Zionist Anti-Communist : Chris Floyd’s Recent Vile Attacks On American Troops

Chris Floyd’s Recent Vile Attacks On American Troops; Refer Troops As “Death Squads”

by mah29001 | March 24, 2009

Isn’t this rhetoric typical coming from Chris Floyd? Floyd now regards American troops on the ground in Afghanistan to be death squads. Sounding more like a Soviet-inspired propagandist, Floyd also blames the USA for also “creating” al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Even while not mentioning that members of the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Kremlin were in contact with each other during even prior up to the 9/11 attacks.

Has Floyd ever criticized the old Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan which installed itself through force after ousting the Afghani monarchy? Or perhaps the same Soviet-backed Communist party just enjoying to murder one another when things didn’t go well for the Kremlin? Apparently to Floyd, he certainly doesn’t seem to care. Has Floyd also ever been critical of any of the Islamic laws still being pushed by many “moderate”/”former” Taliban members now involved with the “new” Afghani government?

Apparently that’s fine as well.

Chris Floyd : Five Years and Counting: A Milestone on America's Long March Into Hell

Five Years and Counting: A Milestone on America's Long March Into Hell

by Chris Floyd | March 20, 2008

We've all seen a blizzard of articles noting the five-year anniversary of the act of aggression launched against Iraq at the order of George W. Bush. There have been great slag-heaps of mendacity among these commemorations -- none more foul than the stinking torrent of lies that poured forth through the blood-flecked teeth of Bush himself on Wednesday -- but also some excellent analyses of the true situation in Iraq in this fifth year of hell.

The latter include the series of text and video reports from Baghdad by Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. (The latest piece is here. The whole series can be found here.) Another noteworthy witness is Patrick Cockburn. His latest story focuses on the use of deliberate lies "often swallowed whole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq." It is worth quoting at length:

It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.

The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred. Yet the war began with just such a mistake. Five years ago, on the evening of 19 March 2003, President George Bush appeared on American television to say that military action had started against Iraq.

This was a veiled reference to an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by dropping four 2,000 lb. bombs and firing 40 cruise missiles at a place called al-Dura farm in south Baghdad, where the Iraqi leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker. There was no bunker. The only casualties were one civilian killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child.

On 7 April, the US Air Force dropped four more massive bombs on a house where Saddam was said to have been sighted in Baghdad. "I think we did get Saddam Hussein," said the US Vice President, Dick Cheney. "He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn't able to breathe."

Saddam was unharmed, probably because he had never been there, but 18 Iraqi civilians were dead. One US military leader defended the attacks, claiming they showed "US resolve and capabilities".

Mr Cheney was back in Baghdad this week, five years later almost to the day, to announce that there has been "phenomenal" improvements in Iraqi security. Within hours, a woman suicide bomber blew herself up in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, killing at least 40 and wounding 50 people. Often it is difficult to know where the self-deception ends and the deliberate mendacity begins....

I must demur slightly from Cockburn here. I believe there is very little if any self-deception about Iraq on the part of Bush, Cheney, Tony Blair (or his replacment puppy, Gordon Brown). The mendacity that has characterized their every statement about the conflict throughout its duration has been deliberate, conscious, knowing, and willful. When they go to bed at night, they know they have lied about the war. When they look in the mirror, they know they have lied about the war. Now, it may be that they delude themselves into thinking that their conscious lies about the war are in the service of "a greater good" -- which they identify with the perpetuation of the wealth and privilege of the elites they belong to and represent. But about the falsity of the propaganda they use in order to justify and continue the carnage and war profiteering in Iraq, there are no delusions. They know exactly what they are doing.

Cockburn offers a more recent example to show that the same carnival of deceit that marked the war's beginning is still going on:

On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.

The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.

The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.

But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks.

A second doctor, who did not want to give his name, pointed out that al Rashad hospital is run by the fundamentalist Shia Mehdi Army and asked: "How would it be possible for al-Qa'ida to get in there?"

Few people in Baghdad now care about the exact circumstances of the bird market bombings apart from Dr Aboub, who is still in jail, and the mentally disturbed beggars who were incarcerated.

And of course, it is not only people in Baghdad who don't care about the fate of Aboub and the captive beggars -- whose confusion and torment in the torture chambers of our proteges can only be imagined. It is the American political and media establishments -- and the American people collectively -- who do not care and do not want to know about the individual lives being crushed in their names.

Seamus Milne takes up this theme of neglect -- where, as he puts it, the vast suffering in Iraq "has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise" -- in his excellent summation in Thursday's Guardian:

The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, "a day which will live in infamy". Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead...they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies.

...After five years of occupation, Iraq is ranked as the most violent and dangerous place in the world by an Economist Intelligence Unit index. Two million refugees have fled the country as a result, while a further 2 million have been driven from their homes inside Iraq. This has become the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet.

In the western world, far from the scene of the unfolding catastrophe, such suffering has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise. But the impact on the aggressor states, both at home and abroad, has only begun to be felt: not only in the predicted terrorist blowback finally acknowledged by Tony Blair last year, but in a profound domestic political alienation, as well as a loss of standing and credibility across the globe. How can anyone take seriously, for example, US or British leaders lecturing China about Tibet, Russia about Chechnya, or Sudan about Darfur, when they have triggered and presided over such an orgy of killing, collective punishment, prisoner abuse and ethnic cleansing?

Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the "supreme international crime" of aggression. If it weren't for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague. As it is, the only Briton to be found guilty of a war crime in Iraq has been corporal Donald Payne, convicted of inhumane treatment of detainees in Basra -- while the man who sent him there is preposterously touted as a future president of the European Union....

...and has already been hired to teach religion at Yale University, as we noted recently. No doubt we'll also see George Bush on that gilded gospel road next year, talking of his deep, abiding religious faith while filling his trousers with "appearance fee" loot, like Blair and Bill Clinton -- that "unindicted co-conspirator" whose policies did so much to lay the groundwork for the present catastrophe, from his accelerated privatization of the military (Clinton gave billions to Halliburton); to his waging of undeclared, unsanctioned war against Serbia (where he deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure in blatant contravention of international law); to his continuation of genocidal sanctions on the Iraqi people, which weakened Iraqi society to the breaking point and accelerated the rise of religious extremism and sectarianism; to the continual bombing raids he conducted against Iraq, including two major air campaigns, again inflicting many civilian casualties; and, last but by no means least, his quashing of several investigations into the crimes of George H.W. Bush and his minions, which allowed the political rehabilitation of this sinister faction and kept them close enough to the center of power -- and sanitized enough in the public eye -- to be able to cheat their way into office after losing a close vote in 2000.

This is a woeful record indeed -- and the fifth anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq is just a small milestone that we are speeding past on a long journey into darkness. As an American, one can only echo the words of Senator Robert Byrd five years ago, when this flawed and conflicted man rose as one of the very few in the entire political establishment to condemn Bush's Hitlerian action: "Today, I weep for my country."

Chris Floyd : The Courtier's Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

The Courtier's Choice: Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy

Chris Floyd | February 18, 2008

The late Arthur Schlesinger was long regarded as one of the leading lights of the American Establishment: a great public intellectual, a prize-winning historian of the nation's political heritage, a much sought-after commentator on current affairs, and a liberal lion of the old school – stalwart of the New Deal, anti-communist left; keeper of the Kennedy flame, etc. In short, one of the great and good, the meritocratic elite who keep the flame burning in the "shining city on the hill" that is America.

But there is one aspect of Schlesinger's glittering resume that goes unmentioned in the encomiums that invariably attend evocations of his brilliant career: his role as a willing conspirator to destroy democracy in a small, impoverished nation.

The story is told in a chapter of Mark Curtis' remarkable book, Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses. As the title would indicate, American depredations in this regard play a secondary – if indispensable – part in the book, which is based largely on partly declassified UK government documents. And the chapter in question here describes perhaps the least destructive of the many Anglo-American interventions over the past 60 years -- interventions which, as Curtis details, have resulted in approximately 10 million deaths. What's more, Schlesinger's role in this particular destruction of a nascent democracy is very small, confined to a few bits of advice passed on to his boss in the White House, John F. Kennedy.

But even so, it is instructive to watch our great and good operate behind the scenes, and to see how they really feel about freedom, democracy and liberation for the poor and oppressed – those rhetorical tropes that have adorned our transatlantic rhetoric for so long, both in the halls of government, and in the weighty pronouncements of our great public intellectuals.

Curtis tells the tale of a ten-year effort by Britain and the United States to prevent the most popular party in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana) from taking power. It began in 1953, when the colony – which had been in Britain's control since 1814, when they seized it from the Dutch – attempted to use the limited self-government it had been "granted" by Her Majesty to place the People's Progressive Party (PPP) in office. Led by Cheddi Jagan, the party's platform was the usual mixture of land reform, social programs and nationalist feeling (which is called "patriotism" when it occurs in America and Britain, but is denigrated as a troublesome aberration when it rears its ugly head amongst the lesser breeds) that arose across the "third world" in the post-war years. These were all treated – without exception, whatever their various ideological, ethnic, or religious character – as dire threats to American and British "interests." That is, the successful implementation of these programs would have slightly reduced the profits of a few vast foreign-owned industrial and corporate combines that held whole nations in their thrall. Each of these movements were denounced as "communist" by Western leaders – even when the leaders knew, and admitted freely among themselves, that the movements and their leaders were not communists, and would not align their nations with the Soviet bloc.

But more than the bloated profit margins of favored corporations were at stake. There was also the West's overriding fear of a successful challenge to Anglo-American domination of subject nations. The fact that the overwhelming majority of these movements sought good relations with the United States and Britain, and were peaceful, law-abiding parties seeking power through the democratic process meant nothing; because they stood for the principle of national independence, non-alignment, and self-determination – i.e., because they would not automatically submit to the dictates of Washington and London – they could not be allowed to succeed. All measures were "justified" to prevent them from taking power – or to overthrow them in the event they were elected by their people. In order to subvert these popular movements, successive, bipartisan governments in the United States and Britain repeatedly armed, funded, trained and supported what they fully recognized were the worst elements in a given society: corrupt political hacks, feudal lords and rapacious corporate bosses, criminal gangs, power-mad military tyrants, religious extremists, warlords, death squads, and so on. The end result was almost always the same: moderate forces were destroyed, their remnants were radicalized, societies were violently polarized, economies were wrecked, and ordinary, innocent people suffered – and sometimes died – by the millions.

The historical record of this process is long and clear: Guatemala, Iran, Iraq (the two CIA-assisted coups that put the Baathists in power, and the present-day policy of arming and supporting both Shiite and Sunni extremists to maintain an obedient client state and prevent the emergence of any genuine independence), Yemen, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uganda, Chile (perhaps the epitome of this dark art), and many others.

And so in 1953, the British sent troops and warships to Guyana to overturn the people's election of Cheddi Jagan and the PPP. For the next few years, the colony was ruled directly from London. But in 1961, when elections were again allowed, the PPP won again. By this time, Britain had promised to "grant" Guyana its independence – but the idea that the "independent" country should be allowed to choose its own leaders was not to be borne. After all, it was clear that they would vote the "wrong way" again. What's more, the preceding decade had seen an acceleration in the withering of Britain's imperial pretensions; it was now recognized in official US and UK papers that Guyana "was in the US, not the UK, sphere of interest." Thus London was willing to defer to whatever Washington desired for the newly "independent" nation.

Curtis quotes a number of US and UK intelligence reports and diplomatic papers that make clear that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic knew that the PPP was not a communist party. They also openly acknowledged that Jagan was "the ablest leader in British Guiana," as one State Department report described him. Curtis describes the main outlines of the American view from government papers at the time:

[The U.S. thought] that Jagan was not a 'controlled instrument of Moscow' but 'a radical nationalist who may play both sides of the street but will not lead British Guiana into [Soviet] satellite status.

U.S. intelligence reports quoted by Curtis noted that Jagan would "make a more determined effort to improve economic conditions" in Guyana. The Party drew its strength not only from its main base of "poverty-stricken rural and urban workers" among the Indian community, but also from "a considerable number of small businessmen."

After Jagan won the 1961 pre-independence election with 45 percent of the vote – easily outpointing the main opposition party led by the Anglo-American favorite, Forbes Burnham – the Americans came up with a two-fold plan. First, Washington would make a public show of offering Jagan technical and economic assistance to prepare the country for independence. But behind the scenes, they would launch a covert operation to destroy the PPP, bring down Jagan and put a suitable leader in his place.

And here the liberal lion and champion of democracy Arthur Schlesinger enters the documentary picture. Writing in his capacity as Special Assistant to the President, Schlesinger pointed out to Kennedy that the two prongs of Washington's plan were in blatant conflict: obviously, Washington could not support Jagan and overthrow him at the same time. So what did Schlesinger recommend? That Kennedy eschew the low-down and undemocratic path of covert action, and instead help the people of Guyana – and their freely elected leader – to step into independence with the full support and blessing of "the world's leading democracy?"

Of course not. Taking his courtier's pen (or typewriter) in hand, Schlesinger wrote that the conflict between the benevolent public pronouncements and the plans for dirty pool "means that the covert program must be handled with the utmost discretion."

That's it. That's Schlesinger's analysis, that's the extent of his morality, of his Pulitzer Prize-winning political convictions: "If we're going to strangle Guyana's democracy in its cradle, then for God's sake, let's do it quietly."

And that's how it was done. Again, a tried-and-true path was followed. As Curtis details, the CIA funded and organized strikes and riots to bring economic and political chaos to Guyana. These American-created upheavals were then cited by U.S. and UK officials as "proof" that Jagan was leading the country to ruin. (This technique was perfected years later in Chile, when the US spent millions of dollars to foment unrest under the Allende regime. Curtis quotes U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry's candid assessment of the strategy: "[We must] do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty;" i.e., to make them suffer for the crime of exercising their freedom and voting the "wrong way.")

Meanwhile, Britain engineered a "constitutional coup" in setting up the structure of the soon-to-be independent state. The Brits imposed an electoral system on Guyana which their own major parties had always rejected (and still do): proportional representation. They recognized that in any winner-take-all system, Jagan and the PPP would continue to win. But a system of proportional representation – which gives losing parties additional seats as the "second choice" of voters – would allow a coalition of pro-American interests to cobble together a ruling coalition.

And so it proved. In the last pre-independence election in 1964, Jagan and the PPP won 46 percent of the vote – again, by far the largest share. But with proportional representation, minority parties won enough votes to put together a coalition headed by – of course – Forbes Burnham. As Curtis notes, "now that the acceptable leadership had taken office, Guyana could be granted independence, which proceeded in 1966."

Both London and Washington – and Arthur Schlesinger – knew that the people of Guyana had been ill-served by these undemocratic machinations. Curtis quotes UK Colonial Secretary Iain MacLeod writing to Schlesinger in February 1962: "If I had to make a choice between Jagan and Burnham as head of my country, I would choose Jagan any day of the week." But the welfare of the Guyanese people didn't amount to a hill of beans to our great public intellectual – and certainly not to the highly respected statesmen he so assiduously served.

As we said before, the subversion of democracy in Guyana was actually very small beer for a system that killed millions of people to maintain its elites in wealth and privilege. But even the deadliest of these operations have found – and still find – avid assistants and staunch apologists among our great and good. And what would Schlesinger have advised if instead of a plan to "merely" overturn a democratic election and plunge a nation into chaos, upheaval and hardship, he had been presented with a CIA scheme to, say, blow Cheddi Jagan's brains out?

Given the nature of our great public intellectuals, and their characteristic attitude toward those in power, I think it's clear what Schlesinger's answer would have been in such a case. Drawing on the excellent Harvard education that he and his president shared, he would have plucked a passage from the highest reaches of Western culture, and scribbled in the margins of the plan: "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly."
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