The American Bear

› What to Think Whenever You Hear "The Worst of the Worst" | Bruce Dixon

There are some phrases, mostly referring or belonging to government which frequently mean the opposite of what they say, or which are shorthand for entire libraries of lies promoted by the powerful to turn reality on its head. Terms like “military intelligence,” “public charter school,” “public-private partnership,” “extraordinary rendition,” “congressional oversight” and “humanitarian intervention” are among those that come readily to mind. We take this moment to focus on a current favorite phrase oft deployed by our masters of deceit to conceal their official crimes.

That phrase is “the worst of the worst.” Official spokespeople and corporate media apply this term to those unjustly confined for torture and indefinite sentences with no trial or formal charges, like those at Guantanamo, Bahgram, Diego Garcia and an archipelago of known and unknown prisons and surrogate facilities. It’s been shown again and again that the so-called “worst of the worst” in such places are often completely innocent, and sometimes include children.

No matter. The “worst of the worst” label is an open invitation to invent even more lies, to dismiss their lives, their families and the rules of international law and human decency in their cases. One of the signal policy innovations of the Obama administration over the Bush-Cheney regime is said to be the simple murder of such persons with drones rather than locking them up.

The “worst of the worst” phrase is deployed by domestic officials as well, usually to refer to the United States’ world-leading total of more than 70,000 in solitary confinement in thousands of federal, state and local jails and prisons. It has become standard procedure across the country to put prisoners in solitary confinement for years for such offenses as refusing to confess an alleged gang affiliation, engaging in anything that looks like unsanctioned self-help or self-improvement organizing, the possession of books that one’s jailers disapprove of, having a history of political activism on the outside, or experiencing an awakening of political consciousness while a prisoner.

The assertion of jailers that the 70,000 in solitary confinement on any day in the United States are “the worst of the worst” is nothing less than cynical doublespeak to conceal their own crimes. Solitary confinement, when prolonged for more than a few days is recognized under international law as torture, and crimes always are doubly diabolical when committed anyone on a public payroll.

Hence whenever we hear media spokespeople, military or civilian officials on any level refer to those in their dungeons and their gunsights at home and abroad as “the worst of the worst” we should not let that stand. We should know, and let everyone in our reach know we and they are hearing the worst kind of calumny, designed to conceal official wrongs committed in all our names. It’s our jailers and their official enablers, not our prisoners here and around the world who are truly “the worst of the worst.”

› Reminder: The U.S. Government Lies About the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Mideast | A Tiny Revolution

Obviously I have no idea whether any chemical weapons have been used in Syria, and if they have who’s responsible. But this is a good time to remember that, even beyond the bogus case for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has a long history of lying about this subject.

This is from last week:

In a letter to key lawmakers, the White House said U.S. intelligence agencies “assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

Now Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN Commission on Syria, says they have “strong, concrete suspicions” that chemical weapons were used in Syria, but that they were deployed not by the Assad regime but by Syrian rebels. (Del Ponte was the lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milošević‎; earlier she barely escaped assassination when Sicilian organized crime attempted to blow up her house with 1000 pounds of explosives.)

And this is from March 1988, about Saddam Hussein’s notorious gassing of the Iraqi city of Halabja back when Saddam was our ally:

The U.S. State Department said both Iran and Iraq had used poison gas in the fighting around Halabja and called on both nations to desist immediately.

“This incident appears to be a particularly grave violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons. There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting,” department spokesman Charles Redman said in Washington.

He declined, however, to say what evidence the United States had to implicate the Iranians.

Seventeen years later, investigative reporter Joost Hiltermann wrote about declassified State Department cables instructing U.S. diplomats to muddy the water by claiming that both Iraq and Iran had used chemical weapons around Halabja and “to dodge the ‘What’s the evidence’ question with the stock ‘Sorry, but that’s classified information’ response…In the final analysis, the only evidence for the convenient claim that Iran used chemical weapons during the war is that the US government said so.”

More recently, a senior U.S. official explained the general principle about this kind of thing: “The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

P.S. Charles Redman, the Reagan State Department spokesman who lied about Iran using chemical weapons in 1988, was later rewarded by Bill Clinton with the Ambassadorship to Germany. He then cashed in by becoming a senior vice presidential at Bechtel. Thanks to Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks you can read here about Redman flying to Tripoli to try to get Bechtel into business with the Qadhafi family.

› Newly Declassified Memo Shows CIA Shaped Zero Dark Thirty's Narrative | Adrian Chen

Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden. But the extent to which the CIA shaped the film has remained unclear. Now, a memo obtained by Gawker shows that the CIA actively, and apparently successfully, pressured Mark Boal to remove scenes that made them look bad from the Zero Dark Thirty script.

The CIA’s whitewashing effort is revealed in a cache of documents newly released under a Freedom of Information Act request about the CIA’s cooperation with Bigelow and Boal. The documents include a 2012 memo—initially classified “SECRET”—summarizing five conference calls between Boal and the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs in late 2011. “The purpose for these discussions was for OPA officers to help promote an appropriate portrayal of the Agency and the Bin Ladin operation,” according to the memo. (Hundreds of pages of CIA documents about the film were released last year; the memo obtained by Gawker was approved for release late last month.)

During these calls, Boal “verbally shared the screenplay” for Zero Dark Thirty in order to get the CIA’s feedback, and the CIA’s public affairs department verbally asked Boal to take out parts that they objected to. According to the memo, he did. [continue]

› Washington’s threat to invade Syria | WSWS

Charges by the White House and US secretaries of state and defense Thursday that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons have brought Washington to the brink of another war in the Middle East.

One decade after the Bush administration invoked the infamous pretext of “weapons of mass destruction” to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, the Obama administration is preparing to follow the same route to launch its own war for regime-change in Syria.

In a letter to members of Congress Thursday, the White House said that US intelligence believes “with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

The letter reiterated Obama’s threat that any use of chemical weapons “is a red line for the United States of America,” adding that the White House “has communicated that message publicly and privately to governments around the world, including the Assad regime.”

Secretary of State John Kerry has said that the Syrian regime had “launched two chemical attacks,” and Secretary of Defense Hagel told reporters in Abu Dhabi about the White House letter, adding that use of such weapons “violates every convention of warfare.”

A White House official told reporters that “all options are on the table in terms of our response.”

There is no more reason to believe the veracity of these reports than there was to give credibility to the Bush administration’s claims about aluminum tubes, yellow cake from Niger and mobile biological weapons labs.

Today, just as a decade ago, these claims are employed purely as a pretext for aggressive war in pursuit of US geo-strategic interests in the Middle East. [continue]

› Behind the U.S.-North Korea Conflict | Jack Smith

What’s happening between the U.S. and North Korea to produce such headlines in recent days as “Korean Tensions Escalate,” and “North Korea Threatens U.S.”?

The New York Times reported:

This week, North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jung-un, ordered his underlings to prepare for a missile attack on the United States. He appeared at a command center in front of a wall map with the bold, unlikely title, ‘Plans to Attack the Mainland U.S.’ Earlier in the month, his generals boasted of developing a ‘Korean-style’ nuclear warhead that could be fitted atop a long-range missile.

The U.S. is well aware North Korea’s statements are not backed up by sufficient military power to implement its rhetorical threats, but appears to be escalating tensions all the same. South Korean President Park Geun-hye also realizes the threats are rhetorical but declared: “We should make a strong and immediate retaliation without any other political considerations if [the North] stages any provocation against our people.”

Pyongyang obviously has another objective in mind. I’ll have to go back a bit to explain the situation.

Since the end of the Korean War 60 years ago, the Worker’s Party government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has repeatedly put forward virtually the same four proposals to the United States. They are:

1. A peace treaty to end the Korean War. 2. The reunification of Korea, which has been “temporarily” divided into North and South since 1945. 3. An end to the U.S. occupation of South Korea and a discontinuation of annual month-long U.S-South Korean war games. 4. Bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang to end tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. and its South Korean protectorate have rejected each proposal over the years. As a consequence, the peninsula has remained extremely unstable since the 1950s. It has now reached the point where Washington has used this year’s war games, which began in early March, as a vehicle for staging a mock nuclear attack on North Korea by flying two nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth bombers over the region March 28. Three days later, the White House ordered F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to South Korea, a further escalation of tensions.

Here is what is behind the four proposals.

1. The U.S. refuses to sign a peace treaty to end the Korean War. It has only agreed to an armistice. An armistice is a temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent. The armistice signed July 27, 1953, was supposed to transform into a peace treaty when “a final peaceful settlement is achieved.” The lack of a treaty means war could resume at any moment. North Korea does not want a war with the U.S., history’s most powerful military state. It wants a peace treaty and diplomatic recognition from Washington.

2. Two Koreas exist as the product of an agreement between the USSR (which bordered Korea and helped to liberate the northern part of the country from Japan in World War II) and the U.S., which occupied the southern half. Although socialism prevailed in the north and capitalism in the south, it was not to be a permanent split. The two big powers were to withdraw after a couple of years, allowing the country to reunify. Russia did so; the U.S. didn’t. Then came the devastating three-year war in 1950. Since then, North Korea has made several different proposals to end the separation that has lasted since 1945. The most recent proposal, I believe, is “one country two systems.” This means that while both halves unify, the south remains capitalist and the north remains socialist. It will be difficult but not impossible. Washington does not want this. It seeks the whole peninsula, bringing its military apparatus directly to the border with China, and Russia as well.

3. Washington has kept between 25,000 and over 40,000 troops in South Korea since the end of the war. They remain — along with America’s fleets, nuclear bomber bases and troop installations in close proximity to the peninsula — a reminder of two things. One is that “We can crush the north.” The other is “We own South Korea.” Pyongyang sees it that way — all the more so since President Obama decided to “pivot” to Asia. While the pivot contains an economic and trade aspect, its primary purpose is to increase America’s already substantial military power in the region in order to intensify the threat to China, but next door North Korea is well within this dangerous periphery.

4. The Korean War was basically a conflict between the DPRK and the U.S. That is, while a number of UN countries fought in the war, the U.S. was in charge, dominated the fighting against North Korea and was responsible for the deaths of millions of Koreans north of the 38th parallel dividing line. It is entirely logical that Pyongyang seeks talks directly with Washington to resolve differences and reach a peaceful settlement leading toward a treaty. The U.S. has consistently refused.

These four points are not new. They were put forward in the 1950s. I visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a journalist for the (U.S.) Guardian newspaper three times during the 1970s for a total of eight weeks. Time after time, in discussions with officials, I was asked about a peace treaty, reunification, withdrawal of U.S. troops from the south, and face-to-face talks. The situation is the same today. The U.S. won’t budge.

Why not? Washington wants to get rid of the communist regime before allowing peace to prevail on the peninsula. No “one state, two systems” for Uncle Sam, by jingo! He wants one state that pledges allegiance to — guess who? In the interim, the existence of a “bellicose” North Korea justifies Washington’s surrounding the north with a veritable ring of fire power. [continue]

› The racism that fuels the 'war on terror' | Glenn Greenwald

[Written in response to the disconnect between this poll and this poll]

[…] Many Americans can (a) say that they oppose the targeted killings of Americans on foreign soil while simultaneously (b) supporting the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen because, for them, the term “Americans” doesn’t include people like Anwar al-Awlaki. “Americans” means their aunts and uncles, their nice neighbors down the street, and anyone else who looks like them, who looks and seems “American”. They don’t think those people- Americans - should be killed without charges by the US government if they travel on vacation to Paris or go to study for a semester in London. But the concept of “Americans” most definitely does not include people with foreign and Muslim-ish names like “Anwar al-Awlaki” who wear the white robes of a Muslim imam and spend time in a place like Yemen.

Legally - which is the only way that matters for this question - the New-Mexico-born Awlaki was every bit as much of an American citizen as the nice couple down the street. His citizenship was never legally revoked. He never formally renounced it. He was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime that could lead to the revocation of citizenship. No court ever considered revoking his citizenship, let alone did so. From a legal and constitutional perspective, there was not a single person “more American” than he. That’s because those gradations of citizenship do not exist. One is either an American citizen or one is not. There is no such thing as “more American” or “less American”, nor can one’s citizenship be revoked by presidential decree. This does not exist.

But the effort to depict Muslims as something other than “real Americans” has long been a centerpiece of the US political climate in the era of the War on Terror. When it was first revealed in 2005 that the Bush administration was spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, a Bush White House spokesman sought to assure everyone that this wasn’t targeting Real Americans, but only those Bad Ones that should be surveilled (meaning Muslims the Bush administration decided, without due process, were guilty):

“This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches.”

Identically, when the Israelis attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010 and killed 9 people including the US-born teenager Furkan Dogan, some conservatives insisted that he was not a Real American because his parents were Turkish and he grew up in Turkey (“it is silly to call him an ‘American of Turkish descent’. He, like the other members of his family, was a Turk”). The stark contrast in reactions between the sustained fury of the Turkish government over the killing of their citizens by the Israelis versus the support for those killings given by the US government was accounted for in part by the blind US support for whatever Israel does (including killing Americans), but also by the belief that Dogan wasn’t really an American, not the Real Kind you get upset about.

This decade-long Othering of Muslims - a process necessary to sustain public support for their continuous killing, imprisonment, and various forms of rights abridgments - has taken its toll. I’m most certainly not suggesting that anyone who supports Awlaki’s killing is driven by racism or anti-Muslim bigotry. I am suggesting that the belief that Muslims are somehow less American, or even less human, is widespread, and is a substantial factor in explaining the discrepancy I began by identifying.

Does anyone doubt that if Obama’s bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?

Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial, and Robert Gibbs would have been widely scorned if he had offered this vile blame-the-victim justification for killing Jimmy rather than Abdulrahman? It is indisputably true that - just as conservatives argued that Furkan Dogan was not a Real American - large numbers of Americans believe the same about the Denver-born teenager named Abdulrahman. This ugly mindset is not the only factor that leads the US public to support more than a decade of US killing and rights abridgments aimed primarily at Muslims, including their fellow citizens, but it is certainly a significant one.

Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it’s exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they’re not Muslim, and thus do not care.

The perception that the state violence, rights abridgments and expansions of government power ushered in by the War on Terror affect only Muslims long ago stopped being true. But ensuring that people continue to believe that is the key reason why it has been permitted to continue for so long.

› Argo: The Stupidest Movie of the Year | As'ad AbuKhalil

It is reflective of American liberalism that Ben Affleck, who is considered to the left of the Democratic Party and who is supposed to have been critical of US foreign policies in the Middle East, is behind the movie Argo. The movie received wide publicity and acclaim and has served to energize American national pride. That is what patriotic movies are supposed to do.

But if you think about it, this movie is based on a simple premise that does not require a complicated or sophisticated plot: basically, as CIA agents were hiding in the Canadian embassy, an American traveled to Iran with fake Canadian passports, which enabled the Americans to leave the country. The rest is either manufactured or unnecessary. In fact, the entire scheme of the movie was actually comical and entirely unnecessary. Once the Americans obtained the Canadian passports, they were free to leave the country, and that is exactly what happened.

The character played by Affleck is in fact less impressive than what appears on the screen: his scheme was not the product of a sophisticated mind, and the extra length to which the CIA went to create a fake production company and even a phone number for it was entirely unnecessary, especially that the details (of the last minute phone call) were all manufactured for extra dramatic effect.

This is a typical Hollywood movie with typical Hollywood twists and turns, and with the typical formulaic ending. I mean, who is going to believe that suspenseful ending: with the plane about to leave Iranian territory, while Iranian armed men were chasing the plane on the runway because they discovered at the last minute that they were duped. But the White Man is always – in Hollywood – more than one step ahead of the native.

It should not be surprising that the movie recycled racist and stereotypical depictions from other racist movies on Iran, like Not Without My Daughter. All the Iranians in the movie were frowning or angry or yelling, and the movie never bothers to subtitle what they have to say. Only the words of submissive natives, i. e. the Iranians who cooperate with the Americans and are smiley are worth translating to the audience.

There are comical touches to the movie: there is a seconds-long history lesson at the beginning of the movie which talks about the 1953 CIA coup. But that short intro leaves out the rest of the history of US-Iranian relations: the movie mentions SAVAK [Organisation of Intelligence and National Security] in passing but does not mention that the CIA helped set up that torturing apparatus of the Shah. The movie also leaves out the various cover operations between the Shah and the US, and that the Carter administration did not rule out military intervention in Iran to keep the Shah out of respect for the people of Iran, but due to the infeasibility of that option compared with the climate of 1953.

Iran and its people and culture are all unpleasant in American popular culture and there is nothing worth admiring or liking about them. Basically, Americans can’t forgive the Iranians because they had not forgiven the Americans for their 1953 coup and for their endorsement and embrace of the rule of the Shah. Nothing about Iran is pleasant according to the stereotypical American portrayal.

But there is a funny moment at the end of Argo.

Just before the credits, you read that the movie is about a great “cooperation” between countries of the world for good purposes. So of all the examples of international cooperation, Ben Affleck and his team found the Canadian-American cooperation for the production of fake passports to be the most exemplary.