But all over the world, life goes on, as if nothing significant really took place!

How much longer can such banditry by the Empire be tolerated?

***

I don’t feel like writing my usual long philosophical essays, today.

I am simply pissed off; outraged. This time I really am! Not by what those sadistic imperialist control-junkies in Washington have managed to do again. I have no positive expectations when it comes to them, as they are clearly a bunch of mass murderers of the greatest caliber, not unlike their European colonialist and crusader predecessors.

What shocks me, suddenly, is this silence, this calm, all over the world! As if nothing really taken place. As if nothing is going on!

Are we going to eat the lowest grade of shit from the Empire forever? Is the monstrous fascist and market-fundamentalist system going to get away with absolutely everything? It has already murdered some 60 million people since the end of the WWII, as I explained in my recent book with Noam Chomsky.

The Empire overthrew every decent government in Africa, in the Middle East, Asia and until recently, in Latin America. It liquidated peaceful and secular Muslim governments and replaced them with thugs or extremists.

Many of us know about it. It is no secret! But then, when the same banditry takes place again and again, everybody stays seated on his or her bum, silent like a buffalo!

Where at least are there any substantial protests in Western capitals and major cities? Where is that multi-million crowd yelling “Je suis Chavez”?

Did those morons in Europe and the United States enter a complete, final, terminal state of amnesia and indoctrination? Don’t they see and care what their governments and corporations are doing all over the world?

It seems that all that can still lift them up from the couch is either that bloody football or regime-sponsored events like “Je suis Charlie”.

So this is their famous “democracy” – the one that the West wants to ‘export’ and sticks down the throat of the Chinese people, of Russians, of Latin Americans: the establishment can butcher millions of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Somalia, in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Papua, Kashmir, Syria and Ukraine, it can attempt to overthrow any democratically elected government in Latin America, but the citizens of the Empire are so ‘pacified’, so fucked, really, that they don’t even recognize what is happening in front of their eyes, or what is done in their name. And if they recognize it, they don’t care.

It must remind one of those Germans who were living next to concentration camps, during the war, looking at the smoke coming up from the chimneys, and then claiming that ‘they did not know’.

***

Have they – Europeans and North Americans – lost their marbles? Their Christian fundamentalist/corporatist states are imposing sanctions on Russia – for nothing. Actually, Russia is being punished for the successful Western act of overthrowing the Ukrainian government! It is all totally bizarre, grotesque, comical. It makes a person with at least a few intact pieces of brain want to puke.

They first create ISIS in those NATO sponsored ‘refugee camps’ in Southern Turkey and Jordan, in order to overthrow the legitimate government in Damascus. Then when ISIS goes gaga, they use it as justification to redeploy troops in Iraq, and to bomb Syria! And European and North Americans still immobilized on their asses and still getting stoned and pissed, instead of at least building a few good, old-fashioned barricades!

And now Venezuela!

I believe that Latin America should, immediately, impose sanctions on the United States.

This is not a joke; it can and should be done. This is the only way to deal with the Empire! Merely exposing its acts only, does not obviously help. It just laughs back and continues murdering people and destroying countries that do not want to lick its boots and to sacrifice its people. It does it all in broad daylight.

Venezuela should approach the UN Security Council, and then the ICC (although states like the US or Israel do not recognize it, as they are ‘above the law’).

Then sanctions should be imposed against the U.S., first by Venezuela, then by most of other Latin American countries. China and Russia should offer their mighty shoulders, and protect Latin America against further attacks, militarily.

Enough of fear; enough of this horror! The world cannot count on the Europeans and North Americans. They cannot and are unwilling to control their governments and corporate bandits. Their countries are forming, in fact, a bunch of failed states, processing materials that are plundered abroad.

What happened in Venezuela on Feb 12th should never be accepted as the norm. Not anymore.

The world is not a chessboard, Mr. Obama. But what you are playing is not even chess. It is dirty; an extremely dirty game, which should be stopped by all means.

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His critically acclaimed political revolutionary novel Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear” (Pluto). He just completed feature documentary “Rwanda Gambit” about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website.

#Dead Hostage: A Wrong Kind of Victims of ISIS War

The Wrong Kind of Victim: No Hashtag for Dead Hostage in ISIS War

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

 

Ordinarily the death of an American hostage held by Islamic extremists is the occasion of bellicose, ballyhooed, bloody shirt-waving rage, stoked in tandem by government and media. It usually evokes widespread calls for retaliation, for taking the gloves off at last and exterminating the barbarians once and for all. Today, it almost always comes with its own hashtag, so that people can immediately identify themselves with the victim, who is seen invariably as a martyr for the goodness and specialness of America.

But it turns out that some victims are less special than others. In a time when the killing of French journalists whom no American had ever heard of, working at at magazine no American had ever heard of, brings forth a flood not just of sympathy but of direct, personal identification with the victims -- JeSuisCharlie! -- the death of a young American woman captured by ISIS has been remarkably muted. Where is the global flood of JeSuisKayla hashtags?

Not only has the death of 26-year-old Kayla Mueller failed to evoke the usual spasm of anger and grief -- it has actually been celebrated by some of America's most rock-ribbed, hardcore, give-no-quarter opponents of Islamic terrorism (which they broadly define as the merest expression of Islam in any form anywhere on earth). You would think our stalwart halal-haters would be the first to mourn the death of an honest-to-goodness real human being -- a white American! -- while she was in the grip of the most monstrous Muslimy monsters who ever lived.

(There are conflicting reports on how Mueller died; ISIS claims she was killed in a Jordanian airstrike on the building where she was being held; the official line is that ISIS killed her some time before, and was just using the airstrike claim for propaganda value. With conflicting claims from such noble and honest adversaries, it is of course hard to ascertain the truth of either claim. One may make the observation, however, that the historical record provides ample scope for skepticism of the "official line" in such matters, going all the way back to the Gulf of Tonkin, and beyond )

But however she died, it seems that Kayla Mueller forfeited her sacred American citizenship -- indeed, her very humanity -- by committing the heinous crime of … supporting Palestinian rights. That's all it took for her to be branded "a Jew-hating bitch." That's all it took for inveterate foes of the "savage barbarians" in the Middle East to tweet and trumpet their jubilation at her death. As Rania Khalek reports at The Electronic Intifada:

Mueller participated in nonviolent protests with Palestinians against Israeli home demolitions and walked Palestinian children to school to protect them from harassment by Jewish settlers — the kind of work [the International Solidarity Movement] is known for.

A serious malefactor indeed! Taking part in non-violent protests, walking children to school -- offenses surely worthy of death. Khalek continues:

American-born Rabbi Ben Packer shared Kaplan’s op-ed on his Facebook page along with the comment, “All sympathy - GONE!!”

Packer, who served as the “Rabbi on Campus” at Duke University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) after a stint in the Israeli army, is currently “Supreme Commander” of “Heritage House,” a Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem that provides lodging for Jewish tourists and “lone soldiers,” essentially foreign fighters recruited from abroad to participate in Israel’s military occupation in Palestine.

Packer went on to respond enthusiastically to a friend who remarked that Islamic State should have burned Mueller alive like it did the captured Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasassbeh.

In a blog post titled, “Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch,” conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel calls Mueller “a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel.”

Schlussel concludes her post with the following farewell: “Buh-bye, Kayla. Have fun with your 72 Yasser Arafats.”

This is perhaps just par for the course, the kind of thing one would expect from -- in the scornful words of Atticus Finch -- "minds of that caliber." But Khalek notes that America's respectable mainstream media -- while certainly not glorying in Mueller's death -- went to great lengths to eradicate the reality of her life:

In a timeline of Mueller’s humanitarian work, USA Today completely erased her work in Palestine, saying only that between 2010 and 2011, she worked in “Tel Aviv, Israel, volunteering at the African Refugee Development Center.”

Although a more in-depth USA Today article specified that Mueller worked with ISM for the Palestinian cause, the article claimed she did so in Israel, vaguely noting that Mueller “would walk to school with children in the morning and then make sure they returned home safely later in the day.”

Mueller escorted Palestinian children to school in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, not “Israel,” to protect them from violent Jewish settlers. Leaving out such crucial details obscures the reality of Israeli violence.

While some outlets shied away from emphasizing Mueller’s Palestine activism, others framed her death as a consequence of it.

The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz implied that her involvement in Palestine led to her death with the headline, “US idealist Kayla Mueller’s road to ISIS captivity went through West Bank.” The Washington Post seemed to agree, with an article titled, “How Kayla Mueller’s pro-Palestinian activism led her to Syria.” …

Between the Zionist backlash against Mueller, the outlets erasing her Palestine activism and those using her death to advance their own agendas, there is one constant: Mueller’s support for Palestinians against Israeli oppression is a taboo that must be ignored, obscured or ridiculed.

Same as it ever was. In death, as in life, certain people are accorded the full dignity and respect of personhood; others are stripped of their humanity and turned into lumps of meaningless meat whose lives and concerns don't matter.

In the memory of many people still living, this was precisely the treatment meted out to the Jews of Europe by the Germans (and many of their helpers, like Ukraine's Stepan Bandera, being celebrated today by America's allies). This was the treatment meted out to the Iraqi people, in the extraordinary 20-year American campaign to strangle their country to death, with sanctions that Washington itself admits killed half a million innocent children and a war of aggression that killed up to a million more people, and led directly to the depredations of ISIS and other extremists in the region.

This is the treatment meted out every single week by the White House death squads of the Peace Prize Prez, as they rain drone death on villages, houses and farms, killing women and children, killing the sick and elderly, killing masses of men who may or may not have behaved in a manner that a distant button-pusher looking through an electronic bug-eye in the sky believes might possibly be construed as the arbitrarily designated, insanely broad "signature" of someone who might possibly carry out some unspecified act of terrorism against an unspecified target at some unspecified location at some unspecified point in the future. For this alone, they and everyone in their proximity can be blown to pieces or burned to death by the defenders of civilization.

Reaction = Action: Putting Putin First in Ukraine Plot

The Putin-Did-It Conspiracy Theory

by Robert Parry - Consortium News 

The original falsehood behind the Iraq War was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them against America either directly or by giving them to al-Qaeda. The opening lie about the Ukraine crisis was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the conflict as part of some Hitlerian plan to conquer much of Europe.

President Barack Obama talks with President
Vladimir Putin en route to the APEC Family Photo
at the International Convention Center in Beijing, 
China, Nov. 11, 2014.- White House Photo: Pete Souza

Yet, while the Hussein-WMD claim was hard for the common citizen to assess because it was supposedly supported by U.S. intelligence information that was kept secret, the Putin-Ukraine lie collapses under the most cursory examination based simply of what’s publicly known and what makes sense.

Nevertheless, the New York Times – much as it did when it was falsely reporting breathlessly about “aluminum tubes” for Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapons program – continues to promote U.S. government propaganda about Ukraine as fact and dismisses any rational assessment of the situation as crazy.

On Friday, the Times concluded its lead editorial with the assertion that: “What remains incontrovertible is that Ukraine is Mr. Putin’s war.” But the point is anything but “incontrovertible.” Indeed, the crisis was most certainly not instigated by Putin.

The actually “incontrovertible” facts about the Ukraine crisis are these: The destabilization of President Viktor Yanukovych’s elected government began in November 2013 when Yanukovych balked at a proposed association agreement promoted by the European Union. He sought more time after the sticker shock of learning from Kiev economic experts that the deal would cost Ukraine $160 billion in lost revenue by cutting trade with Russia.

It was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, not Vladimir Putin, who pushed the EU agreement and miscalculated the consequences, as the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel has reported. Putin’s only role in that time frame was to offer a more generous $15 billion aid package to Ukraine, not exactly a war-like act.

Yanukovych’s decision to postpone action on the EU association prompted angry demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan square, largely from western Ukrainians who were hoping for visa-free travel to the EU and other benefits from closer ties. Putin had no role in those protests – and it’s insane to think that he did.

In February 2014, the protests grew more and more violent as neo-Nazi and other militias organized in the western city of Lviv and these 100-man units known as “sotins” were dispatched daily to provide the muscle for the anti-Yanukovych uprising that was taking shape. It is frankly nutty to suggest that Putin was organizing these militias. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “When Is a Putsch a Putsch.”]

Evidence of Coup Plotting

By contrast, there is substantial evidence that senior U.S. officials were pushing for a “regime change” in Kiev, including an intercepted phone call and various public statements.

In December 2013, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.” In early February, she discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leaders of Ukraine should be. “Yats is the guy,” she declared, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Who’s Telling the Big Lie on Ukraine?”]

The Maidan uprising gained momentum on Feb. 20, 2014, when snipers around the square opened fire on police and protesters touching off a violent clash that left scores of people dead, both police and protesters. After the sniper fire and a police retreat — carrying their wounded — the demonstrators surged forward and some police apparently reacted with return fire of their own.

But the growing evidence indicates that the initial sniper fire originated from locations controlled by the Right Sektor, extremists associated with the Maidan’s neo-Nazi “self-defense” commandant Andriy Parubiy. Though the current Ukrainian government has dragged its feet on an investigation, independent field reports, including a new one from BBC, indicate that the snipers were associated with the protesters, not the Yanukovych government as was widely reported in the U.S. media a year ago.

The worsening violence led Yanukovych to agree on Feb. 21 to a deal guaranteed by three European countries. He accepted reduced powers and agreed to early elections so he could be voted out of office. Yet, rather than permit that political settlement to go forward, neo-Nazis and other Maidan forces overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives.

The U.S. State Department quickly deemed this coup regime “legitimate” and Nuland’s choice, Yatsenyuk, emerged as Prime Minister, with Parubiy put in charge of national security.

In other words, there is plenty of evidence that the Ukraine crisis was started by the EU through its mishandling of the association agreement, then was heated up by the U.S. government through the work of Nuland, Pyatt and other officials, and then was brought to a boil by neo-Nazis and other extremists who executed the coup.

A Nutty Conspiracy Theory

But there is zero evidence that Putin engineered these events. There is no evidence that he got Merkel and the EU to overplay their hand; no evidence that he organized the neo-Nazi militias in Lviv; no evidence that he manipulated U.S. officials to manipulate the “regime change” behind the scenes; no evidence that he ordered the Maidan militants to attack.

Is the New York Times really suggesting that Putin pulled the strings on the likes of Merkel and Nuland, secretly organized neo-Nazi brigades, and ruthlessly deployed these thugs to Kiev to provoke violence and overthrow Yanukovych, all while pretending to try to save Yanukovych’s government – all so Putin could advance some dastardly plot to conquer Europe?

The Times often makes fun of “conspiracy theorists,” but the Times’ narrative is something that would make even the most dedicated “conspiracy theorist” blush. Yet, the Times not only asserts this crazy conspiracy theory but calls it “incontrovertible.”

Beyond the lack of evidence to support this conspiracy theory, there is no rational motive for Putin to have done what the Times claims that he did.

In the actual chronology of event, Putin was preoccupied with the Winter Olympics in Sochi when the Ukraine crisis took its turn for the worst a year ago. He was fearful that the Olympics would be marred by Chechen or other terrorism and thus was personally overseeing security.

Putin had spent some $40 billion on making the Olympics a glamorous show to introduce the new Russia to the world as a country ready to join the West. I’m told that he was very proud of Russia’s position in the G-8 and felt he had built a constructive relationship with President Barack Obama by helping him resolve crises in Syria and Iran in 2013.

The last thing Putin wanted to do was provoke a crisis in Ukraine. Nor is there any intelligence that he had designs on the Baltic States, as the conspiracy theory contends.

However, when a right-wing regime seized power in a violent coup in Ukraine on Russia’s border and then took provocative actions against Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Putin responded to calls from Crimea – both from its parliament and a referendum – to take the peninsula back into Russia.

Putin also feared that the new powers in Kiev might give the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol to NATO with its nuclear-armed submarines. In other words, as much as the New York Times has bandied about claims of a Russian “invasion” of Crimea, the Crimeans requested Russia’s intervention and up to 25,000 Russian troops were already there in the agreement with Ukraine over the naval base.

Reactor, Not Instigator

But the key point is that Putin was reacting to the Ukraine crisis, not instigating it. As even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained to Der Spiegel, “The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.”

Kissinger added, “Putin spent tens of billions of dollars on the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The theme of the Olympics was that Russia is a progressive state tied to the West through its culture and, therefore, it presumably wants to be part of it. So it doesn’t make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine.”

In this case, Kissinger is clearly right. It never made any sense for Putin to provoke the Ukraine crisis. Yet, that became the lie upon which the United States has built its increasingly aggressive policies over the past year, with politicians of all stripes now shouting that America must stand up to the madman Putin and “Russian aggression.”

This is a dangerous “group think” for a number of reasons, not the least the disturbing fact that both the United States and Russia have lots of nuclear weapons. On a less existential level, the “Putin-is-Hitler” analogy has prompted a major miscalculation on the right approach for the Obama administration to take vis a vis Putin.

As Harvard Professor Stephen M. Walt has noted, the most effective response to a crisis is different if a foreign leader is an aggressor on the march or if the leader feels cornered. The former calls for a “deterrence model,” i.e., a tough reaction. But a tough response in the latter case will only make the beleaguered leader more belligerent like a cornered animal, thus spinning the crisis into more dangerous territory under what’s known as the “spiral model.”

“When insecurity is the taproot of a state’s revisionist actions, making threats just makes the situation worse,” Walt wrote. “When the ‘spiral model’ applies, the proper response is a diplomatic process of accommodation and appeasement (yes, appeasement) to allay the insecure state’s concerns.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “‘Realists’ Warn Against Ukraine Escalation.”]

Perhaps the new ceasefire agreement in Minsk – spearheaded by German Chancellor Merkel – will finally help defuse the crisis, with the legitimate concerns of the various sides being taken into account rationally rather than letting the past year’s hysteria continue to control events.

But the Times’ editorial doesn’t give much reason for hope that America’s upside-down “group think” has righted itself in any meaningful way. In the mainstream media’s latest repeat of the Iraq-WMD fiasco, the Times and virtually every other major news outlet remain committed to a dangerous misreading of the facts about Ukraine.

And anyone who dares point out the real history of the crisis is immediately shouted down with the anti-intellectual riposte: “Putin apologist!” — just as in 2002-2003, when anyone who doubted the certainty about Iraq’s WMD was a “Saddam apologist.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Venezuelan Assembly President Implicates RCMP in Coup Plot

Evidence Reveals Canada, UK Involvement in Venezuela Coup Plot

by Telesur 

The president of Venezuela's national assembly, Diosdado Cabello, presented further evidence of the right-wing plot to overthrow the Bolivarian government Friday evening.

Cabello presented evidence of the foiled plans, including a video showing members of the military prior to recording a message announcing that the military no longer recognized the government.

The video, which was set to be aired after planned attacks had been carried out, was to have been televised by a station in Venezuela or Miami.

Cabello also showed a 10-year U.S. visa given to one of the detained, days before the plan was to be implemented.

Venezuelan TV video of coup plotters, and 10-year U.S. visa granted to one of the accused.

Cabello also said that a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a member of the U.K. diplomatic core in Venezuela, had been involved in plans, including seeking information on airport capacity in case of emergencies.

According to Venezuelan intelligence, the computers seized to military detractors revealed maps from the places where the opposition was plotting to carry out attacks, including the Miraflores presidential palace, and the headquarters of teleSUR in Caracas.

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro announced Thursday that the government had thwarted a coup attempt which was being coordinated by Venezuela's right-wing opposition with the support of the U.S. government.

During the televised presentation, Cabello pointed to a recent interview given by U.S. president Barack Obama, in which he stated that “American leadership at times entails twisting the arms of states which don't do what we need them to do.”

The plans were to take place exactly one year after opposition-led acts of violence rocked the country, claiming 43 lives and billions in damage.

On Wednesday, opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma released a “transition plan” which involved privatization of the country's oil, deregulation of the economy and accords with “international financial institutions” including the International Monetary Fund.

La nueva Televisión del Sur C.A.