The following is Ken Loach’s contribution to 11’09″01 September 11 a film in which French director Alain Brigand invited leading film makers from 11 different nations to provide their own impression of the September 11 attacks in 11 minutes, 9 seconds and one frame. Loach’s contribution won the the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize for Best Short Film.
Category: USA
Rick Perry’s Army of God
Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman recently interviewed Forrest Wilder, author of an exposé in the Texas Observer revealing the close ties between radical Christian evangelicals and U.S. presidential hopeful Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas.
A particularly eye-opening interlude occurs around minute 6.40 of the interview and stars self-declared prophet Cindy Jacobs, who explains that the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy may be the cause of mass bird deaths in Arkansas.
Why Bradley Manning Deserves a Medal, Not a Prison Cell
First published by TomDispatch.
We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material — the Iraq War logs, theAfghan War logs, and the State Department cables— which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.
President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans — and the world — a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done — and is still doing — globally. He has blown the whistle on criminalviolations of American military law. He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.
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American Holocaust: The Destruction of America’s Native Peoples
The American Holocaust is the topic of the following lecture by David Stannard, professor and chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Hawaii. Specifically, he examines the manufactured controversy in discussing the history of Native Americans with the terms genocide and holocaust.
During the course of his argument, Stannard criticises modern day apologists for the genocide of Native Americans including Christopher Hitchens and Benny Morris. Morris, in particular, for his justification of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians using the example of the American Indians: quoting Morris, “[t]here are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing,” he adds “[e]ven the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” Or as he also, rather disturbingly, put it, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.” Therefore the terms and significance given to the crimes against the Native Americans also take on international importance as the example of America is used to justify current and, perhaps, future crimes against humanity.
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The Virtue-less war of the nintendo bomber
My second article in the drones series is now online at Al Jazeera.
In April, the British Ministry of Defence published a study which for the first time gave serious consideration to the moral, ethical and legal aspects of the drone wars. The study advises defense planners that ‘before unmanned systems become ubiquitous’ they must ‘ensure that, by removing some of the horror, or at least keeping it at a distance we do not risk losing our controlling humanity and make war more likely.’ The report is particularly concerned that the low risks of using drones were enabling policy makers to consider military action in places where they would otherwise be hesitant: ‘the use of force is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability,’ it suggests.
The conclusions of the report are sobering. So is the fact that it was produced by a British military think tank rather than a US Congressional committee. In the US, the media and political establishment are still romancing the drone with the kind of giddy attention that sometimes borders on the inappropriate. In a May 10, 2009 segment on the Predator drone, Lara Logan of CBS’s 60 Minutes was positively breathless. Two years later, at a New America Foundation conference on drones, Professor Thomas Nachbar of the University of Virginia School of Law declared drones ‘fun’ and argued ‘against more transparency’ in their use.
Drones are attractive to US militarists and their courtiers because they are politically liberating. In their battle against public opinion and institutional inertia, politicians have often found technology an ally. The drones must therefore be understood in the context of a long-standing US desire to develop the technological means for achieving global Pax Americana. And for a century, airpower has been a key component of this vision.
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The blood of Dresden
Following is an extract from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut in which he describes the scenes of ‘obscene brutality’ he witnessed as a prisoner of war in Dresden which inspired his classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
It was a routine speech we got during our first day of basic training, delivered by a wiry little lieutenant: “Men, up to now you’ve been good, clean, American boys with an American’s love for sportsmanship and fair play. We’re here to change that.
“Our job is to make you the meanest, dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the history of the world. From now on, you can forget the Marquess of Queensberry rules and every other set of rules. Anything and everything goes.
“Never hit a man above the belt when you can kick him below it. Make the bastard scream. Kill him any way you can. Kill, kill, kill – do you understand?”
His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was right. “Didn’t Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies? Ha! They’ll find out.”
And of course, Germany and Japan did find out: a toughened-up democracy poured forth a scalding fury that could not be stopped. It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting – other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards. A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved.
Obama’s Foreign Policy and the End of the American Era
Steve Walt, co-author of the ground-breaking The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, gave a keynote address on “Obama’s Foreign Policy and the End of the American Era” at an event is co-hosted by the IIEA and UCD’s Clinton Institute for American Studies. You can download the Post Event Notes from this event here.
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‘Iran got no nukes and US knows that’
Lucy Kafanov of RT interviews legendary journalist Seymour Hersh about his most recent article on Iran and the Obama administration’s attempts to discredit him.
Washington is ignoring its own intelligence because it is hell-bent on finding nuclear weapons that do not exist, Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told RT.
WikiLeaks: Saudis Often Warned U.S. About Oil Speculators
Further evidence of the vacuity of the ‘war for oil’ argument. Much of the price for oil is today determined in the derivatives market by Wall Street speculators rather than by producers or suppliers. The underlying commodity usually has a minimum impact on the actual price. But the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will not investigate this for the same reason why it was prevented from investigating the banks. Because Wall Street owns the executive branch. (Don’t miss the excellent Inside Job and this post by Pat Lang).
Kevin Hall: The Saudis have been saying for years something should be done to curb the influence of banks that are speculating on the price of oil.
Geoffrey Wawro on the US in the Middle East
In the following audio, Jeff Blankfort interviews Prof. Geoffrey Wawro, author of Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, (Penguin, 2010) with a focus on US support for Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and whether Israel is a strategic asset or liability.
Geoffrey Wawro on the US in the Middle East: MP3
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