Keeping track of the empire’s crimes by William Blum

Keeping track of the empire’s crimes

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA’s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)²; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966³, referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

“The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.”⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “War on Terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages.

Notes

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009 ^?
2. Fabian Escalante, “Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro” (Ocean Press, 2006) ^?
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32^?
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23 ^?
5. Ibid., chapter 18 ^?
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions ^?
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com ^?
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009 ^?
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8 ^?
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007 ^?

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2

Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website at “essays”.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I’d appreciate it if the website were mentioned. www.killinghope.org

see

U.S. Government Assassination Plots by William Blum

Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the Second World War by William Blum

Afghanistan on Dandelion Salad

South Asia, Latin America: Pentagon’s 21st Century Counterinsurgency Wars by Rick Rozoff

Stop NATO

NATO

from the archives:

638 Ways To Kill Castro (video)

Source: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/keeping-track-of-the-empires-crimes-by-william-blum/

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Not content with bringing our Parliament into disrepute, now—through ignorance—they would destroy it

So, the dust has settled on the expenses affair and our elected representatives have been found sorely lacking. MPs have raped and pillaged the expenses system, using our money not only to fund their lavish lifestyles but also to exempt themselves from the laws that they impose on us—most notably ensuring that they need pay no tax on benefits-in-kind (for many of these claims were not expenses at all, but benefits that, for anyone else, would have been taxable).

However, with truly astonishing stupidity, these venal idiots have come up with a set of solutions that are worse than the original problem. After all, fixing the expenses system would not have been difficult: forcing the annual publishing of all (unredacted) receipts, removing the benefits-in-kind tax exemption and allowing the recall of any MP by his or her constituents would have gone a long way to sort out even the perception of wrong-doing—let alone the ability to get away with it.

But no: the government has decided that they need yet another stupid, expensive and unaccountable QUANGO to ensure that our lords and masters can keep their pudgy, grasping little hands out of the cookie jar.

Your humble Devil opposed this from the outset—if only because it would potentially stop us being able to obtain the details of the expenses under FoI. Besides, if our 646 MPs are unable to manage themselves, then what possible moral (or practical) justification can they put forward for attempting to manage 60 million of us?

None.

However, it gets worse, as Raedwald pointed out, having examined the text of the proposed Bill.

Make no mistake. This is an anti-democratic, pernicious and malign little Bill. Consider this provision;

• An order under this section may provide .. for specified property, rights and liabilities which subsist wholly or mainly for the purposes of the House of Commons to be transferred to the IPSA by a scheme

You see, Brown's new Quango doesn't merely check MPs' claims—it pays them. Rather than Parliament owning its own pay chest and being its own master, MPs will now be employed by the government. Brown has taken Parliament's resources from them. And who decides just how much of Parliament's property, rights and liabilities are to be transferred to the government? Why, a government minister, of course! With the complicity of Brown's Speaker, Mr Bercow;

• A scheme made by virtue of subsection (8) is to be made by a Minister of the Crown with the consent of the person who chairs the House of Commons Commission.

The last thing this nation needs is an Act that would pack the chamber with vile apparatchiks and 'professional' politicians, rob the Commons of its authority, turn our parliament into just a department of government and treat our MPs—returned by us to Parliament to exercise the thunderous powers and sovereignty of that body—as mere hirelings, irrelevant juniors.

As distasteful as we may find the corrupt and venal behaviour of the 646 bastards within the House of Commons, we should not confuse or conflate these odious people with Parliament itself. And what this Bill proposes to do is to make Parliament the servant of the government—to make the entirety of Parliament subservient to the Executive.

This is incredibly dangerous; part of the problem with governments over the last few decades is that they have increasingly come to see themselves as the masters of this country—the supreme power over you and I.

What many bloggers have campaigned for is a return to the situation wherein we, the people, wield the power in this country, and wherein MPs acknowledge that we only lend them our power for a short term. And, yes, we were gleeful at the expenses scandals because we thought that the power of the people might be reasserted over a chastened Parliament.

This Bill proposes the very opposite.

Ineffective though the House has been at holding the Executive to account, it was at least able to do it in small respects—especially as the power of this government has waned.

This Bill would remove even that check on an over-weaning Executive, and it most certainly returns no power to us. Indeed, as EUReferendum notes in a comment on Raedwald's post, it does the very opposite.

Such is the sagging morale of our MPs, and their slender grasp of constitutional and democratic principles, that they look to approving this with minimal debate and scrutiny, intent only on "restoring public confidence" in Parliament. Not for them the lesson of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the classic illustration of the principle that rushed law is always bad law.

As to The Telegraph's concerns about inhibiting high-quality people from standing for Parliament, the main deterrent is the singular fact that, progressively, this institution has been robbed of its powers (with the willing assent of its incumbents). Yet this Bill seeks to neuter Parliament even further, continuing its march towards irrelevance.

What is lost here is the very rationale for having Parliament in the first place. It does not belong to the MPs, or government. It is—or should be—our Parliament, there as a bastion against an over-powerful and oppressive executive. Anything that diminishes Parliament diminishes us.

Having lost the plot so long ago, however, our MPs are now conspiring in destroying what little authority they have left. But while they act in haste, we will be the ones to repent at leisure.

I have argued for sometime that Parliament has been giving away powers—to the European Union—that it has no entitlement to: the power is, I repeated many times, lent to them for a period no longer than five years—at the end of which, it must be returned.

Once again, it seems that MPs simply do not get it: yes, they have behaved disgracefully, and they should feel suitably ashamed. Yes, many of them should resign—and some already have.

However, this Bill will not make amends—this Bill will not fix the system. Indeed, it is more akin to them—having been found with their hands in the till—murdering the shopkeeper and burning down the store.

All is not lost, however: as The Sunday Times reports, some MPs seem to have realised the enormity of this desecration and strapped on some testicles.

GORDON BROWN’S plans to create a legally enforceable “code of conduct” for MPs are in turmoil as MPs and peers prepare to reject the scheme.

At least four senior MPs are to table amendments to water down or remove the proposals from the Parliamentary Standards Bill, which is going through the Commons this week.

They include Sir Stuart Bell, the Labour MP on the Commons Commission; Sir George Young, who chairs the committee on standards and privileges; and Alan Duncan, the shadow leader of the Commons. The House of Lords has also threatened to throw out the scheme.

It has emerged that neither Jack Straw, the justice secretary, who is charged with pushing through the legislation, nor Harriet Harman, the leader of the Commons,who unveiled the bill last week, knew about the plans for a code of conduct until they were announced by No 10 in The Sunday Times. Whitehall officials drew up new clauses to “fit the press release”.

The wording of the proposed law leaves it open to individuals to take parliament, or MPs, to court. Malcolm Jack, the most senior Commons official, has warned of “litigants trying to make a point”.

Another key section of the bill raises the prospect that the words of MPs, evidence given by witnesses to select committees and other Commons business, could be used as evidence in criminal proceedings, which would undermine the tradition of free speech under “parliamentary privilege”.

Again, via EUReferendum, it seems that the danger is so severe that Mystic Mogg has been coaxed out of his box to bend his great mind to producing a stern warning.

The House of Commons is in danger of cutting its own constitutional throat, but the Clerk of the House is trying to stop them. The clerk is Malcolm Jack, a man of scholarship and courage who is the ultimate referee on all constitutional questions which affect the Commons. His core duty is to advise the House, its Speaker, the committees and MPs on the practice and procedure of the House, and its rights.

Last Friday Dr Jack sent a memorandum to the Standards Committee on the “Privilege Aspects of the Parliamentary Standards Bill”. He gives a serious warning about particular aspects of the Bill, which is expected to be rushed through both Houses of Parliament before the summer recess. The Lords is due to rise on July 21, so time would be very limited. Rushed legislation is usually a disaster, and this would be legislation in a panic.

No shit. The article is well worth reading in full, as Mystic outlines the main concerns with the Bill, and Dr Jack's pedigree and position. But his conclusion is spot on.

The morale of the Commons has of course been shaken by the expenses scandal. I have never seen a comparable loss of confidence. Any healthy institution wants to extend its own authority. The Parliamentary Standards Bill is seeking to deal with a problem which is only too real. Yet the remedy which has been proposed is to reduce the existing rights and functions of the House of Commons, including self-regulation. This is a move in the wrong direction. If the Commons cannot restore its reputation by doing its job better, it will certainly not do so by demonstrating its lack of confidence in its own authority.

The new Bill proposes to create a regulator — the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority — to be called “Ipsa”, which will act as an independent authority for disciplining Parliament. No one in his or her right mind would contemplate joining such a preposterous body, which will start with no authority and is likely to be abolished as soon as anyone finds out that it has been built on sand. Quangos are always vulnerable: they have too many enemies and hardly any friends. They are appointed by politicians to suit their self-interest.

The Clerk of the House should be trusted, partly because he is the 50th in his line, of whom the first was appointed in 1363. If Ipsa is now appointed by Gordon Brown in 2009, it will be lucky to survive through 2010. Britain needs a strong and independent and new House of Commons, which would mean an early election; no one needs an ipsy-dipsy quango.

Quite so. Not only are QUANGOs subject to cronyism and manipulation by higher powers—in this case, the government—but they are democratically unaccountable and that is precisely what is not required in this case.

We need more information published on the internet—with scrutiny being driven by bloggers, if necessary. And, crucially, we need a channel to be able to do something about any abuses that we find—such as the ability to recall MPs.

After all, have politicians not bemoaned the lack of public engagement? This apathy is caused—I, and others like me, believe—by the sense that we can never find out what these bastards are up to and, even if we could, there is nothing that we can do about it.

The publication of documents—such as department spending and MPs' expenses—would give people the opportunity to find out precisely where their money is going; the ability to recall MPs would give the people of this country the sense that they are able to ensure that our politicians are made accountable for their actions.

With a few simple strokes, we can go some way to making our politicians more honest, less proligate and less wasteful and we can re-engage the voters in the politics of this country.

Instead what they have presented us with is something that Raedwald quite rightly terms a Bill that...

... treats us all like fools and is as insulting as a gob of spittle in the face for the voters of Britain.

Well, seriously: what did you expect from the Cyclopean Gobblin' King?

The man has got to go, and so has this government; most of the rest of the MPs have proven themselves untrustworthy and stupid—at best. The only solution is an immediate General Election.

And how shall we force that...?

Source: The Devils Kitchen

Shocking Book Details New Info On Israeli Attack on USS Liberty

This much we do know: On June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War, Israel surprisingly launched a deadly attack upon a lightly armed American spy ship cruising off the coast of Egypt, Israel’s enemy at the time. When the attack ended, 34 of the USS Liberty’s crew were dead and 171 others were injured, many of them critically.

Here’s what we don’t know, and may never know: why the Israelis decided to mount the attack. The Liberty was clearly marked, flying the American flag and behaving in a completely benign manner. Moreover, it bore almost no resemblance to the much smaller Egyptian freighter some Israelis said they thought they were attacking. Israel’s explanations ranged from lame to downright unbelievable.

Nor will we ever know, for certain, why the United States government’s response was so uneven, unless we simply credit those who believe that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is so all-powerful that American politicians felt too vulnerable to risk its wrath.

We do know that the attack on the Liberty came when the war in Vietnam was going badly and President Lyndon B. Johnson was almost paralyzed by a fear of failure.

James Scott’s father was the damage control officer aboard the Liberty, so he had exceptional access to the inside story of the attack. But he didn’t simply rely on tales told around the family dining table. He conducted prodigious research to document every aspect of the story, a story that only briefly made headlines before fading into historic obscurity.

Unfortunately, the lessons that should have been learned from the Liberty episode didn’t prevent the United States from putting another spy ship, the USS Pueblo, at risk. Seven months after the Liberty was attacked, the Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans in international waters and held hostage, with its crew, for almost a year.

As a former newspaper reporter, Scott knows how to dig for facts, and his book resonates with the results of his relentless search for the truth. Unfortunately, it would appear that the Israeli government was either unwilling or (for reasons that defy logic) unable to conduct its own investigation in such a way that the findings would be credible.

In fairness, Israel did apologize for the attack, but its inability, or its refusal, to provide a plausible explanation for it remains an insult to the victims and their families, not to mention the United States government (which didn’t exactly cover itself with glory in its own investigation).

Anyone reading Scott’s account of the encounter that occurred 42 years ago may be infuriated by the diplomatic and military blunders (or deceit) on both sides, and yet the most compelling passages of his narrative are those that describe the horrors of the attack and the dreadful consequences for those aboard the Liberty. It is high time someone drew our attention to this tragedy, and Scott has done it in magnificent fashion.

By Al Hutchinson of The Tampa Tribune

Source: American Free Press

'Munich' Shouldn't Be Such a Dirty Word

Seventy years ago this month, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler once, twice and then a third time. On Sept. 30, 1938, they agreed that the German-speaking "Sudetenland" of Czechoslovakia should be ceded to Germany. Ever since, the name of this Munich agreement has been used as the ultimate political curse.

In truth, the story of the agreement is far from what is usually supposed. Over and again, "Munich" has been wilfully misunderstood and misinterpreted, with repeatedly disastrous consequences.

The Georgian crisis has just brought more cries of "appeasement" and "Munich." One writer in the Times of London described French President Nicolas Sarkozy as coming back from Moscow "waving a piece of paper and acclaiming peace in our time," the ill-fated words Chamberlain used on his return to London. Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan compared the Russian attack on Georgia to the 1938 "Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia." These are only the latest in a long line of mischievous claims that any compromise is "another Munich" -- and they run alongside a line of sorry military adventures for more than 50 years conditioned by the fear of emulating Chamberlain.

When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal in 1956, one London politician after another recalled the 1930s. "It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war," said Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell. Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who had resigned as foreign secretary in 1938 to protest appeasement even before Munich, was driven by the dread of being seen as another Chamberlain. Eden mounted a foolish military expedition that turned into a national humiliation and ended his career.

Although the Suez plot was thwarted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who asked Eden, "Anthony, have you gone out of your mind?"), not all Americans agreed with Ike. The Senate majority leader told him he should let the British know that "they have our moral support to go in." Ten years later, that senator -- Lyndon B. Johnson, by now the president -- learned the hard way that going in could be easier than getting out, and became another victim of the "Munich complex."

One of his top military advisers was Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had angrily told President John F. Kennedy to his face that refusing to take military action against Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich." Still spooked by the shadow of Munich, LBJ would escalate the Indochina war to show that he "wasn't any Chamberlain umbrella man."

Nor did President Bill Clinton want to be another Chamberlain. He bombed Serbia in 1999 and mused, "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?"

And of course, the present administration has endlessly exploited the rhetoric of Munich. Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld compared opponents of the Iraq war with the earlier appeasers, and last May, President Bush derided the idea of negotiating with terrorists: "We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' " So Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, Bush is another Churchill (at any rate, he keeps a bust of Churchill in the White House), and there must be no more Munichs. We see the outcome today.

Quite apart from their unhappy consequences, all these invocations of Munich begin by rewriting history. Chamberlain was a democratic leader who knew that most of his people understandably did not want to go to war in 1938, only 20 years after another terrible war in which about three-quarters of a million British men had been killed.

Besides which, Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking that he was addressing a real grievance. The one accurate thing about Kagan's quaint comparison is that the residents of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia no more want to be ruled by Georgia today than the Sudeten Germans wanted to be ruled by the Czechs 70 years ago.

While it's lamentably true that German resentment at "the slave treaty of Versailles" following World War I helped bring Hitler to power, there is another inconvenient truth: Between the wars, British and American liberals almost universally believed that the post-1918 settlement had been unjust. H.N. Brailsford, the leading leftist English commentator on foreign affairs, had written in 1920 that, of all the Versailles treaty's redrawing of borders, "the worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule." Experience seemed to show that nationalism was the great force of the age and that it needed to be assuaged -- or appeased, a word first used, it should be remembered, by those who advocated doing so.

To be sure, Churchill denounced the Munich agreement in a resonant speech: "This is only the first sip, the first bitter foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time." But he was speaking as someone untroubled by any sympathy for national self-determination.

As the blogger Andrew Sullivan has said, every Republican nowadays wants to be Churchill. But they should look at his record more closely. A few years earlier, Churchill had broken with the Conservatives (and all enlightened opinion) over his opposition to any form of self-government for India: He had no time for Indians (or later Egyptians) taking their own "stand for freedom." Churchill was a realpolitiker who believed in imperialism and spheres of influence -- the very things that Bush and the neoconservatives now profess to abhor.

And Americans most of all should pause before invoking Munich. After 1918, the United States had withdrawn from the world, with Congress slamming the door on immigrants (even desperate Jews fleeing Nazi Europe) and refusing to join the new League of Nations (a fact of which Bush seems unaware whenever he refers scornfully to the League). In 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, the Democrats were at least as isolationist as the Republicans, and as late as the fall of 1940, FDR was still campaigning for a third term on the unambiguous promise to keep the United States out of any foreign wars. That helps explain why he sent a telegram reading "Good man" to Chamberlain when his British counterpart returned from meeting Hitler, and subsequently told the U.S. ambassador in Rome, "I am not a bit upset over the final result."

No American of any significance advocated military resistance to Hitler in the 1930s, and no such intervention would have been possible anyway. In September 1939, the U.S. Army was smaller than the Belgian army, and as the first grave setbacks in North Africa in 1942-43 would show, it was scarcely ready for serious fighting even after the United States entered the fray.

Some other words of Churchill's are too rarely quoted. They are from one of the finest and most moving, though least known, speeches he ever gave, paying tribute to Chamberlain after his death from cancer in November 1940. It had been Chamberlain's fate "to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man," Churchill said. "But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart -- the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour."

In his bow to Chamberlain's memory, Churchill showed a magnanimity and wisdom that others have lacked. "Long and hard, hazardous years lie before us," he continued, "but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts."

Never once did Churchill advocate preemptive war, and he always recognized that democracies should use arms only as a last resort. Maybe the presidential candidates should be asked whether the United States entered the Iraq war "united and with clean hearts." That could be the real "lesson of Munich."

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Source: The Washington Post

How Good Was the Good War?

Patrick J. Buchanan deserves respect for blasting open an important historical question that the gatekeepers of allowable opinion probably assumed they had welded shut. According to the official version of American history, we are supposed to draw from World War II only a series of neat lessons about “appeasement” and our government’s unquenchable thirst for justice. Innocently wondering if there might have been some alternative to 50 million deaths and the most terrible war in history is enough to make you an object of suspicion—what are you, some kind of extremist?

Even from parts of the Right, the subject of World War II elicits the shrill denunciations, the smears, and the unchallengeable orthodoxies for which conservatives have traditionally condemned the politically correct Left. Buchanan may be wrong (though I do not think he is), but there is nothing wicked or perverse about considering contrary-to-fact scenarios in light of historical evidence. His prose is measured and non-polemical, and his judgments, which are shared by a great many historians and other figures of distinction, deserve to be considered on their merits. Claims that Buchanan’s version of history is politically motivated can hardly be taken seriously, especially coming from people who have made comfortable livings out of distorting the historical record on behalf of their own foreign-policy ambitions.

Munich is the most obvious example. Counting on popular ignorance, neoconservatives never weary of applying the “lessons of Munich” to modern American foreign policy. These so-called lessons turn out to be a decontextualized muddle of half-crazed maxims about the pointlessness of negotiation, the self-serving fraudulence of all enemy grievance claims, and the risk that unless the United States responds with overwhelming force to the slightest modification of the status quo—the justice or injustice of which is not up for discussion—we’ll soon be speaking Ruritanian. Cartoon history begets cartoon policy.

If only the matter had been as simple as modern propaganda about Munich would have it. In 1919, in defiance of the much heralded principle of self-determination, 3 million Germans had been consigned to what became second-class status in the new Czechoslovakia. German grievances, most of which were considered reasonable by just about everyone, had to be addressed one way or another if an endless cycle of war and punishment was to be avoided.

In other words, crushing Germany in a war over the Sudetenland would merely have returned Europe to square one: more punitive peace terms, further German resentment, and yet another episode of hyperpatriotic German politics aimed at revenge. Diplomats in the real world, denounced today as fools and appeasers, had a difficult situation on their hands as they approached this problem.

Buchanan makes a strong case against Britain giving a war guarantee to Poland rather than drawing a realistic line in the West that Hitler could not cross without risking war. George Kennan, as mainstream as they come, said so in a letter to Buchanan in 1999. And Ernest May, my old professor at Harvard, noted, “a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.” A swashbuckling Polish regime was thus given the power to decide whether Britain would be drawn into war, a war Britain was absurdly unprepared to wage, much less win.

The number of politicians—and, later, historians—who considered Chamberlain’s war guarantee reckless and ill advised will surprise most readers. Lloyd George called it a “frightful gamble” and laughed out loud at the suggestion that it would deter Hitler. Even Churchill, in his official history, wondered (albeit disingenuously in light of his own position in 1939): “How could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”

Why should legitimate opinions like these be beyond the pale?

Probably the most important reason that free discussion of World War II—the diplomatic blunders, the Allied atrocities, all the what ifs—has been frowned upon or suppressed is that some people perceive an implicit disregard for the unspeakable fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet it was the war itself that put Europe’s Jewish populations in danger in the first place, an obvious point that has been missed by all but a few writers.

In February 1942, for example, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe. … The Führer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” A month later, after describing the deportations from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels observed, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”

“Because Britain issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany,” writes Buchanan, “by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans.” If he’s right, then with more sensible British diplomacy, the Jewish populations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, and Yugoslavia would have survived, just as the Jewish populations of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian Peninsula did.

David Gordon, a (Jewish) scholar Buchanan thanks in his acknowledgments, has likewise wondered in light of all this: “Was it not a clear moral imperative to avoid the outbreak of war and, if possible, to secure the evacuation of the Jews from parts of Europe likely to fall under German control? Further, once war broke out, was it not imperative to end the war as soon as possible?” This, surely, is a morally serious position.

No one would have begrudged Buchanan a quiet retirement. He chose instead to re-examine a historical episode that all sectors of society treat with religious reverence, knowing full well how his work, which most of his opponents would not bother to read, would be received. But once the guardians of acceptable opinion have finished venting their spleens at what a scoundrel Buchanan is for not dutifully repeating the things he was taught in seventh grade, normal people may begin to evaluate his thesis rationally. The existence of this symposium suggests that that process may have begun.

by Thomas E. Woods Jr

Source: The American Conservative