The Pentagon: “WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Have Blood On Hands”

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by Davis Fleetwood

The 400, 000 documents released several days ago will take years for historians to go through, but the Pentagon wasted no time framing WikiLEaks as public enemy number 1.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it:

“The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world. Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries. This department is conducting a thorough, aggressive investigation to determine how this leak occurred, to identify the person or persons responsible, and to assess the content of the information compromised.”

No Bobby, I think it might be the trail of death and destruction in the wake of the United States exporting, correction: violently shoving democracy down the throat of the world that is damaging our reputation.

Admiral Mike Mullen went even further:

“Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.”

Sorry Mike, but the blood is on the hands of those who would implement our insanely homicidal foreign policy. Mike, the blood is on your hands. The blood is on the hands of the Bush administration. The blood is on the hands of President Obama, and truth be told, the blood is on the hands of the American taxpayer, many of whom, though they may have never been to an anti war rally, will make a pilgrimage to DC this weekend to attend a rally held by a comedian asking us all to just take a deep breathe, get along and restore some sanity.

Suggesting that WikiLeaks and their source has blood on their hands is akin to saying that a TV station reporting on a fire is guilty of arson, or a reporter filing a story about a rape is accessory to future rape. At the end of a horror movie, when a light is cast in a dark basement revealing the cave of  the mass murderer, one does not prosecute the light.

Do we need any more metaphors, or are you with me here?

Your logic, Admiral, like the foreign policy you implement in your starched and pressed boy scout outfit all pimped out with pins, stars and the skulls of murdered children is about as warped as the corpses of the innocent civilians lying in the streets of Iraq that now number – in the low estimates of the US military ( I know this courtesy of wikileaks) to number over 66 thousand civilians.

What I also know, courtesy of WikiLeaks, is that in this hellfire attack (pictured in video above)-the civilian walking by is not listed in the report of this incident.

So what is the real number of innocent civilians dead, admiral? Furthermore, in the cost to benefit ratio, how many Iraqi civilian deaths is to high a price to pay for us to continue pursuing our Manifest Destiny?

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A freelance writer, Davis Fleetwood has worked as a writer/ media consultant for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign and served as a contributing editorial commentator for The Uptake. His videos have been seen by over 18 million viewers. He has been called (among many other things) “one of the most prominent voices in YouTube politics.” (-You Tube News & Politics chief, Steve Grove) He was a “Best of YouTube, 2007” nomination. His book DROPPIN’ KNOWLEDGE LIKE A CLUMSY LIBRARIAN, is now available from No Cure For That Press, and his first full length feature documentary, MANIFEST DESTINY’S CHILD, is due out on DVD this January.

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No One Cares

Originally posted on TruthDig. Written by Chris Hedges

We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands more Afghans and Pakistani civilians have been killed. Millions have been driven into squalid displacement and refugee camps. Thousands of our own soldiers and Marines have died or been crippled physically and psychologically. We sustain these wars, which have no real popular support, by borrowing trillions of dollars that can never be repaid, even as we close schools, states go into bankruptcy, social services are cut, our infrastructure crumbles, tens of millions of Americans are reduced to poverty, and real unemployment approaches 17 percent. Collective, suicidal inertia rolls us forward toward national insolvency and the collapse of empire. And we do not protest. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Green Party and Code Pink, is dead. No one cares.

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama

by Chris Hedges (this originally appeared on TruthDig) acronym ♦ march 2010

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives.

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened.

He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers’ defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel’s brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims’ lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran.

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage.

“Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?” Stack wrote. “Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political ‘representatives’ (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the ‘terrible health care problem’. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.”

The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be. If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that is already gaining huge ground among the permanently unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we have failed to articulate a credible alternative.

A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We will again be told by the Democrats that the least-worse candidate they select for office is better than the Republican troll trotted out as an alternative. We will be bombarded with slick commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian corporate state. Isolation and ridicule—ask Nader or McKinney—is the cost of defying power, speaking truth and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love. And it is vital that this anger become our own. We have historical precedents to fall back upon.

“Here in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name,” the late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. “Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism—who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored.”

Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism, organizing and mobilization that empower groups to confront the hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite. The longer socialism is identified with the corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become. The right-wing mantra of “Obama the socialist,” repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker of the House, is discrediting socialism itself. Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called Obama the “most radical president” the country had seen in decades. “By any standard of government control of the economy, he is a socialist,” Gingrich said. If only the critique were true.

The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become, in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and fight back. This means refusing to support the Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of building a viable socialist movement. It is the only alternative left to save our embattled open society. We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer alone.

Jimmy Carter’s Cold War Whoop Ass Can ♦ This Day In The USA ♦ Jan 2

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Jimmy Carter’s Cold War Whoop Ass Can ♦ This Day In The USA ♦ Jan 2
by Davis Fleetwood

Questions for discussion:
What will Madison Avenue call the Second Cold War? When will history book say it began? What is so funny about peace, love and Marxism? When do we begin the “duck and cover” drills again? What the hell is a d’tente, and should Carter have ended it?

Deep in the first Cold War, by December 1979, to counter a covert propaganda battle being fought by the CIA against the Marxist controlled Afghanistan; the Soviets came to the aid of the communist Afghan government, then under siege by anti-communist rebels who also happened to be religious lunatics of the Muslim variety. If you are among the 1 out of 5 students who pay attention to the lies taught to you in the typical high school U.S. History classroom, the Soviets were propping up a puppet government in Afghanistan.

This is what victory in the first Cold War would mean: the ability to prop up a puppet government in places like Afghanistan without some Vodka swilling Fukhov breathing down your neck.

So on January 2^nd, 1980- an election year, by the way, President Carter busted out his version of whoop ass. He requested that the Senate postpone action on the SALT-II nuclear weapons treaty and recalled the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. He even hinted that the U.S. might boycott the summer Olympics, scheduled for Moscow later that year. Pretty badass for a cardigan wearing energy conservationist who couldn’t get Iran to give back a few hostages.

So what happened? Well, the ones fighting the commies in Afghanistan were the Islamist Mujahideen Resistance. Some branding genius on Madison Avenue came up with the moniker “freedom fighters”. The US got in bed, covertly, with the Saudis to support these Freedom Fighters. Fast forward a decade or so, and down comes the mighty Soviet Union.

The Cold War was over. The U.S. had won, which meant we could alter the affairs of lesser nations without the meddlesome check and balance of a peer nation with conflicting socio-economic worldviews. Communism was dead. Long live Capitalism.

So Uncle Sam was paying, training and arming yesterday’s freedom fighters, which are not so attached to a country, as they are a religion. I wonder how that worked out?

Now it is America propping up a puppet government in Afghanistan- a tribal culture that is in fact not even a country- in order to secure a major oil pipeline and ostensibly to chase down Osama and his crew in neighboring Pakistan.

Thank God (and you know what God I mean, not the towel head variety) that we have China to thank for her emergence on the worlds stage laying claim as the worlds largest economy. China’s military is nothing to sneeze at either. And we owe them so much money!!!!

So the Second Cold War, the one yet to come, will surely be a balm for our stagnating economy a boost for our national identity, one final chance to shove capitalism and freedom down the unappreciative throat of the world. The only things left to decide are, what do we call it, and whose side are you on? The book of Revelation vs. The book of Zen? Accurate, perhaps, but something lacking.

CWII?

Revenge of the Dragon?

I’m Davis Fleetwood, reminding you that history is based on actual events.

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