Our Invisible Government. Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Sept. 16, 2019.
Why Does Chris Hedges Hedge His Bets? (Revealing While Concealing the Invisible Government's Conspiracies.) Edward Curtin. Sept. 21, 2019.
How Important Is The Drone Attack On The Saudi Oil Field? Ian Welsh. Sep. 16, 2019.
US Defends Your Freedom By Using Troops As Saudi Oil Security Guards. Caitlin Johnstone. Sept. 22, 2019.
If you’ve been lying awake at night terrified that the Pentagon might not send additional troops and armaments to defend oil corporations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, I’ve got some great news for you.
In response to an attack on Saudi Aramco oil infrastructure for which Houthi rebels in Yemen have taken credit, the US government has responded in the only possible rational way: by blaming Iran and deploying troops to act as security guards for Middle Eastern oil companies.
“In response to the kingdom’s request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper informed the press yesterday. “We will also work to accelerate the delivery of military equipment to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enhance their ability to defend themselves.”
So you can breathe easy, my friend. Freedom and democracy are safe once more.
A lot of delusional, unpatriotic democracy haters like to argue that the US military doesn’t actually defend the freedom of the American people, and that it isn’t really used to defend freedom at all, and that it isn’t even really used to defend any rules-based international order as sometimes claimed, and that even to use the word “defend” to describe anything the US military does is inaccurate since it is consistently on the attacking and aggressing side of any given conflict, and that actually the US military functions as nothing other than a blunt object wielded by the rich and powerful for the advancement of plutocratic interests and the geostrategic dominance of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, and that it can in fact be accurately said that the only difference between the US military and any other band of armed thugs is funding…
I forget where I was going with this.
Ah, yes. Defending your freedoms. If sending a platoon of Paul Blarts to act as mall security for foreign oil corporations isn’t enough to get you saluting every American flag flying over every McDonald’s you see, then you should know that the US military’s freedom fighting doesn’t end at mere corporate asset protection.
They’re also defending your freedom by killing Afghan farmers in their sleep.
Why did the armed forces of the United States kill dozens of civilian farmers in Afghanistan while they rested in the field after a hard day’s work? That’s a good question. But an even better question is, what were those Afghan farmers doing lying on top of your freedom?
Obviously the compassionate US military would never dream of killing non-combatants under any circumstances whatsoever, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few civilians. Those dead farmers were collateral damage, caught in the crossfire of a a life-or-death struggle for freedom and democracy in a nation that surely has something to do with defending those things somehow. It is certainly a loss that civilians perish in this way on a regular basis in Afghanistan, but that’s a small price to pay for everything we’ve gained as a result of that eighteen-year occupation, such as [research what’s been gained and put here in second draft].
Yes, whether they’re defending Saudi Aramco profit margins, bombing field laborers, encircling the planet with hundreds of military bases, stockpiling nuclear weapons, funneling weapons to extremist militias, toppling governments, destabilizing large regions, inflicting siege warfare upon civilians via starvation sanctions, or just generally dominating the entire world using the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military retribution, you can rest assured that the US military is giving your freedoms the best protection that petrodollars and war profiteering can buy.
Novelty Joke PM From Fake Country Meets With Trump, Silent On Assange. CaitOz. Sept. 21, 2019.
The Madness of James Mattis. Maj. Danny Sjursen, TruthDig. Sep. 8, 2019.
The wildly unpopular, if not forbidden-to-be-uttered, truth is that Mattis, while an admittedly decorated Marine and a military strategist, was an abject failure. Despite being hailed as a “warrior monk,” he was and remains a conventional interventionist figure—prisoner to the tired old militarist ideas of the necessity for U.S. military forward deployment, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the perpetual need to balance or “contain” Russia and China. His career-long defense of America’s post-9/11 engagements should be the first sentence of his obituary.
None of these egregious errors in judgment have derailed Mattis’ career, of course. Can-do attitudes and compulsive optimism form the bedrock of today’s military culture, if not American society at large. Indeed, it was the general’s all-too-familiar view of the “War on Terror” that likely endeared him to successive promotion boards. As he notes in his own op-ed, “Institutions get the behaviors they reward.”
But Mattis and his entire generation of military leadership ultimately did a great disservice to their subordinates and the American people once they reached four-star rank. When given an (often absurd) mission by administration officials—be they Bush neoconservatives or Obama liberals—these generals and admirals offered “how” rather than “if” responses. Cultishly eager to please, they failed to tell their frequently ill-informed superiors that perhaps a proposed conflict couldn’t be won, at least with the resources available or at an acceptable human cost.
US Army Smashes Recruitment Goals By Preying On Hopeless Millennials With Student Debt. Zerohedge. Sep 22, 2019.
There are two forms of government in the United States. There is the visible government—the White House, Congress, the courts, state legislatures and governorships—and the invisible government, or deep state, where anonymous technocrats, intelligence operatives, generals, bankers, corporations and lobbyists manage foreign and domestic policy regardless of which political party holds a majority.
The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power. They spy on and smear domestic and foreign critics, fix elections, bribe, extort, torture, assassinate and flood the airwaves with “black propaganda.” They are impervious to the chaos and human destruction they leave in their wake. Disasters, social upheavals, economic collapses, massive suffering, death and rabid anti-American blowback have grown out of the invisible government’s overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile and the wars it fostered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The United States and the rest of the globe would be far safer if our self-styled shadow warriors ... were made accountable to the public and the rule of law.
Why Does Chris Hedges Hedge His Bets? (Revealing While Concealing the Invisible Government's Conspiracies.) Edward Curtin. Sept. 21, 2019.
Revelations about the machinations of the so-called “deep state’s” conspiracies often conceal deeper truths that go unmentioned. This is quite common, whether it is done intentionally or not.
Sometimes it is intentional and is directed by the intelligence agencies themselves or their accomplices in the media, who operate a vast propaganda network. In that case, it is because the secret rulers have been caught doing some evil deed, and, not being able to fully deny it, they admit to part of it while concealing deeper secrets.
...
News in today’s world appears as a pointillistic canvas of thousands of disconnected dots impossible to connect unless one has the desire, time, determination, and ability to connect the points through research, which most people do not have. “As a result,” writes Jacques Ellul in his classic study, Propaganda, “he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly” and “his attention is continually diverted to new matters, new centers of interest, and is dissipated on a thousand things, which disappear from one day to the next.”
...
Hedges tells us all this and rightly condemns it as “the moral squalor” and “criminality” that it is.
...
This also is very true. All these truths can make you forget what’s not true and what’s missing in his article.
But something is missing, and some wording is quite odd and factually false.
...
He omits mentioning the Clinton administration’s dismantling wars against Yugoslavia, including 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia in 1999 that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” wars he covered for the New York Times, the paper he has come to castigate and the paper that has a long history of doing the CIA’s bidding.
...
He says the invisible deep state “failed to foresee…the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” This is factually wrong and quite absurd, as is well documented. They simply lied about these matters ex post facto. He suggests such failures were due to “ineptitude,” a coy word used by numerous other writers who find reasons to deny intentionality to the “deep state.”
He therefore is implying that the attacks of September 11, 2001, a subject that he has consistently failed to address over the years even while he has written in detail about so much else, did not involve America’s “invisible government forces.”
...
He is a very well-read man, who is constantly quoting from scholars about various important issues. His books are chock full of such quotations and references. But you will look in vain for references to the brilliant, scholarly work of such writers on these assassinations, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the CIA’s criminal and morally repugnant activities as James Douglass, David Talbot, David Ray Griffin, William Pepper, Graeme MacQueen, Lisa Pease, and so many others. Is it possible that he has never read their books when he has read so much else? If so, why?
As I said before, Chris Hedges, who has a passionate but mild-mannered style, is not alone in his disregard of these key matters. Other celebrity names on the left have been especially guilty of the same approach: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Alexander Cockburn, to name just a few (Zinn and Cockburn are dead). They have avoided these issues as if they were toxic. Nor would they logically explain why. The few times they did respond to those who criticized them for this, it was usually through a dismissive wave of the hand or name calling, a tactic such as the CIA developed with the term “conspiracy theory.”
How Important Is The Drone Attack On The Saudi Oil Field? Ian Welsh. Sep. 16, 2019.
US Defends Your Freedom By Using Troops As Saudi Oil Security Guards. Caitlin Johnstone. Sept. 22, 2019.
If you’ve been lying awake at night terrified that the Pentagon might not send additional troops and armaments to defend oil corporations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, I’ve got some great news for you.
In response to an attack on Saudi Aramco oil infrastructure for which Houthi rebels in Yemen have taken credit, the US government has responded in the only possible rational way: by blaming Iran and deploying troops to act as security guards for Middle Eastern oil companies.
“In response to the kingdom’s request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper informed the press yesterday. “We will also work to accelerate the delivery of military equipment to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to enhance their ability to defend themselves.”
So you can breathe easy, my friend. Freedom and democracy are safe once more.
JUST IN: Pentagon to will deploy additional troops and military equipment to Saudi Arabia: "In response to the Kingdom's request, the president has approved the deployment of U.S. forces, which will be defensive in nature and primarily focused on air and missile defense." pic.twitter.com/qORbgWHoeP
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 20, 2019
A lot of delusional, unpatriotic democracy haters like to argue that the US military doesn’t actually defend the freedom of the American people, and that it isn’t really used to defend freedom at all, and that it isn’t even really used to defend any rules-based international order as sometimes claimed, and that even to use the word “defend” to describe anything the US military does is inaccurate since it is consistently on the attacking and aggressing side of any given conflict, and that actually the US military functions as nothing other than a blunt object wielded by the rich and powerful for the advancement of plutocratic interests and the geostrategic dominance of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, and that it can in fact be accurately said that the only difference between the US military and any other band of armed thugs is funding…
I forget where I was going with this.
Ah, yes. Defending your freedoms. If sending a platoon of Paul Blarts to act as mall security for foreign oil corporations isn’t enough to get you saluting every American flag flying over every McDonald’s you see, then you should know that the US military’s freedom fighting doesn’t end at mere corporate asset protection.
They’re also defending your freedom by killing Afghan farmers in their sleep.
A U.S drone strike just slaughtered 30 civillian farmers in Afghanistan. You probably didn’t hear about it.https://t.co/tbSMwTiPEG
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) September 19, 2019
Why did the armed forces of the United States kill dozens of civilian farmers in Afghanistan while they rested in the field after a hard day’s work? That’s a good question. But an even better question is, what were those Afghan farmers doing lying on top of your freedom?
Obviously the compassionate US military would never dream of killing non-combatants under any circumstances whatsoever, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few civilians. Those dead farmers were collateral damage, caught in the crossfire of a a life-or-death struggle for freedom and democracy in a nation that surely has something to do with defending those things somehow. It is certainly a loss that civilians perish in this way on a regular basis in Afghanistan, but that’s a small price to pay for everything we’ve gained as a result of that eighteen-year occupation, such as [research what’s been gained and put here in second draft].
Yes, whether they’re defending Saudi Aramco profit margins, bombing field laborers, encircling the planet with hundreds of military bases, stockpiling nuclear weapons, funneling weapons to extremist militias, toppling governments, destabilizing large regions, inflicting siege warfare upon civilians via starvation sanctions, or just generally dominating the entire world using the carrot of military alliance and the stick of military retribution, you can rest assured that the US military is giving your freedoms the best protection that petrodollars and war profiteering can buy.
Novelty Joke PM From Fake Country Meets With Trump, Silent On Assange. CaitOz. Sept. 21, 2019.
The Madness of James Mattis. Maj. Danny Sjursen, TruthDig. Sep. 8, 2019.
The wildly unpopular, if not forbidden-to-be-uttered, truth is that Mattis, while an admittedly decorated Marine and a military strategist, was an abject failure. Despite being hailed as a “warrior monk,” he was and remains a conventional interventionist figure—prisoner to the tired old militarist ideas of the necessity for U.S. military forward deployment, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the perpetual need to balance or “contain” Russia and China. His career-long defense of America’s post-9/11 engagements should be the first sentence of his obituary.
None of these egregious errors in judgment have derailed Mattis’ career, of course. Can-do attitudes and compulsive optimism form the bedrock of today’s military culture, if not American society at large. Indeed, it was the general’s all-too-familiar view of the “War on Terror” that likely endeared him to successive promotion boards. As he notes in his own op-ed, “Institutions get the behaviors they reward.”
But Mattis and his entire generation of military leadership ultimately did a great disservice to their subordinates and the American people once they reached four-star rank. When given an (often absurd) mission by administration officials—be they Bush neoconservatives or Obama liberals—these generals and admirals offered “how” rather than “if” responses. Cultishly eager to please, they failed to tell their frequently ill-informed superiors that perhaps a proposed conflict couldn’t be won, at least with the resources available or at an acceptable human cost.
US Army Smashes Recruitment Goals By Preying On Hopeless Millennials With Student Debt. Zerohedge. Sep 22, 2019.
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