"Where Is Our Radical Youth?" Washington Post Op Ed

[Kuya]

I already explained what Haliburton has that others do not. The equipment, transportation, and connections around the world that take decades of experience in the field to create.

You can't just hire Joe the Plumber and tell him to drive his truck over to Iraq and fix a leaky multi billion dollar pipeline.

Do you really want to have a chicken and egg argument about why, or do you just want to troll?

You're an idiot.

Halliburton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Halliburton is the only company mentioned by Osama bin Laden in an April 2004 tape in which he claims that "this is a war [in Afghanistan] that is benefiting major companies with billions of dollars."[24]
Internet pundit John Burnett has described Halliburton's deals as recalling a Vietnam-Era controversy. He claims Vice President Cheney's ties to the company are reminiscent of President Lyndon B. Johnson's relationships with Brown & Root.[1]

TomPaine.com - Bringing Halliburton To Heel

The Army's recent decision to break up Halliburton's logistics contract doesn't make a dent in the war profiteer's monopoly. And despite evidence that the giant corporation was vastly overcharging taxpayers for services it provides, it still has almost exclusive access to many contracts in Iraq. The good news is that there's a bipartisan proposal in the Senate to create a war profiteering oversight committee. Corporate policy expert Charlie Cray explains.

Leading Pentagon watchdogs have been calling for Halliburton’s debarment or suspension from Pentagon contracts since August. At that time the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) issued a memo complaining that Halliburton could not account for more than $1.8 billion of $4.3 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait. For the third time, the DCAA recommended that the Pentagon not pay Halliburton until it coughed up all the receipts.

The long list of waste, fraud, bribery and other abuses associated with Halliburton’s Iraq contracts now fill volumes. Vigilant oversight by Rep. Henry Waxman’s office and Pentagon investigators—with the help of company whistleblowers—have uncovered attempts to charge taxpayers $45 per case of soda, $100 per bag of laundry, $10,000 a day to use five-star hotels in Kuwait. (Meanwhile, the troops are sweating it out in tents in the desert). There’s been $167 million worth of price gouging for imported gasoline, and $186 million charged for meals that were never served to the troops, and a $6 million kickback to two employees (fired by the company) from a subcontractor.

Nor has the company’s record in Iraq been the only basis for calls for debarment, which come not only from members of Congress but also from watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight. POGO is a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan non-profit organization with more than two decades experience monitoring Pentagon contracts.

But when it comes to the contractor abuses witnessed in Iraq, it seems like all has been forgiven. Even the most egregious cases have failed to result in a suspension. For example, CACI International received an extension of its contract even after its role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was revealed. There are at least 25 ongoing criminal investigations related to the Iraq reconstruction contracts. Wanna bet how many result in suspension?

Another reason for the lack of action is the lack of any clear standards for the debarment penalty. Soon after assuming the presidency in 200, Bush quietly repealed a Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) standard that provided guidance for suspension or debarment. Without the rule, contracting officers admit that such decisions are subject to all kinds of political pressure and other considerations.

Yet short of debarment there are few effective penalties for waste, fraud and abuse. (No one has talked about a war profiteering tax or criminal sanction like the one enacted before WW I.) Although Pentagon auditors have repeatedly advised withholding payments to Halliburton for its work in Iraq, the company essentially has the Army in a bind, since it has threatened to withhold payment to its subcontractors in the event that it doesn’t get paid. And that can mean an interruption in service. Army spokespeople have warned against any action that might affect the troops.

But as Marie deYoung, a former Halliburton/KBR employee and Army captain, put it in a Senate hearing earlier this month, poorly planned contracts like those managed by Halliburton “can compromise military readiness and operational security.” Describing low morale among foreign contract workers whose loyalties could shift under pressure, problems with information security, and the hiring of thousands of truckers and civilians who have had to drive and work in the line of fire without the capacity or legal right to defend themselves in the face of insurgents who have attacked the convoys (dozens of Halliburton employees have died in Iraq), de Young concluded that “the Bush-Cheney administration compromised our military security by commercializing and outsourcing the military’s command and control of all phases of planning and management of combat service support missions for Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Just before the Senate hearing, the military announced that it would be breaking up Halliburton’s big logistics contract (known as the LOGCAP) so that other bidders could compete, an acknowledgment of the fundamental problem: Halliburton has a virtual monopoly on the work it is doing in Iraq. What they didn’t say was that this monopoly was created in 1992 by then-secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who characteristically justified the decision with a still-classified study that the Pentagon paid KBR to conduct.

Halliburton CEO David Lesar’s reaction to the Army’s announcement that it would break up the massive LOGCAP work (worth up to $9.4 billion so far for Halliburton): “If we do choose to rebid, we're going to jack the margins up significantly.”

Lesar’s response reveals just how little competition the company expects to result from the announcement.

That should be no surprise. It’s hard to imagine how anyone else will be able to seriously compete with the company given all the advantages it has from its existing work, presence in the region and familiarity with the byzantine Pentagon contracting bureaucracy. Given the plan to establish up to 14 permanent bases in the country and reports of low troop reserves, there will likely be as much work for Halliburton in Iraq and elsewhere in the coming years as it can handle, even if a few token task orders are thrown to another company.

Anyone who isn’t convinced should look back at the Pentagon’s record in reforming the oil restoration contracts (worth up to $8.2 billion for the company so far) after the original no-bid contract was “opened up” to the competition. At the Senate hearing on the Iraq contracts, the former head of Bechtel’s bidding team described the process that resulted as a “sham,” ultimately resulting in Bechtel’s withdrawal from the bidding process.

“In their conduct of the entire (Restore Iraqi Oil) program, I believe Pentagon officials, up and down the chain of command, ignored our federal laws and regulations and the procedures that normally ensure fair play,” the former Bechtel employee concluded. “I never saw anything approaching the arrogant and egregious ways in which the Corps treated Halliburton’s competitors and violated federal laws and regulations to ensure KBR kept its RIO work.”

Democracy Now! | Pratap Chatterjee on "Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War”

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, this actually goes back many years. Most people think, you know, well, Halliburton was brought in by Dick Cheney. Not true at all. Kellogg Brown, & Root, or Brown & Root at the time, was building warships during the Second World War. In Vietnam, they built almost all the bases there. You can go to Cam Ranh Bay in Southeast Asia. I talk about Donald Rumsfeld actually arriving in 1966. He visits the bases, and then he comes back to the US Congress, and he speaks in the House of Representatives, and he says, “This company, you know, they don’t have receipts. They are wasting money, and they’re paying off the President.” This, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: And they were paying…?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: They were paying off the President.

AMY GOODMAN: Lyndon Baines Johnson.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: In this case, Lyndon B. Johnson. So, fast-forward thirty-seven years, and he is the man who’s giving them a contract. And actually, it’s Rumsfeld really; it’s not even Cheney. It’s Rumsfeld who’s looking to this system of outsourcing war, of finding Indians to clean toilets and that sort of thing, so that Americans, you know, can invade Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: But it’s Cheney who was head of Halliburton.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Cheney was the head of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and he made out well. He was actually a very bad CEO in some ways and a very good CEO in other ways. I mean, he took the company from making $100 million in US contracts to $2.3 billion in the five years he was there, so a large increase for the company. In fact, he made some very bad business decisions. He bought up a company that had a billion dollars in asbestos liability.

People often ask me, did Cheney get the contract—did he give the contract to Halliburton? I really think the question should be reversed: why did Halliburton hire Cheney, as opposed to why did Cheney hire Halliburton? Well, Cheney hired—Halliburton hired Cheney because of the revolving door, because they knew he could bring business to them. And once he actually became Vice President, Halliburton’s lobbying budget actually dropped by half. They stopped having to recruit—you know, having to lobby, because they already knew they were in.

They had these contracts set up from so many years ago. I mean, starting in Vietnam, building Diego Garcia. You know, I talk about them in Turkey in Adana. You know, Operation Northern Watch was supported by people working for a consortium called VBR, which was partly Brown & Root, Halliburton. So this has gone on for a long time. In Bosnia, you know, in Kosovo, under Clinton, Kellogg Brown & Root, then just Brown & Root, subsidiary of Halliburton, was, you know, cooking for the soldiers, building Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. And today that continues. So this is not something that’s new. It is, in fact, you know, par for the course that Cheney would come in and work for them.

AMY GOODMAN: Pratap Chatterjee, we just have two minutes, and I want to go to that top story, reading the introduction, how it was just awarded KBR $35 million for electrical work, despite the fact that it’s under criminal investigation for the deaths of at least two Americans, and separately, the US government has just charged KBR with criminal bribery charges for promising and paying tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials in exchange for lucrative contracts. Explain both of those quickly.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the contract in Nigeria, which was a contract with a consortium called TSKJ, Albert “Jack” Stanley, who was the head of KBR at the time, worked for Cheney, paid tens of millions of dollars to Nigerian officials. So they’re paying a half-billion-dollar fine to the US government for what happened at those times. So, this is a huge—I mean, this should be a much bigger story.

AMY GOODMAN: This is money that comes from taxpayers, US taxpayers. So US taxpayers are bribing Nigerian officials, or they’re doing it in our name.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Absolutely, that is exactly how—

AMY GOODMAN: And the Americans?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: So, now, when KBR works in a place like Iraq, they are able to get away with a lot of shoddy work. And my book covers the fact that a lot of the work that was done, you know, because people weren’t watching, there wasn’t oversight, there wasn’t accountability, they were able to get away with shoddy electrical work, often bad food, overpriced items. A lot of times, there’s also a lot of detail of how, you know, people walked away with—the book opens with this guy Jeff Alex Mazon walking away with a $1 million check. And he’s paid that by a subcontractor to Halliburton. When the case came up at the Rock Island Arsenal, he said, “Look,” he says, “what’s wrong with this, getting this money? You know, this is money that is owed to me, because I did this work for Halliburton.”

No god damn oversight. No fair competition for government services.

[Plow]

ok, so you just want to troll, could've just said that instead of mass copypasta

[Kuya]

I would estimate (i.e. pull out of my ass) that about 15% of all current mainstream news coverage is directly on Iran and Afghanistan, and a good 35-40% is directly related to it.

Would you like to actually discuss the 2, repeating 25 year old conversations for the billionth time, or do you just want to troll?

You're an idiot.


The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

After eight years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address on January 17, 1961. The former general warned of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” He added that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.

Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant. In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

During just one year, 1989, General Electric had received close to $2 billion in military contracts related to systems that ended up being utilized for the Gulf War. Fifteen years later, the company still had a big stake in military spending. In 2004, when the Pentagon released its list of top military contractors for the latest fiscal year, General Electric ranked eighth with $2.8 billion in contracts (Defense Daily International, 2/13/04).

Given the extent of shared sensibilities and financial synergies within what amounts to a huge military-industrial-media complex, it shouldn’t be surprising that—whether in the prelude to the Gulf War of 1991 or the Iraq invasion of 2003—the U.S.’s biggest media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests had combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes.

By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as “collateral damage” flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned and even more rarely seen civilians killed by U.S. firepower.

At the outset of the Gulf War, NBC’s Tom Brokaw echoed the White House and a frequent chorus from U.S. journalists by telling viewers (1/16/91): “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm’s way.” When those innocents got a mention, the U.S. government was often depicted as anxious to avoid hurting them. A couple of days into the war (1/17/91), Ted Koppel told ABC viewers that “great effort is taken, sometimes at great personal cost to American pilots, that civilian targets are not hit.” Two weeks later (1/29/91), Brokaw was offering assurances that “the U.S. has fought this war at arm’s length with long-range missiles, high-tech weapons . . . to keep casualties down.”

With such nifty phrasing, no matter how many civilians might die as a result of American bombardment, the U.S. government—and by implication, its taxpayers—could always deny the slightest responsibility. And a frequent U.S. media message was that Saddam Hussein would use civilian casualties for propaganda purposes, as though that diminished the importance of those deaths. With the Gulf War in its fourth week (2/9/91), Bruce Morton of CBS provided this news analysis: “If Saddam Hussein can turn the world against the effort, convince the world that women and children are the targets of the air campaign, then he will have won a battle, his only one so far.”

News coverage of the Gulf War in U.S. media was sufficiently laudatory to the war-makers in Washington that a former assistant secretary of state, Hodding Carter, remarked (C-SPAN, 2/23/91): “If I were the government, I’d be paying the press for the kind of coverage it is getting right now.” A former media strategy ace for President Reagan put a finer point on the matter. “If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event,” said Michael Deaver, “it couldn’t be done any better than this is being done.”

When the media watch group FAIR conducted a survey of network news sources during the Gulf War’s first two weeks, the most frequent repeat analyst was ABC’s Anthony Cordesman. Not surprisingly, the former high-ranking official at the Defense Department and National Security Council gave the war-makers high marks for being trustworthy. “I think the Pentagon is giving it to you absolutely straight,” Cordesman said (Newsday, 1/23/91).

The standard media coverage boosted the war. “Usually missing from the news was analysis from a perspective critical of U.S. policy,” FAIR reported (Extra!, Winter/91). “The media’s rule of thumb seemed to be that to support the war was to be objective, while to be anti-war was to carry a bias.” Eased along by that media rule of thumb was the sanitized language of Pentagonspeak as mediaspeak: “Again and again, the mantra of ‘surgical strikes against military targets’ was repeated by journalists, even though Pentagon briefers acknowledged that they were aiming at civilian roads, bridges and public utilities vital to the survival of the civilian population.”

In late April 1999, with the bombing of Yugoslavia in its fifth week, many prominent American journalists gathered at a posh Manhattan hotel for the annual awards dinner of the prestigious Overseas Press Club. They heard a very complimentary speech by Richard Holbrooke, one of the key U.S. diplomats behind recent policies in the Balkans. “The kind of coverage we’re seeing from the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and the newsmagazines lately on Kosovo,” he told the assembled media professionals (Palm Beach Post, 5/9/99), “has been extraordinary and exemplary.” Holbrooke had good reasons to praise the nation’s leading journalists. That spring, when the Kosovo crisis exploded into a U.S.-led air war, news organizations functioned more like a fourth branch of government than a Fourth Estate. The pattern was familiar.

Mostly, the American television coverage of the Iraq invasion in spring 2003 was akin to scripted “reality TV,” starting with careful screening of participants. CNN was so worried about staying within proper bounds that it cleared on-air talent with the Defense Department, as CNN executive Eason Jordan later acknowledged (CNN, 4/20/03): “I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance—‘At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’—and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

This is not a matter of government censorship or even restrictions. Serving as bookends for U.S.-led wars in the 1990s, a pair of studies by FAIR marked the more narrow discourse once the U.S. military went on the attack. Whether the year was ’91 or ’99, whether the country under the U.S. warplanes was Iraq or Yugoslavia, major U.S. media outlets facilitated Washington’s efforts to whip up support for the new war. The constraints on mainstream news organizations were, in customary fashion, largely self-imposed.

Those patterns were on display in 2003 with the Iraq invasion, when FAIR conducted a study of the 1,617 on-camera sources who appeared on the evening newscasts of six U.S. television networks during the three weeks beginning with the start of the war (Extra!, 5–6/03):

Nearly two-thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and only 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; counting only U.S. guests, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.

Less than 1 percent of the U.S. sources were anti-war on the CBS Evening News during the Iraq war’s first three weeks. Meanwhile, as FAIR’s researchers commented wryly, public television’s PBS NewsHour program hosted by Jim Lehrer “also had a relatively low percentage of U.S. anti-war voices—perhaps because the show less frequently features on-the-street interviews, to which critics of the war were usually relegated.” During the invasion, the major network studios were virtually off-limits to vehement American opponents of the war.

For the most part, U.S. networks sanitized their war coverage, which was wall-to-wall on cable. As usual, the enthusiasm for war was extreme on Fox News Channel. After a pre-invasion make-over, the fashion was similar for MSNBC. (In a timely manner, that cable network had canceled the nightly Donahue program three weeks before the invasion began. A leaked in-house report—AllYourTV.com, 2/25/03—said that Phil Donahue’s show would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The danger, quickly averted, was that the show could become “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”)

Democracy Now! | Obama's War: US Involvement in Afghanistan, Past, Present & Future

ELIZABETH GOULD: First of all, we have to go back and really look at Dan Rather’s contribution to the way in which the story was framed originally back in the early 1980s. After the Soviets crossed the border, Dan Rather was really the first person—the first journalist who really established the idea that this war should be viewed through superpower confrontation between, you know, basically the evil empire and the freedom fighters. And this was actually documented by Jay Peterzell, who wrote an article in the Columbia Journalism Review that was out in the—I think it was in the spring of 1981, which actually analyzed the way the reporting was happening in our country about Afghanistan and how it suddenly changed after Dan Rather had this report on 60 Minutes. This is when he had gone into the mountains in Afghanistan through Pakistan, and he had gone in to basically talk with the Mujahideen. And Peterzell’s comments, in his review, highlighted the fact that it was a very—he was very skeptical of how serious Rather was at really probing into the deeper implications of where the financing was coming from, and the fact at the time was the financing was coming from the United States. But suddenly the reporting changed after Dan Rather’s report. So he became the sort of the tone of the storytelling.

And we did our first story for CBS News, and we experienced that tone. It was very interesting to see the way they looked at the material, where we brought back a story that indicated there was a more complex story, that there was an Afghan civil war going on, that there was an issue that had to focus on the Afghan part of it. There was no interest. The only interest they had was in focusing on the amount of Russians in the street and the American viewpoint that this was a holy war against the evil empire. And then, once that was established throughout the 1980s, it continued.

And then we experienced again, in 1983, when we took Roger Fisher from the Harvard Negotiation Project to Afghanistan to assess the possibility that the Soviets could be negotiated out, and Roger’s assessment did show that that possibility exists. We brought that back to Nightline. And instead of really making it clear, the presentation really left a confusion in any viewer who would have seen that Nightline that that possibility existed. So, at the point when there was really a possibility, that’s when a lot of the increased funding really started flowing in to increase the insurgency, which actually was one of the major reasons that the Soviets claim that they couldn’t withdraw.

Divided post in two.

[Kuya]

Democracy Now! | 50 Years After the CIA's First Overthrow of a Democratically Elected Foreign Government We Take a Look at the 1953 US Backed Coup in Iran

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup d’etat that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran. The government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The aftershocks of the coup are still being felt.

In 1951 Prime Minister Mossadegh roused Britain’s ire when he nationalized the oil industry. Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves which had been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The company later became known as British Petroleum (BP).

After considering military action, Britain opted for a coup d’état. President Harry Truman rejected the idea, but when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House, he ordered the CIA to embark on one of its first covert operations against a foreign government.

The crushing of Iran’s first democratic government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the Shah, who relied heavily on US aid and arms. The anti-American backlash that toppled the Shah in 1979 shook the whole region and helped spread Islamic militancy.

The 50th anniversary of the coup was front-page news in Iranian newspapers. The Christian Science Monitor reports one paper in Iran publishing excerpts from CIA documents on the coup, which were released only three years ago.

The U.S. involvement in the fall of Mossadegh was not publicly acknowledged until three years ago. In a New York Times article in March 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that “the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

STEPHEN KINZER: This was a hugely important episode, and looking at it from the prospective of history, we can see that it really shaped a lot of the 50 years that have followed since then in the Middle East and beyond. But yet, it’s an episode that most Americans don’t even know happened. As I was writing my book, I had the sense that I was dredging up an incident that had been largely forgotten. During my work, I realized early on that Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, had been the Man of the Year for Time magazine in 1951. And after I realized that, I went to some trouble and I finally located a copy of that Time magazine. And I framed it, and I have it up on my wall. And it gave me the feeling that, not only am I digging up this episode again, but I’m bringing back to life this figure of Mossadegh. He was really a huge figure in the world of mid-century. This was a time, bear in mind, before the voice of the Third World, as we now call it, had ever really been raised in world councils. This was a time before Castro, before Nkrumah, before Sukharno, before Nasser. Mossadegh actually showing up in New York and laying out Iran’s case and by extension the case of poor nations against rich nations was something very, very new for the whole world. And what a figure he was. This book is full of amazing characters. Not just Kermit Roosevelt, the guy who planned the coup. But Mossaugh--tall, sophisticated, European-educated aristocrat--but also highly emotional, a guy who would start sobbing and sometimes even faint dead away in Parliament when giving speeches about the suffering of the Iranian people. When he embraced the national cause of that period, which was the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, he set himself on a collision course with the great powers in the world. And that collision has produced effects which we’re still living with today.

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company arrived in Iran in the early part of the twentieth century. It soon struck the largest oil well that had ever been found in the world. And for the next half-century, it pumped out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil from Iran. Now, Britain held this monopoly. That meant it only had to give Iran a small amount--it turned out to be 16 percent--of the profits from what it produced. So the Iranian oil is actually what maintained Britain at its level of prosperity and its level of military preparedness all throughout the ‘30s, the ’40s, and the ’50s. Meanwhile, Iranians were getting a pittance, they were getting almost nothing from the oil that came out of their own soil. Naturally, as nationalist ideas began to spread through the world in the post-World War II era, this injustice came to grate more and more intensely on the Iranian people. So they carried Mossadegh to power very enthusiastically.

And the British responded as you would imagine. Their first response was disbelief. They just couldn’t believe that someone in some weird faraway country--which was the way they perceived Iran--would stand up and challenge such an important monopoly. This was actually the largest company in the entire British Empire.

When it finally became clear that Mossadegh was quite serious, the British decided to launch an invasion. They drew up plans for seizing the oil refinery and the oil fields. But President Truman went nuts when he heard this and he told the British, under no circumstances can we possibly tolerate a British invasion of Iran. So then the British went to their next plan, which was to get a United Nations resolution demanding that Mossadegh return the oil company. But Mossadegh embraced this idea of a U.N. debate so enthusiastically that he decided to come to New York himself and he was so impressive that the U.N. refused to adopt the British motion. So finally, the British decided that they would stage a coup, they would overthrow Mossadegh. But what happened, Mossadegh found out about this and he did the only thing he could have done to protect himself against the coup. He closed the British embassy and he sent all the British diplomats packing, including, among them, all the secret agents who were planning to stage the coup.

So now, the British had to turn to the United States. They went to Truman and asked him, please overthrow Mossadegh for us. He said no. He said the C.I.A. had never overthrown a government and, as far as he was concerned, it never should. So, now, the British were completely without resources. They couldn’t launch an invasion, the U.N. had turned down their complaint, they had no agents to stage a coup. So they were stymied. It wasn’t until November of 1952 when British foreign office and intelligence officials received the electrifying news that Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president that things began to change. They rushed one of their agents over to Washington. He made a special appeal to the incoming Eisenhower administration. And that administration reversed the Truman policy agreed to send Kermit Roosevelt to Tehran to carry out this fateful coup.

And what came out of the coup was of course the oil industry on paper remained Iranian, nationalized, but in reality it was controlled by a consortium. In that consortium the British still retained more than 50 percent, but the U.S. got a good 40 percent of that control.

AMY GOODMAN: I said at the top, this month marks the 50th anniversary of America’s first intervention in the Middle East. I should have said, of America’s first overthrow of a democratically elected government. But, Stephen Kinzer, the statement that you make in your book, it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax, which the U.S. had called the coup through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York. Can you flush that out?

STEPHEN KINZER: The goal of our coup was to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadegh and place the Shah back in his throne. And we succeeded in doing that. But from the perspective of decades of history, we can look back and ask whether what seemed like a success really was a success. The Shah whom we brought back to power became a harsh dictator. His repression set off the revolution of 1979, and that revolution brought to power a group of fanatic anti-Western, religious clerics whose government sponsored acts of terror against American targets, and that government also inspired fundamentalists in other countries including next door, Afghanistan, where the Taliban came to power and gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

So, I think you can--while it’s always difficult to draw direct cause and effect lines in history--see that this episode has had shattering effects for the United States. And let’s consider one other of the many negative affects this has had. When we overthrew a democratic government in Iran 50 years ago, we sent a message, not only to Iran, but throughout the entire Middle East. That message was that the United States does not support democratic governments and the United States prefers strong-man rule that will guarantee us access to oil. And that pushed an entire generation of leaders in the Middle East away from democracy. We sent the opposite message that we should have sent. Instead of sending the message that we wanted democracy, we sent a message that we wanted dictatorship in the Middle East, and a lot of people in the Middle East got that message very clearly and that helped to lead to the political trouble we face there today.

AMY GOODMAN: Right after the Shah was deposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution of 1979 and then the Iranian students took over the U.S. embassy, I’m wondering, Professor Abrahamian, how often did the press, and understanding through the hundreds of days that the hostages were held, go back to the 1953 coup and explain the fears of the students that in 1953 the Shah had fled thinking that the coup had been fought back and the U.S. brought him back and that now that Jimmy Carter had allowed him into the United States, that they might be staging another possible coup, leading the students to fear this and to take the hostages.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: I think on this issue actually you see a big cultural gap between the American public and the Iranian public. For the Iranian public, the ‘53 coup shapes basically Iranian history, as Stephen shows very much in his book. But for Americans, the ’53 coup was something unreal for them. It wasn’t something they were aware of. If they were aware it, it was like Jimmy Carter saying that this was ancient history. For the U.S. it may have been ancient history but for Iranians it was not. So when the students took over the embassy, they actually called it the “den of spies” because they knew that in ’53 the coup had been actually plotted from the U.S. compound. So they were-–

AMY GOODMAN: That very building that they took over.

ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN: That very building. And that, for Iranians, was a central issue. In the United States, if you watch how the media covered it here, it saw the hostage crisis as Iranian emotional rampaging mobs in the streets calling for death of America and the ’53 coup was intentionally not brought into that context. So you can go for reams of programs on the main channels in the United States about the hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, and you rarely get the mention of the ’53 coup. This was intentional. The media here did not want to make that link to ’53.

Democracy Now! | Chalmers Johnson: "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, yes. Militarism is the—what the social side has called the “intervening variable,” the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.

It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It’s read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other—this is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny—it causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military’s desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen.

It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language—one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it’s in that sense that I believe the nexus—or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was he warned by?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Members of Congress. Republican memb-–

AMY GOODMAN: And why were they opposed?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, they did not want to have their oversight abilities impugned. They weren’t carrying them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was—I think he’s been overly praised for this. It was a heroic statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be only at the end that he realized what a monster he had created.

But these clandestine activities also have one other caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they’re unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001, which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the way the CIA has evolved.

It’s been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek colonels in the late ’60s and early ’70s in Greece; the coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and essentially defenseless people of Central America.

The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is why I—moreover, there is no effective oversight. There are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period, he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, “The fox is in the henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to.”

AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything, Chalmers, that gives you hope?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing this morning. That is, the only way—you’ve got to reconstitute the constitutional system in America, or it is over. That is that empires—once you go in the direction of empire, you ultimately lead to overstretch, bankruptcy, coalitions of nations hostile to your imperialism. We’re well on that route.

The way that it might be stopped is by a mobilization of inattentive citizens. I don’t know that that’s going to happen. I’m extremely dubious, given the nature of conglomerate control of, say, the television networks in America for the sake of advertising revenue. We see Rupert Murdoch talking about buying a third of the Los Angeles Times. But, nonetheless, there is the internet, there is Amy Goodman, there are—there’s a lot more information than there was.

There is no fair mainstream media coverage in the US, and the military industrial complex is exactly what endangers American citizens. Also, you're an idiot.

[Plow]

I don't need to point it out to you, but just in case someone's really oblivious enough to not see your trolling:

You just filled half a page with media coverage of something, then stated flat out that there is no media coverage of it.

[Kuya]

Bush had a strategy for Afghanistan? I'd sure like to see what it was.

What do you want to do with Afghanistan instead? Or do you just want to troll about it?

You're an idiot.


Democracy Now! | Obama's War: US Involvement in Afghanistan, Past, Present & Future

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by a roundtable of people around the country. Right now in Washington, D.C., Gilles Dorronsoro. He’s a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, previously a professor of political science at the Sorbonne in Paris. He’s written the book Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s take that chronologically backwards: Afghanistan today and what you think of President Obama picking up from President Bush and actually announcing a surge. He’ll be giving a major speech tomorrow before a joint session of Congress, Gilles.

GILLES DORRONSORO: Well, maybe, two things here. The first thing is that Obama decided to send more troops, reinforcement, in Afghanistan. But at the same time, there is no new strategy. That may be the most interesting thing. There is a strategic review going on, but it’s not finished. Maybe it will be finished in one month, two months. We don’t know, actually. And at the same time, it seems that the military thinks that the situation is so bad in the south that they need to send 17,000 men more. So that’s the first point, that the disconnection between the reinforcement and the strategy.

The second point, maybe, is that it’s probably a very wrong idea to send troops south. Why? Because south and east has been the place where most of the troops have been sent—the international coalition, I mean—and where the result is extremely weak. There is no Afghan state there. The population is rejecting the international coalition. And I think it’s not going to produce real results there. So, most probably, the situation is not going to improve very much in the south, and it’s going to be more and more difficult to send reinforcements like that, because it’s an open-ending process.

ANJALI KAMAT: Gilles Dorronsoro, can you talk about—there seem to be two strategies that the US is trying out in Afghanistan. On the one hand, there seems to be a move to engage, to negotiate with the Taliban. On the other hand, there also seems to be a strategy in some parts of Afghanistan to arm local militias to fight the Taliban. Can you talk about the sort of—what’s your assessment of these two strategies? How do see them working together?

GILLES DORRONSORO: Well, I think that the first strategy is not a real strategy. I mean, it’s a discourse. But seriously, nobody is going to speak with the Taliban right now. Why? First, because they are too powerful, actually. So, to open negotiation with the Taliban right now is not a right move, because the Taliban are powerful, Karzai is very weak. So, if there is some negotiation, it’s about the withdrawal of the United States. So, it’s a non-starter.

The second thing is—could we use negotiations to split the Taliban, to find the so-called “moderate Taliban”? I’ve never seen what is a moderate Taliban, honestly, and I don’t think we are strong enough to split the movement, so it’s going nowhere. So, negotiation is not a real strategy. It’s a discourse, and I don’t see anything coming from that.

The second point is much more practical, much more interesting and much more dangerous, actually. What’s the idea? The idea is to find some local groups that sometimes you can describe as tribes, but much more local than that, small groups, and you give them money. And money, it’s arms, because—same thing, with money, you buy arms. And then you say, “OK, you’re going to protect your own village, maybe a little more. And from that, maybe we can stabilize the situation in a place.” It’s a very wrong move. Why? Because doing that, you’re reinforcing the periphery, actually. You can give money, you can give arms to people, and after that they will be much more independent from Kabul.

So, the major problem we have in Afghanistan is that we did not succeed in building an Afghan partner. We can’t negotiate, because there is no Afghan state. And what we are doing, we are reinforcing the periphery, so there is less probability to having an Afghan state working, really, somewhere. So, I think that’s a very dangerous strategy. I’m not sure it’s going to work and it’s going to be implemented in all Afghanistan, but the result could be extremely dangerous.

Obama is essentially going to do the same thing, so there's no way for you to argue against that. You should thank me, i gave you some insight into what's going on, and with that i conclude our would be argument over. Come back when you actually have some sources and numbers below your belt.

[Kuya]

I don't need to point it out to you, but just in case someone's really oblivious enough to not see your trolling:

You just filled half a page with media coverage of something, then stated flat out that there is no media coverage of it.

INDEPENDENT media. (less people listen to this)

MAINSTREAM media. (lots of people listen to this)

Would you like me to go into semantics now?

[Plow]

I almost believe you're not trolling about Afghanistan, so I'll say this:

Obama is not God. Congress does not work instantly. What we are currently doing is more than Bush ever did-- creating a plan. It will not happen instantly, things will not change instantly, and for now we have to work with what we have.

Do you really believe I'm not aware that all of the bolding in the last post was not to emphasize certain points, but to draw attention away from the rest? He explains very clearly how stuck the situation is, if you can't take from that the fact that it's going to take time to develop a solution, I really don't know what to tell you.


In the end, you're posting 6 year old articles from activists while complaining about a lack of activism.

You're complaining that we're not doing anything about Cheney, Haliburton, and Bush's policies while specifically mentioning government investigations and actions against them, and claiming that shifting the entire government in direct response to these abuses is not doing anything.

You're arguing that the first results you get on Google searches are not mainstream.

You're disregarding every legitimate argument for silly shit you think you can win.

In a word, you're trolling.

[Elvis]

I don't see how Kuya is trolling. He's just posting a lot of text at once which might turn some people off who prefer concision. I did the same thing in the Israel thread.

If you guys want to get a good picture of how a movement is doing, you're going to have to actively look for it.

Just because it's not on TV doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I mean, I don't think I have to elaborate much more on this. It's common sense.

That Israel thread died awhile ago but the conflict still goes on and there are new and disturbing reports being put out about the Gaza massacre. Like a new European Union report which states what people have known for many years - that Israel is annexing the West Bank.

And as to the activism part. Several UK universities are rife with protest and blah blah. Hampshire College in the US is divesting from companies that profit from the Occupation. Things are happening all the time.

But in terms of sincere debating versus just trolling on this forum - I think it's about choosing your battles.

Like, IMO, I felt fine debating the Gaza conflict when it was going on. It was during the beginning of the incursion and the thread sort of ended with the unilateral cease-fire on both sides. So basically, the thread lasted 3 weeks?

So this was something most people - if they turned onto the MSM - were seeing on television or hearing about in the blogosphere. It was the 'hot' news item at that moment. So why not discuss it here? The momentum was right.

Afghanistan has been called 'Obama's War' and in light of recent events, I think it's worthwhile to discuss. I really don't see any trolling in Kuya's post. Maybe his posts are just tl;dr but it's difficult to be concise when it comes to these issues since you're up against establishment dogma. To deviate you need a lot of evidence to 'prove' the merit of your argument - at the least, rhetorically - to your 'audience'. Hence, the voluminous nature of his posts.

And finally, the simple answer could be that most aren't interested. This happened to the Israel thread around the 2.5 week mark. What do you do then? You have to refocus your energy. We're armchair dissidents after-all. We play a role in the discussion so, in that role, go elsewhere to learn/debate/etc.

I don't get very political IRL. Most of my friends are apolitical. And I can't imagine how I'd broach the subject. It has to happen naturally most of the time.

When in doubt...blog! I go on this blog a lot for the ME stuff: Mondoweiss .

And there are a couple others. Very active discussion and great writing by the author.

It's cool talking about political stuff here too since we all know each other to a certain extent (forum-wise). Very active forum/similar age groups/blah blah.

[Plow]

The problem is that the discussion is why activists are more... active... and he has absolutely no interest in discussing that, he just wants to do whatever he can to get it into an argument he can win.

Beyond that I believe his real goal isn't even that, but simply to get people to write extensive responses and take time, and effort, into things he's not even thinking about beyond how to get people to respond.

I mean, it's one thing to present sources and support for your argument, it's completely another to spam the thread with quotes from a left wing website and absolutely no personal thought on the issues whatsoever.

[Nystul]

It tickles me when people talk about "independent media" and how it's so superior to mainstream media. It's been shown many times over that people do not gravitate towards the TRUTH, they gravitate towards the media source that already confirms their beliefs. Whether you are aware of it consciously or not, you listen to the news that you've chosen because you've already formed your world view and those particular outlets support that.

There is independent media that leans way left, way right, and stays center. I'm guessing you don't support the hard right outlets- calling them nutsjobs etc. It reminds me of when christians hear about hinduism or other religions. "all those gods? all that chanting over some god with 8 arms and an elephant face? Thats so crazy!" when of course they are ignoring the fact that their own religion is pretty odd as well (guy gets resurrected, walks on water, bushes burn and talk but don't actually burn, plagues and slaughters of first borns, flood, boats with every animal, people turning into salt, lots of chanting and keeling and drinking wine because it represents blood etc).

[Awoir]

drinking wine because it represents blood etc).

It doesn't represent blood, it is blood.

[Araelus]

It doesn't represent blood, it is blood.

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life.) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say.... Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.

That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

Yes, people's existing beliefs influence their actions and it's easier to persist in a way of living than to get outside it and look back to reflect. But how did we get from the lack of a motivated youth in today's world to this topic, exactly? Or is the human condition of having a perspective from inside existence to blame?

[Nystul]

It doesn't represent blood, it is blood.

that actually depends on which branch of the christian faith you belong to, but thats beside the point.

[Not not Mattaru]

Just a few responses to the article:

1) Historical context - the decade, generation, and circumstances were much different. The time the author is nostalgic about was a completely different time where people who were activists faced different circumstances. Naturally, the Vietnam War which put many college aged people's life at stake posed a much greater personal impetus to go out and be an activist (which compared to today - on the whole - was probably a much more limited scope of activism). Mix this with the real polar generational differences brought on by sexual, drug, and etc. revolutions and the civil rights movement of course the ingredients for activism are greater. What is of great importance is the 60s became a real starting point for a tradition of activism that has evolved from what it once was - it is not static and why should it be. Why should a different time and experience garner the same reaction intrinsically?

2) Naturally, this leads me to question if the author takes into account other forms of dissent and activism that are past his historically embedded vision. There is no short supply of NGOs and non-profit groups that take on roles that activists were calling for almost half a century ago, they have in a sense fallen into the mainstream of our discourse and in that way appear to be hidden compared to eras like the 1960's. Today, after graduating many students choose to enter with NGOs and non-profits in the US who would may otherwise be apart of the authors so-called absent movement, when actually they are becoming involved with its evolution and offspring. This isn't even getting started on the different array of media to be subversive in and the wide range of topics that people are active about which seem to be a greater array than in the 1960's but I can't back that up right now and don't want to fall in the author's narrow historical vision.

3) I don't know about all students, but I know I read pretty subversive and interesting things for class (I'm one of those people that read for class, yes, I may be an exception) that if I had any interest whatsoever (or spare time) in Twilight - on my off time I may want to read it. What I am curious to know about is during the period he is talking about what was the bestseller at the time? Was it Ginsberg? Maybe, but I am not sure and with the claims he makes that may be good to know.

Basically, the editorial is very good at mystifying the 1960's and activism, but that is its problem, it isn't balanced, its nostalgic and fails to reach outside the author's scope.

Don't be a square man, break out of the conformist bourgeois hegemony mannnnnn.

I mean, parents just don't understand.

[Elvis]

It tickles me when people talk about "independent media" and how it's so superior to mainstream media. It's been shown many times over that people do not gravitate towards the TRUTH, they gravitate towards the media source that already confirms their beliefs. Whether you are aware of it consciously or not, you listen to the news that you've chosen because you've already formed your world view and those particular outlets support that.

There is independent media that leans way left, way right, and stays center. I'm guessing you don't support the hard right outlets- calling them nutsjobs etc. It reminds me of when christians hear about hinduism or other religions. "all those gods? all that chanting over some god with 8 arms and an elephant face? Thats so crazy!" when of course they are ignoring the fact that their own religion is pretty odd as well (guy gets resurrected, walks on water, bushes burn and talk but don't actually burn, plagues and slaughters of first borns, flood, boats with every animal, people turning into salt, lots of chanting and keeling and drinking wine because it represents blood etc).

That's not accurate though. I mean, you're applying a generalization in the same way I might have.

For example, I'm very interested in American foreign policy. Specifically the coverage of stuff that happens in the ME. I can show you studies done on the mainstream press that indicate bias/flawed reporting over a consistent period of time.

One that I've often quoted is a study done by Harvard Uni. on the differences between The New York Times and Haaretz (leading Israeli newspaper). The study showed that while the Times "has muted the alarm over the dangers of the United States’ near-unconditional support for Israeli policies toward the Palestinian, Haaretz has sought to sound the alarm."

No outlet is perfect. You're right in a sense though, in that we talk up the sources we like but that's natural.

I can summarize my process of understand a story by beginning with my news source of choice THEN comparing to other sources. I try to get context and look for neutral information - hopefully. I consider Amnesty International/the Red Cross/etc. to be neutral. And then you just go from there.

Now, this is a broad topic but I'll just focus on the NY Times. Specifically Thomas Friedman.

From one of my favorite authors, Norman Finkelstein:

[Focus on bold text as the establishment line. The underlined/hyperlink text is cited from studies published by Human Rights Watch and the US Army War College. 1 is a neutral organization. The other is the "U. S. Army's most senior military educational institution" (Wiki description).]

New York Times foreign affairs expert Thomas Friedman joined in the chorus of hallelujahs. Israel in fact won the 2006 Lebanon war, according to Friedman, because it had inflicted “substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large,” thereby administering an “education” to Hezbollah: fearing the Lebanese people’s wrath, Hezbollah would “think three times next time” before defying Israel.

He expressed hope that Israel was likewise “trying to ‘educate’ Hamas by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.”

To justify the targeting of Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure Friedman asserted that Israel had no other option because “Hezbollah created a very ‘flat’ military network…deeply embedded in the local towns and villages,” and that because “Hezbollah nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians…to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

Leaving aside Friedman’s hollow coinages—what does “flat” mean?—and leaving aside that he alleged that the killing of civilians was unavoidable but also recommends targeting civilians as a “deterrence” strategy: is it even true that Hezbollah was “embedded in,” “nested among,” and “intertwined” with the Lebanese civilian population?

Here’s what Human Rights Watch concluded after an exhaustive investigation: “we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.”

And again, “in all but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population or taken other actions to contribute to the targeting of a particular home or vehicle by Israeli forces.”

Indeed, “Israel’s own firing patterns in Lebanon support the conclusion that Hezbollah fired large numbers of its rockets from tobacco fields, banana, olive and citrus groves, and more remote, unpopulated valleys.”

[...]A U.S. Army War College study based largely on interviews with Israeli participants in the Lebanon war similarly found that “the key battlefields in the land campaign south of the Litani River were mostly devoid of civilians, and IDF participants consistently report little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and noncombatants. Nor is there any systematic reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the combat zone as shields.”

On a related note, the authors report that “the great majority of Hezbollah’s fighters wore uniforms. In fact, their equipment and clothing were remarkably similar to many state militaries’—desert or green fatigues, helmets, web vests, body armor, dog tags, and rank insignia.”


Friedman further asserted that, “rather than confronting Israel’s Army head-on,” Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel’s civilian population to provoke Israeli retaliatory strikes, inevitably killing Lebanese civilians and “inflaming the Arab-Muslim street.”

Yet, numerous studies have shown, and Israeli officials themselves conceded that, during its guerrilla war against the Israeli occupying army, Hezbollah only targeted Israeli civilians after Israel targeted Lebanese civilians.

In conformity with past practice Hezbollah started firing rockets toward Israeli civilian concentrations during the 2006 war only after Israel inflicted heavy casualties on Lebanese civilians, while Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah avowed that it would target Israeli civilians “as long as the enemy undertakes its aggression without limits or red lines.”

If Israel targeted the Lebanese civilian population and infrastructure during the 2006 war, it was not because it had no choice, and not because Hezbollah had provoked it, but because terrorizing the civilian population was a relatively cost-free method of “education,” much to be preferred over fighting a real foe and suffering heavy casualties, although Hezbollah’s unexpectedly fierce resistance prevented Israel from achieving a victory on the battlefield.

In the case of Gaza it was able both to “educate” the population and achieve a military victory because—in the words of Gideon Levy—the “fighting in Gaza” was “war deluxe.”

Compared with previous wars, it is child’s play—pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition.

A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.

The justification put forth by Friedman in the pages of the Times for targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure amounted to apologetics for state terrorism.

It might be recalled that although Hitler had stripped Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher of all his political power by 1940, and his newspaper Der Sturmer had a circulation of only some 15,000 during the war, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg nonetheless sentenced him to death for his murderous incitement.

The NY Times piece by Friedman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/op...4friedman.html

The two studies are referenced above.

So this is just an example of the most widely read newspaper printing outright fallacies. There are plenty of other examples.

I think the rejectionism of 'the mainstream' is due to this perception of the NY Times or CNN or FOX as 'establishment'.

Ultimately, you end up reading the mainstream anyways. You do so and then compare and contrast with other sources and then arrive at your own conclusions.

[Araelus]

Ultimately, you end up reading the mainstream anyways. You do so and then compare and contrast with other sources and then arrive at your own conclusions.

My laconic response is that if more people did what you suggest, they would then go out and solve a lot of the problems which have been mentioned. It is always easier to not think. The world in general encourages conformity - not in thought or action per say - but in the attitude that we do not need to carefully consider and come to our own conclusions.

If people figure out what they really think, and examine and discover what ideas they have internalized from external sources, they would have more confidence in arguing their points and a clear notion of what is at stake when those arguments are made.

Bravo, Elvis, in that regard.

[Kuya]

Let me just, in contrast to my previous post, make small comments on the accusations that have been tossed at me.

Thus far, i've been accused of denying the existence of any media that reports what the mainstream media does not and and denying the existence of any sort of movement that attempts to combat forces that corrupt the US government. This accusation of course, seemingly comes out of thin air since there is nothing concrete in any of my posts that would allude to this. Furthermore, the person who made the accusation did not even present any sort of analysis on how he arrived to this seemingly baseless accusation.

Next, it's been stated that i've not included my personal thoughts and have instead regurgitated left wing (am i being painted as a radical for not seeming like a moderate? A moderate, that no doubt is highly relative to what they consider moderate?) talk. I don't know how anyone can claim this, when before i even showered this thread with sources to back up my previous statements there is a clear idea that i've presented, on various subjects, and as can be seen, my point has been justifiably backed up by professional sources. Not only that, some of those sources even refute the statements made by the person i was arguing with. Yet this same person accuses me of lacking any of my own ideas, as if anybody's ideas came out of a vacuum. Now there is even an ambiguous accusation that i don't balance my point of view with mainstream sources. How do i even reply to that? Scan my literature?

Next, i've been continuously accused of trolling, as if there were some objective and empirical way to figure out someone's intentions across the internet. What do i say to a person like that? That i'm not trolling?

Lastly, there is even an idea going around that my position is apparently relative, because if i use left wing sources, that must be i wanted to see them because they apparently confirm my own point of view. What is it saying exactly? That the US was not involved in the Iranian coup d'état? That it wasn't involved in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded? What would a right wing or moderate source look like exactly? Are they supposed to deny the previous, or just use language that doesn't harm your sensibilities?

I will conclude my main point, and that point is that there are still serious problems that pertain to American society, and saying that the youth of today is "deactivated" because they feel there is hardly anything left to fight for is an illusion. An illusion not only born out of a lack of motivation to search for facts beyond what mainstream media presents, but apathy that manifests itself as powerlessness in front of their government.

edit: i'm seemingly being attacked because i'm being too critical. Too critical. Who would have thought that the citizen of a US colony would be critical of the US government.

[Plow]

Nope.

I'm laughing at your trolling because you know it has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

You know as well as i do that the entire country has united to try to change the things you're arguing here, and that's the point of the conversation.


I'm not going to argue with you about Afghanistan, Iran, etc., because, guess what, I agree with you. Unfortunately that's not the point of the topic, in the least.

[Kuya]

Nope.

I'm laughing at your trolling because you know it has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

You know as well as i do that the entire country has united to try to change the things you're arguing here, and that's the point of the conversation.


I'm not going to argue with you about Afghanistan, Iran, etc., because, guess what, I agree with you. Unfortunately that's not the point of the topic, in the least.

No i don't agree with you, but let's leave it at that.