#mass slaughter

Between Obama’s high approval ratings among the democrats and USA’s own propensity for supporting wars (When they asked Americans whether they support the U.S. taking “an active part in world affairs”, 69 percent said yes; 30 percent, no), it isn’t surprising to assume that if you’re a USA president, a “kill list” is an ordinary affair.

I’d begin this post with “Effective Evil” or Progressives’ Best Hope? Glen Ford vs. Michael Eric Dyson on Obama Presidency, in which Ford stated the following:

“Well, it certainly isn’t the sports-like assessment that I just heard from the good doctor. But we at Black Agenda Report have for some time been saying that Obama is not the lesser of evils, but the more effective evil. And we base that on his record and also on his rhetoric at the convention. So, we would prefer to talk about what history-making events have gone down under his presidency.”

“We say that he is the more effective evil because he is able, being a Democrat, to accomplish more of that right-wing agenda than the Republicans ever could. Remember, George Bush tried to privatize Social Security. He got his worst domestic defeat of his term in so doing, and the Republicans were reeling from that even in 2009. It took Barack Obama to introduce the model for austerity. And it is a—and it certainly is a twist on history—I think it’s a lie—to claim that he is the bulwark of defense. Now, we need to tell the truth. That is our first obligation, not just get in the game as the rules of the game have been laid down by one—by either of those corporate political parties.” (Source) 

How much of it is true? To elaborate on the “effective evil” moniker, I’d head down the “Drone Papers” route first. This is what the Drone Papers start off with. It’s an explicit illustration of the war machinery that operates beyond USA’s borders, an endeavor that’s labeled accurately as “The Assassination Complex” (source):

From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.

The masking of the numbers:

“Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets. The slides also paint a picture of a campaign in Afghanistan aimed not only at eliminating al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, but also at taking out members of other local armed groups.”

The ‘find, fix, finish’ doctrine:

“The ‘find, fix, finish’ doctrine that has fueled America’s post-9/11 borderless war is being refined and institutionalized. Whether through the use of drones, night raids, or new platforms yet to be unleashed, these documents lay bare the normalization of assassination as a central component of U.S. counterterrorism policy.”

The guidelines are still in effect:

“It has been widely reported that President Obama directly approves high-value targets for inclusion on the kill list, but the secret ISR study provides new insight into the kill chain, including a detailed chart stretching from electronic and human intelligence gathering all the way to the president’s desk. The same month the ISR study was circulated — May 2013 — Obama signed the policy guidance on the use of force in counterterrorism operations overseas. A senior administration official, who declined to comment on the classified documents, told The Intercept that ‘those guidelines remain in effect today.’ ”

The “baseball cards”:

“ ‘The system for creating baseball cards and targeting packages, according to the source, depends largely on intelligence intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. ‘It isn’t a surefire method,’ he said. ‘You’re relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,’ which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have ‘godlike powers.’ ”

The SIGNIT’s poor capabilities:

“ ‘In undeclared war zones, the U.S. military has become overly reliant on signals intelligence, or SIGINT, to identify and ultimately hunt down and kill people. The documents acknowledge that using metadata from phones and computers, as well as communications intercepts, is an inferior method of finding and finishing targeted people. They described SIGINT capabilities in these unconventional battlefields as ‘poor’ and ‘limited.’ Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.”

“The source underscored the unreliability of metadata, most often from phone and computer communications intercepts. These sources of information, identified by so-called selectors such as a phone number or email address, are the primary tools used by the military to find, fix, and finish its targets. ‘It requires an enormous amount of faith in the technology that you’re using,’ the source said. ‘There’s countless instances where I’ve come across intelligence that was faulty.’ This, he said, is a primary factor in the killing of civilians. ‘It’s stunning the number of instances when selectors are misattributed to certain people. And it isn’t until several months or years later that you all of a sudden realize that the entire time you thought you were going after this really hot target, you wind up realizing it was his mother’s phone the whole time.’ ”

You’re a “terrorist” if you’re killed:

“Within the special operations community, the source said, the internal view of the people being hunted by the U.S. for possible death by drone strike is: ‘They have no rights. They have no dignity. They have no humanity to themselves. They’re just a ‘selector’ to an analyst. You eventually get to a point in the target’s life cycle that you are following them, you don’t even refer to them by their actual name.’ This practice, he said, contributes to ‘dehumanizing the people before you’ve even encountered the moral question of ‘is this a legitimate kill or not?’ ”

The deliberate obfuscation of civilian casualties:

“The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — ‘enemy killed in action’ — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or ‘unlawful enemy combatants,’ EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, ‘is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.’

The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as ‘exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.’ ”

“The White House’s publicly available policy standards state that lethal force will be launched only against targets who pose a ‘continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.’ In the documents, however, there is only one explicit mention of a specific criterion: that a person ‘presents a threat to U.S. interest or personnel.’ While such a rationale may make sense in the context of a declared war in which U.S. personnel are on the ground in large numbers, such as in Afghanistan, that standard is so vague as to be virtually meaningless in countries like Yemen and Somalia, where very few U.S. personnel operate.”

(A heroic whistleblowing that was highly, and unsurprisingly, underplayed by the Times-source)

This all goes back to the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 that makes it lawful for the USA to invade countries over vague guidelines (source): 

“The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (Pub.L. 107–40, 115 Stat. 224) is a joint resolution of the United States Congress which became law on September 18, 2001, authorizing the use of the United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. The authorization granted the President the authority to use all ‘necessary and appropriate force’ against those whom he determined ‘planned, authorized, committed or aided’ the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. The AUMF was passed by the 107th Congress on September 14, 2001, and signed into law by President George W. Bush on September 18, 2001. In December 2016, the Office of the President published a brief interpreting the AUMF as providing Congressional authorization for the use of force against al-Qaeda and other militant groups. 

The only representative to vote against the Authorization in 2001 was Barbara Lee, who has consistently criticized it since for being a blank check giving the government unlimited powers to wage war without debate. Lee has initiated several attempts to repeal the authorization. Business Insider has reported that the AUMF has been used to allow military deployment in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia.”

The Afghanistan papers reveal still more (Source). Obama’s administration was also heavily involved in the heinous tortures at the Abu Ghraib. Though the details are from before Obama took office, the torture allegations didn’t change afterwards, either. Here are some of the details from there (Source):

“Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of ‘crimes against the coalition’; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.”

“Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:”

“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.” “The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.”

“Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. ‘Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,’ Haykel said.

Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.”

“The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called ‘hard site’ at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:”

“SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederick, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.”

When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

“I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, ‘Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.’ I heard PFC England shout out, ‘He’s getting hard.’ ”

“In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

‘I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, ‘This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.’ . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.’ ”

“In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called ‘O.G.A.,’ or other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. ‘They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.’ The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.’ ”

“Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, ‘MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.’ ”

“Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, ‘I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules.’ Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’ ‘Make sure he has a bad night.’ ‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’ Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. ‘The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’ ”

‘Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, ‘I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.’ (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this ‘they needed to give me paperwork.’) Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a ‘bunch of people from MI’ watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.”

“The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, ‘cases of abuse may have been prevented.’ ”

CIA sex abuse and torture went beyond Senate report disclosures, detainee says-Source. 

Is it only limited to Abu Ghraib, or were the sanctioned tortures and illustrative example of a wider issue? 

Ben Rhodes and Mehdi Hasan also talk about Obama’s legacy and how it seeped into the Trump administration (Source):

Confronting the Consequences of Obama’s Foreign Policy

Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss Obama’s legacy and whether it has seeped into the Trump administration.

“To his critics on the left, he was the deporter in chief, the drone president, bombing villages in Pakistan, assassinating Americans without trial in Yemen, arming rebels in Syria, launching a military intervention in Libya without congressional approval.”

“Jorge Ramos: President Obama deported 2.5 million immigrants, he destroyed thousands of families. No other president has done something like that.”

“MH: Now, you might not be surprised to hear that I happen to think the right-wing critique of Obama’s foreign policy is a lot of BS, but I also happen to think that the left-wing critique of him can sometimes be a little simplistic. Because there’s the Obama who, yes, embraced U.S. Empire, killed a lot of civilians and sold weapons to some awful regimes, as every U.S. president does. But there’s also the Obama who pulled off the biggest diplomatic breakthrough of our time, the Iran nuclear deal; who managed to get the U.S. to sign up to the Paris Climate Accords; who re-opened ties with Cuba — all in the face of blind, Republican opposition.

So my question today is: With Donald Trump now in office, is it time to recognize Obama maybe wasn’t as bad as we all thought — you know, everything’s relative in life — or is it, in fact time, for liberals to have a proper reckoning with Obama’s foreign policy legacy, to recognize that Obama’s excesses, whether in the Middle East or at the Mexico border, led the way to Trump’s?”

“MH: Let’s turn to the stuff I don’t miss about Obama, if you don’t mind. Gina Haspel was recently confirmed, very controversially, as Trump’s director of the CIA, despite having been in charge of a CIA black site at which torture was allegedly carried out, and despite destroying taped evidence of that torture. The vast majority of Senate Democrats voted against here; you said on Twitter that her nomination turned into a referendum on a dark chapter of our history that should be over. But it’s not over, Ben, because your administration, your president, Barack Obama, refused to prosecute CIA torturers, decided to look forward not back when you came to office in 2009.

Given Gina Haspel is director of the CIA today, as a direct result of that decision by your administration, do you have any regrets about how you handled that situation and how you handled the torturers?”

How long does this history of “divide and conquer” run among the imperialist states? I won’t go too back as it’d be time-consuming, but I’d start with Hitler (source):

Hitler himself said on several occasions that part of his inspiration came from the U.S. treatment of Native Americans. These were his words on October 17, 1941, as he spoke with a small group about Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union:

“We’ll take away its character of an Asiatic steppe, we’ll Europeanize it. … As for the two or three million men whom we need to accomplish this task, we’ll find them quicker than we think. They’ll come from Germany, Scandinavia, the Western countries and America. …

There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins. If these people had defeated us, Heaven have mercy! But we don’t hate them. That sentiment is unknown to us. We are guided only by reason. …

All those who have the feeling for Europe can join in our work.”

To expand the argument further, I’d post the verbatim quotes from the indispensable article below that highlights how USA’s extensive “War on Terror” has been an elaborate program to destabilize the entire region for war machinery at whose heart Israel’s “Arab Policies” lie:

US, Russia & Syria: The Problem With Faking It by Thomas S. Harrington (source): 

In 1982, as the Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation of the Revisionist Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the ‘Iron Wall’ that the only way to deal with ‘the Arabs’ in and around Israel was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation) was consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his country needed to take in the coming years.

What follows are some excerpts from Israel Shahak’s English translation of that text:

"Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon…."

"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."

"If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt.

"There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority."

Yinon’s vision reappeared in the now infamous "Clean Break" document from 1996, authored by a consortium of US and Israeli "strategic thinkers" that included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav Wurmser, which was meant to serve as a foreign policy guide for the first administration of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The text is nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously debilitate Syria’s ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence in the in the area.

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions."

"Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite."

Then there is Wesley Clark's famous speech, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was "to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years".

Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the "Clean Break" document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to "shape its strategic environment".

On September 5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in New York and well-connected member of Tel Aviv’s conservative policy elite described the Syrian conflict in the following terms in the New York Times:

"This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,....Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria."

I don’t think it can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in Syria never been about helping anyone in that country, but rather insuring its effective dismemberment so as to further the perceived "strategic interests" of the Jewish state.

Did the same happen with regards ISIS, as well? The issue is far more widespread than most would care to admit. 

Noam Chomsky on How the Iraq War Birthed ISIS & Why U.S. Policy Undermines the Fight Against It (source): 

“Patrick Cockburn, who has done by far the best reporting on this, describes it as an Alice in Wonderland strategy. The U.S. wants to destroy ISIS, but it’s opposing every force that’s fighting ISIS. So, the main state that’s opposed to ISIS is Iran. They support the Iraqi government, the Shiite government. But Iran is, you know, on our enemies list. Probably the main ground forces fighting ISIS are the PKK and its allies, which are on the U.S. terrorist list. That’s both in Iraq and in Syria. Saudi Arabia, our major ally, along with Israel, is both traditionally, for a long time, the main funder of ISIS and similar groups—not necessarily the government; rich Saudis, other people in the emirates—not only the funder, but they’re the ideological source. Saudi Arabia is committed, is dominated by an extremist fundamentalist version of Islam: Wahhabi doctrine. And ISIS is an extremist offshoot of the Wahhabi doctrine. Saudi Arabia is a missionary state. It establishes schools, mosques, spreading its radical Islamic version. So, they’re our ally. Our enemies are those who are fighting ISIS. And it’s more complex.

ISIS is a monstrosity. There’s not much doubt about that. It didn’t come from nowhere. It’s one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society—Iraq—with a sledgehammer, which elicited sectarian conflicts that had not existed. They became very violent. The U.S. violence made it worse. We’re all familiar with the crimes. Out of this came lots of violent, murderous forces. ISIS is one. But the Shiite militias are not that different. They’re carrying out—they’re the kind of the—when they say the Iraqi army is attacking, it’s probably mostly the Shiite militias with the Iraqi army in the background. I mean, the way the Iraqi army collapsed is an astonishing military fact. This is an army of, I think, 350,000 people, heavily armed by the United States and trained by the United States for 10 years. A couple of thousand guerrillas showed up, and they all ran away. The generals ran away first. And the soldiers didn’t know to do. They ran away after them.”

Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq (source)

“The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.”

“That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.”

“In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.”

This isn’t limited to this. No, it goes much further than this: 

Undermining Assad's regime has been the goal since at least 2007 (source):

The Bush Administration has been quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad.

The U.S. State Department acknowledged Monday it has been funding opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, following the release of secret diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks that document the funding (source).

The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda (source).

And:

THE United States is launching a covert operation to send weapons to Syrian rebels for the first time as it ramps up military efforts to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles will be sent through friendly Middle Eastern countries already supplying the rebels, according to well-placed diplomatic sources (source).

And:

The United States has coordinated a massive airlift of arms to Syrian rebels from Croatia with the help of Britain and other European states, despite the continuing European Union arms embargo, it was claimed yesterday (source).

These terrorist states create one bogeyman and then they create another to replace it; yet none of it is an issue of “morality”, but of “moral bankruptcy” of these states and their apologists (the public).

In this light, you’d not be surprised that under Obama’s presidency, the USA’s troops and drone strikes were increased in the key-regions, not decreased (source). The drone strikes were increased “ten times!” under his precedency compared to Bush’s (source).

The Body Count is in millions (source). And new sources state that it’s around 8 million in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone. 

“According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan. (Source)” 

The investigations into these crimes have been lukewarm, at best. When your whole well is poisoned (NATO, included), you can’t expect transparency, and that’s well-documented: USA’s hostility to investigation (source), Sanctioning of the ICC (source), and putting ‘evidence sites’ of war-crimes at risk (source).

ACLU demands CIA disclose drone program details after document leak

Lawsuit seeks information and legal rationale for US drone strikes that have killed thousands of civilians following anonymous whistleblower’s revelation (source)

The above was way back in 2015, and five years onwards, and I’ve seen nothing of substance being brought to the light. In fact, the drone bases are being expanded to Africa (source): 

“Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and expert on analyzing satellite imagery, notes that Chabelley Airfield allows U.S. drones to cover Yemen, southwest Saudi Arabia, a large swath of Somalia, and parts of Ethiopia and southern Egypt.

‘This base is now very important because it’s a major hub for most drone operations in northwest Africa,” he said. “It’s vital. … We can’t afford to lose it.’ ”

(The pictures are also in the above article, so do look into this one.)

USA’s a key-player in this punditry. In fact, it’s expanding this “international crimes” domain to cyber-crimes, as well, with highly vague guidelines:

Cisa amendment would allow US to jail foreigners for crimes committed abroad

Addition to controversial cybersecurity bill, which passed key Senate hurdle on Thursday, would lower barrier for US to pursue foreign nationals for cybercrime (source)

However, how is this all achieved? Surely, the public isn’t too “ignorant” as it claims to be. For one, most of the “terrorist” rhetoric is engineered, and its simplicity is quite damning:

Glenn Greenwald on How to Be a Terror “Expert”: Ignore Facts, Blame Muslims, Trumpet U.S. Propaganda (source)

“The concept of terrorism is a very widely debated concept all over the world, and there are incredibly divergent opinions, even about what terrorism is, about who it is who’s perpetrating it, about how it is that you define it and understand it, and whether or not there’s even a meaningful definition of the term at all. And yet you have all of these so-called terrorism experts employed by leading American television networks—all of them, really—and on whom most establishment newspapers rely, who are called terrorism experts and yet who are incredibly homogenous in their views, because they spout the very homogenized American conception of all of those questions.

It’s an incredibly propagandized term. It’s an incredibly propagandistic set of theories that they have. And that’s really what these media outlets are doing, is they’re masquerading pro-U.S. propaganda, pro-U.S. government propaganda, as expertise, when it’s really anything but. These are incredibly ideological people. They’re very loyal to the view of the U.S. government about very controversial questions. They certainly have the right to express their opinions, but the pretense to expertise is incredibly fraudulent. And that’s why they have not just Steve Emerson, the Fox News strain, but really all of them who are held up as the most prominent terrorism experts in the U.S. have a really shameful history of incredible error and all sorts of just very dubious claims, because they’re really just rank propagandists.”

Then we have the “dehumanizing language” that’s used for refugees (many of whom are from the very same war-torn regions these states have wrecked havoc in) more often than not by the “cultured” European Politicians (source): 

“The dehumanising language used by UK and other European politicians to debate the refugee crisis has echoes of the pre-second world war rhetoric with which the world effectively turned its back on German and Austrian Jews and helped pave the way for the Holocaust, the UN’s most senior human rights official has warned.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, described Europe’s response to the crisis as amnesiac and ‘bewildering’. Although he did not mention any British politicians by name, he said the use of terms such as ‘swarms of refugees’ were deeply regrettable.”

Is it surprising that most of USA and the allies have done nothing but that for the past few decades?

For the “legal versus illegal” naïve children, I’d post these here:

Kofi Annan has, while he still was secretary-general of the UN: 

The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly for the first time last night that the US-led war on Iraq was illegal (source).

And: 

The war in Iraq had "no basis in international law", a Dutch inquiry found today, in the first ever independent legal assessment of the decision to invade (source).

And:

Mr Straw told Mr Cheney that Britain would "prefer" a second resolution but it would be "OK" if they tried and failed to get one "a la Kosovo".

Sir Michael commented that this was "completely wrong from a legal point of view".

He wrote in his letter to Mr Straw: "I hope there is no doubt in anyone's mind that, without a further decision of the Council, and absent extraordinary circumstances of which at present there is no sign, the UK cannot lawfully use force against Iraq to ensure compliance with its Security Council WMD resolution.” (Source)

Even one of the biggest Iraq war hawks has admitted that the Iraq war was illegal:

“International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing. (source)"

Did you know how Osama was created the way he was in later life? These are his words:  

“It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory.”

This was written in 1998. Bin Laden himself was obsessed for many months with the massacre of Lebanese civilians by the Israelis at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in April 1996. 

Here are still more: 

Why had Mr. Clinton not condemned this "terrorist act", he asked? (source)

Here's another: source. 

And this more recent article from last year perhaps illustrates the mindset and attitude of those outside the West's bubble, if I can even call it that: source. 

Naomi Klein coined all of this beautifully: “Disaster Capitalism”– create chaos and then reap the financial benefit. 

All of this is nothing more than a neoliberal capitalist agenda. None of this is “coincidence”, but a well-engineered war-machinery designed to suck the middle-east dry; so the next time you get on your very high horse of “morality”, do look at the havoc you’ve caused.

I’m going to post two excellent comments I came across in two of the articles and close this up:  

“Our militaristic foreign policy is exactly a function, or a necessary and essential mechanism in support of our very flawed neoliberal capitalist economic agenda. All the violence and instability our foreign policy creates is a feature not a bug. It is part of a global strategy to delegitimize and/or scatter to the wind any possibility of any ideology or group of nations states ever having the power to question the moral legitimacy or practical sustainability of the neoliberal global order.

The greatest threat to Americans today is their own apathy and complacency.”

And finally this:

“The United States has become a culture of killing, from top to bottom, so the revelation of these documents is unlikely to have any effect. It's not just the gun violence and mass shootings which reflect the homicidal tendencies of Americans. President Obama opts to ‘kill don't capture’ even in cases such as Osama bin Laden, who might have been shot with a tranquilizer gun and placed in solitary confinement but was instead killed point blank.

On the campaign trail in 2012, Obama actually bragged—with a swagger reminiscent of George W Bush—about his intentional, premeditated act of homicide, and he was reelected. Now Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton vaunts her lethal creds in having been in the room with Obama when he ‘made the call’. She also has characterized the US intervention in Libya as ‘smart power at its best’, while blaming the US deaths on the Benghazi victims themselves for having opted for a "dangerous" profession. (I'm not making this up: watch the first Democratic presidential debate for 2016.)

These same leaders’ express consternation when people in the homeland address conflict through recourse to deadly violence, even as unnamed, unarmed, brown-skinned suspects (how about Brown Lives Matter??) are slain abroad and assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, which is impossible for them to do given that the lethal drone hit lists are secret.

Unfortunately, ‘the new banality of killing’ is sweeping around the globe and has already infected Britain, whose PM David Cameron recently (in August 2015) whacked two of his compatriots using Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones. Capital punishment is prohibited by British law and the EU Charter, but since Cameron used missiles instead of pistols or strangulation wires, most Brits were hoodwinked by the linguistic sleight of hand to accept the homicides as ‘acts of war’. Britain has not to my knowledge made an open declaration of war.

The only hope for stopping all of this lawless lethal creep is for the people of other nations to stand up to their leaders and say, ‘No!’ Unfortunately, with the ever-expanding drone industry boom, this will prove more and more difficult to do ... ”