The Ruthless Truth blog

by Jon Dillingham

Global Research, August 10, 2009

Thanh Nien. (Vietnam National Youth Federation)

 

August 10, 2009, was the first Orange Day organised in Vietnam –- not only to be remembered by victims of Agent Orange but to mark Vietnam’s common pain. Those responsible for exposing Vietnamese citizens and US troops to toxic defoliants kept silent about known health implications, a review of documents finds.

US chemical companies that made Agent Orange and the government and military authorities who ordered its spraying on Vietnam knew the human health toll it could take, according to official and unofficial documents detailing the history of the deadly defoliant.

A review of the documents related to the use of Agent Orange –- a dioxin-laden herbicide -– in Vietnam, including decades-old declassified papers from the companies that manufactured it and the government and military that used it, provides compelling evidence that those in charge also concealed evidence of the devastating effects it could have on people.

A declassified letter by V.K. Rowe at Dow’s Biochemical Research Library to Bioproducts Manager Ross Milholland dated June 24, 1965 clearly states that the company knew the dioxin in their products, including Agent Orange, could hurt people.

In reference to 2,4,5-trichlorophenol and 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (components of Agent Orange), Rowe stated:

“This material is exceptionally toxic; it has a tremendous potential for producing chloracne and systemic injury.”

Rowe worried the company would suffer if word got out.

“The whole 2,4,5-T industry would be hard hit and I would expect restrictive legislation, either barring the material or putting very rigid controls upon it.”

So he said the company should keep quiet about the toxicity: “There is no reason why we cannot get this problem under strict control and thereby hopefully avoid restrictive legislation … I trust you will be very judicious in your use of this information. It could be quite embarrassing if it were misinterpreted or misused … P.S. Under no circumstances may this letter be reproduced, shown, or sent to anyone outside of Dow.”

Dow played its cards right, never getting in serious trouble. The spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam went on for another six years.

Dow did not return phone calls and emails requesting comment on the Agent Orange issue.

‘Undisputed’

In the latest case of US veterans trying to sue Dow and Monsanto for their cancers related to Agent Orange exposure, Supreme Court documents related to a petition for a Writ of Certiorari in Daniel Raymond Stephenson, et al., petitioners, v. Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto Company, et al., respondents, further implicate the companies in cover-ups and misinformation.

The petitioners state that the companies knew their dioxins, such as those used in Agent Orange, were harmful and lied about it while concealing information, including the fact that several factory workers had fallen sick after exposure to dioxin.

Several key facts “remain undisputed,” according to the document:

“Respondents never shared the information in their sole possession about health risks attributable to dioxin”, it said. “Respondents used proprietary, defective manufacturing processes that dangerously contaminated 2,4,5- T with dioxin.” That is, the chemical companies could have manufactured their products without dioxin, as other companies had done, but the process was slower and more expensive, so they chose a more dangerous method.

The companies “secretly tested their products for dioxin and hid its extreme toxicity from the military”, according to the petitioners.

The petitioners stated that the companies had been hiding information during the ongoing court process: “Respondents also misrepresent today’s medical understanding of the injuries caused by exposure to dioxin. Instead of telling this Court that the NAS/IOM has found that numerous cancers have been related to exposure to dioxin-contaminated 2,4,5-T (ingredient in Agent Orange) they quote a twenty-year-old Second Circuit opinion to say: ‘Even today,…no…evidence that Agent Orange was hazardous to human health.’”

The petitioners said the companies had misrepresented the health effects with “patently false” assertions that none of their workers had gotten sick from dioxin poisoning.

Inside job

Though numerous studies have uncontroversially demonstrated the devastating effects of dioxin exposure on humans, the companies that manufactured Agent Orange have gone out of their way to offer their own unique perspective.

Through 2004, Dow and Monsanto funded several friendly studies by Dr Alvin L. Young to show that the exposure of US ground forces to Agent Orange should be of minimal health concern.

Young’s schizophrenic reports go back and forth from saying that dioxins are not harmful to saying they are harmful and his largely debunked studies have drawn the scorn of prominent members of the scientific community.

“Young is paid by the chemical companies”, Dr. Wayne Dwernychuk, a retired senior/advisor at Hatfield Consultants, told Thanh Nien Daily. “I don’t believe a word he says.” Hatfield Consultants is a research leader in the field of contamination from dioxin herbicides in Vietnam.

Not overly concerned

Though reports point to the fact that chemical companies like Dow and Monsanto knowingly hid evidence of dioxin-related medical problems from the government, the declassified 1990 Zumwalt Report suggests that US military experts knew that Agent Orange was harmful at the time of its use.

The report quotes a 1988 letter from Dr. James R. Clary, a former government scientist with the Chemical Weapons Branch, to Senator Tom Daschle. Dr. Clary was involved in designing tanks that sprayed herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, according to the report.

Clary told Daschle:

When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the 1960′s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the ‘military’ formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the ‘civilian’ version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the ‘enemy’, none of us were overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide. And, if we had, we would have expected our own government to give assistance to veterans so contaminated.

Chemical warfare: calling a spade a spade

Supporters of the US Agent Orange campaign prefer to call it an “herbicide program” rather than chemical warfare. But official documents reveal that the US Senate knew its real name.

In US Senate Congressional Records dated August 11, 1969, a table presented to senators showed that congress clearly classified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (main components of Agent Orange) in the Chemical and Biological Warfare category.

The table also includes Cacodylic Acid, a main component of Agent Blue, another chemical sprayed on Vietnam to kill plants, in the official Chemical and Biological Warfare category. The table describes it as “an arsenic-base compound… heavy concentrations will cause arsenical poisoning in humans. Widely used in Vietnam. It is composed of 54.29 percent arsenic”.

As Vietnam War scholar and US veteran W.D. Ehrhart put it concisely in a Thanh Nien Daily interview last week: “It would be hard to describe Agent Orange as anything other than a chemical weapon. Dioxin is a chemical.”

So is arsenic.

[Thanh Nien is the flagship publication of the Vietnam National Youth Federation.]

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US chemical companies concealed effects of dioxin, say advocates

By An Dien and Jon Dillingham

Thanh Nien — August 6, 2009 — A US lawyer and a French activist say chemical companies that produced Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant used by the US Army during the Vietnam War, connived to cover up its dangers.

The following are excerpts from interviews conducted with Gerson H. Smoger, a lawyer who has represented US Agent Orange victims for years, and Marie Hélène Lavallard, a member of the French-Vietnamese Friendship Association, in which they reveal how US chemical companies hid the fact that they knew how hazardous Agent Orange was.

Thanh Nien Daily: How can these companies get away with compensating Americans but not Vietnamese?

Smoger: I would not say that they “got away with compensating”, because I can assure you that the responsible chemical companies had no interest in compensating anyone. Also, unfortunately, the chemical companies have never really compensated the vast majority of American veterans either. While there was a settlement entered into in 1984, the money ran out in 1994. Of the 2.4 million Americans who served in Vietnam, only about 60,000 ever received anything from the companies… Given how long it takes to get cancer from the chemicals, virtually none of the veterans who got cancer have received any compensation from the companies…

…I have reviewed literally millions of pages of documents… It seems that the manufacturers conspired to hide the dangers from the US government and the rest of the world. The chemical companies knew about the dangers and held secret meetings with the purpose of conspiring to keep the knowledge of the dangers from the US government.

Lavallard: The first thing to do is consider separately the 1984 agreement [with US veterans] and the 2004-2008 lawsuit [filed by Vietnamese victims], not because they are separated by 20 years, though they are, but because they have almost nothing in common. The settlement of 1984 was not a judgement; on the contrary it was made to avoid a lawsuit… Why did the parties choose a private settlement?

One has to consider the background. In 1980, 1983 and 1984, three studies were published by Dr George Roush, the medical director of Monsanto. They asserted, especially the last two, that Agent Orange had no inconvenient effects on human health. Of course, they were faked but that was discovered only years later. At the time they were “the Truth”. So the veterans were afraid of losing everything with the lawsuit and preferred a settlement… On Monsanto’s side, they were up to the nostrils in the Times Beach scandal, a small town so contaminated by TCDD that finally the US government bought it all in February 1983 and had it scratched from the surface of the Earth. Monsanto was guilty and was organising its defence. It did not need the bad publicity of a lawsuit for Agent Orange. Do not ask if it escaped the Times Beach condemnation, it did, having people destroying the necessary documents.

Not the slightest “moral” feeling in this settlement. Just a cynical and clever way to pay a small sum to avoid a bigger disgrace. The amount was ridiculous. Once the lawyers had taken their share, the compensations for some 40,000 people ranged from US$256-12,800, with an estimated mean of $4000. Even in 1984 it was not much. For those who received their share in the last years up to 1994 it was simply alms … the judge did not rule in favour of the American victims. It was a private settlement, such as the American law permits. It was not generous.

As for the Vietnamese victims, be sure the corporations do not care at all for them. They knew their herbicides were lethal, and they got along to hide it from the US Army at a Dow-Monsanto secret meeting in 1965. They could have produced the herbicides with much less TCDD, or even without it, but they were only interested in making as much money as possible selling as many gallons as possible as quickly as possible.

Should the US do more to help clean up Agent Orange “hot-spots” in Vietnam?

Lavallard: Easy question. The US government requested and obtained $120 million from Hercules, a chemical company that manufactured herbicides for the war and moved to another place without cleaning its former plant. Just calculate!

Whatever the “legal” aspect, the USA is responsible for poisoning huge parts of Vietnam. They made the mess, they have to clean it. I notice that this question is much easier than the question of sanitary damages. For those, there are still arguments about proof, scientific enough or not, diseases due to sprayings or other reasons, etc. But for the environment, the question is perfectly clear: the US wanted to destroy the forest, it succeeded. The US wanted to [force] the peasants away from their rice fields, they did. The US wanted to destroy the crops, it did, and some contaminated areas remain unsuitable and dangerous to live in.

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Spread the message, carry the fight

By Len Aldis

Thanh Nien — August 10, 2009 — Over the past week and especially today, the call for justice for victims of Agent Orange has been heard and seen around Vietnam and the world, through print and through radio and television.

The Vietnam Association for the Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) and VTV4 have done valuable work to advance the cause.

All are to be congratulated, and mention must be of the role played by Thanh Nien through its informative articles published these days, giving voice to international friends of Vietnam and the Vietnamese victims.

Today via the internet with its stupendous reach, the message of Orange Day has been carried far and wide, and no one can be unaware of the tragic legacy that has been borne by hundreds of thousands of innocents by the use of chemicals in the Vietnam War, and in particular Agent Orange.

We have seen and read of the tragic stories of the victims, we have seen the horrific photographs of them and their families, we have also seen the humanitarian work being carried out within Vietnam by VAVA, the Vietnam Red Cross and international NGOs.

Our thanks should also go to the US NGOs working in Vietnam helping to remove from the soil of Vietnam massive amounts of unexploded bombs that, today, 34 years after the end of the war, are still killing and maiming innocent men, women and children.

The past ten days have been remarkable in bringing the message of international solidarity to the victims of Agent Orange from many corners of the world with the continuing call for justice.

And after August 10?

All of us must increase our roles and strengthen the international campaign for justice. The companies responsible –- Monsanto, Dow, etc. — cannot and must not escape from the horrific crimes they carried out with Agent Orange. Until they accept their responsibility, and compensate all the victims and their families, we should campaign for an international embargo on all their products.

[Len Aldis is the secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society.]

Global Research Articles by Jon Dillingham

by Stephen Lendman.

Global Research, August 10, 2009

 

For eight years, the Bush administration relentlessly targeted Muslim, environmental, and animal rights activists as national security or terrorist threats. Shamefully, Obama continues the same practice.

On May 20, the FBI arrested four New York men, claiming they planned to bomb a Bronx synagogue and community center and shoot down Newburgh, New York-based Air National Guard jets with stinger missiles.

The same day Justice Department press release said:

"The charges against James Cromite (aka Abdul Rahman and Abdul Rehman), David Williams (aka Daoud and DL), Onta Williams (aka Hamza), and Laguerre Payen (aka Amin and Almondo) include "plot(ting) to detonate explosives near a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York, and to shoot military planes….with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. In their efforts to obtain weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, and the FBI and other agencies monitor(ing) the defendants’ actions up to the time of arrest, including providing an inactive missile and inert explosives to the informant for the defendants."

It’s a familiar scheme involving an FBI sting using an informant to entrap unwitting victims, in this case four poor black Newburgh, New York men who’d converted to Islam, two while in prison for unrelated charges. Cromite was called the ringleader. A Pakistani man named Shahed Hussain (aka Malik) was a paid FBI informant facing prison and/or deportation on dozens of fraud counts. He was enlisted to cooperate in return for leniency.

He’s the same man used earlier for four separate stings, Yassin Aref among them, an innocent man, entrapped and victimized, now serving a 15 year prison term, and a valued friend of this writer. In post-9/11 America, he’s one of many Muslim victims of police state justice. They’ve been targeted, persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, kept in isolation, denied bail, tried on secret evidence on trumped-up charges, convicted by juries too intimidated to acquit, and sentenced to long prison terms for being Muslims at the wrong time in America. Others for being environmental and/or animal rights activists. It went on under George Bush and continues under Obama. When the Newburgh 4 are tried in late 2009, they’ll face 25 year to life sentences if convicted on one or more charges.

They’re petty felons, not terrorists, with criminal records on drug-related charges, assault, and Payen’s unrelated weapons charge for firing a BB gun hitting two people in the head, then snatching purses from two women the same day. He’s a Haitian citizen. The others are Americans, and both Williams men aren’t related. They apparently met in prison where two of them were introduced to Islam.

Background on Informant Malik

On FBI instructions, he looked for targets at a Newburgh mosque and found them in four convicted felons, prime candidates to be framed on bogus charges if he could lure them into the trap. He befriended them with offers to pay medical bills, but never did because arrests came first after months of entrapment. His victims were poor, in need of cash, and induced to go along by small gifts and offers of more.

The Justice Department called them "radicalized Muslims," acting out of hatred for Jews and wanting revenge on behalf of Muslims against America.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) uses anti-Semitism for moral cover, but is notoriously Islamophobic in its ideology. Its web site highlighted "Muslim extremists motivated by hatred for Jews and Israel have targeted Jews in the US for many years, an alarming number of post-9/11 plots and conspiracies have involved or been led by" American Muslims "arrested on various terror-related charges (related to) ideologies of extreme intolerance propagated by terrorist movements overseas (and in some cases) jihadist materials on the Internet." The ADL cited alleged quotes about wanting "to get a synagogue" and willingness to die and go to "paradise" as a martyr.

New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said the men planned to bomb two Bronx synagogues by detonating explosives from a cell phone. After supposedly planting phony devices, given Malik by the FBI, police surrounded their car and arrested them in a carefully planned operation. It involved an 18-wheel police vehicle and armored personnel carrier using NYPD Emergency Service Unit personnel. It came off with military precision and why not. It was a setup.

"It’s hard to envision a more chilling plot," said Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder. "These are extremely violent men." In fact, they’re innocent victims of police state justice facing an uphill struggle for vindication against a Justice Department determined to convict with dozens of easily manipulated and/or doctored audio and video DVD recordings of supposedly terror-plotting meetings and conversations.

On June 2, a federal grand jury indicted the four men on eight bogus counts:

– "Conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States"

– Three counts of "Attempt to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States

– Conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles

– Attempt to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles

– Conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the United States (and)

– Attempt to kill officers and employees of the United States"

On May 20, The New York Times described "a painstaking investigation that began in June 2008 involving an FBI agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America." No explanation was given about entrapment. Instead The Times highlighted "some of the most significant allegations of domestic terrorism in some time" and expressions of relief by local political leaders, including Charles Schumer, the senator from AIPAC, saying:

"If there can be any good news from this terror scare it’s that this group was relatively unsophisticated, infiltrated early, and not connected to another terrorist group. This incident shows that we must always be vigilant against terrorism – foreign or domestic." The senator said nothing about four innocent men, targeted and framed for a supposed terror plot.

If convicted on all charges, the men face possible life sentences. No trial date so far has been set. All four are in Westchester County Jail without bail.

The North Carolina 7

On July 27, dozens of heavily armed Swat and hostage rescue team members arrested seven North Carolina men on terrorist-related charges, six US citizens and one permanent resident.

The same day Justice Department press release cited Daniel Patrick Boyd, his two sons, Zakariya and Dylan, Hysen Sherifi, Anes Subasic, Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, and Ziyad Yaghi on charges of "conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to murder, kidnap, main and injure persons abroad." Allegations only were provided. Precise details were omitted.

Earlier on July 22, the federal grand jury indictment listed seven counts:

– "conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists;

– conspiracy to murder, kidnap, main, and injure persons in a foreign country;

– receiving a firearm through interstate commerce;

– possession of a firearm to be used for a crime of violence;

– selling or otherwise disposing of a firearm and ammunition to a person knowing and having reasonable cause to believe was convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;" and

– two counts of false statements.

The DOJ also alleged that "Daniel Boyd is a veteran of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan who, over the past three years, has conspired with others in this country to recruit and help young men travel overseas in order to kill." Again, no evidence was cited, just supposition-based accusations.

The indictment claimed that from 1989 – 1992, Boyd got "violent jihad" training abroad and "allegedly fought in Afghanistan" against the Soviets. Then from November 2006 through July 2009, he and the other defendants "conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists, including currency, training, transportation and personnel" along with the other charges in the indictment. As part of the "conspiracy," they "believe(d) that violent jihad was a personal religious obligation," and they "were willing to die as martyrs." An eighth unnamed suspect is also being sought, a man believed to have traveled to Pakistan last year, for what purpose wasn’t indicated.

According to US Attorney George EB Holding:

"These charges hammer home the point that terrorists and their supporters are not confined to the remote regions of some far away land but can grow and fester right her at home. Terrorists and their supporters are relentless and constant in their efforts to hurt and kill innocent people across the globe. We must be equally relentless and constant in our efforts to stop them."

Six of the seven men are being held at a Farmville, VA detention facility. When brought to trial, they’ll face life sentences if convicted on the most serious charges. Yet according to The New York Times:

DOJ officials "said that the men charged on (July 22) were not seen as serious terrorist threats to the United States or American interests abroad, and that there were no indications of ties to Al Qaeda or other militant groups."

The claimed evidence relates solely to concern that they were "amassing a sizable number of automatic weapons, (the fact that Boyd had) foreign fighter experience, (and has) a network of contacts overseas, intending to recruit others who were on the fence."

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano cited the arrests as proof of increased "homegrown terrorism."

On August 5, AP reported that:

"Federal authorities said Tuesday (August 4) the accused ringleader of a group of North Carolina terrorism suspects talked about loving jihad, fighting for Allah and loathing a US military presence at Muslim holy sites."

Writer Mike Baker said FBI Special Agent Michael Sutton claimed Boyd wanted the defendants "to engage in jihad, train on firearms and travel overseas. Sutton said Boyd repeatedly spoke of armor-piercing ammunition and a year ago told a witness about his dislike of the US military in some Middle Eastern lands." According to Boyd, "They’re over there killing our brothers."

In an August 5 Jewish World Review article, self-styled anti-terrorism expert and notorious Islamophobe Steven Emerson played up the prosecution charges of another homegrown terrorist plot using secretly (and perhaps illegally) FBI taped conversations and comments "reported by witnesses," including a voice identified as Boyd saying:

"If I don’t leave this country soon, I am going to make jihad right here in America (and) Allah knows I love jihad."

Emerson said the FBI "found a fatwa, or religious edict, in Boyd’s house saying Muslims have ‘an individual duty to kill Americans and their allies."

Both Emerson and the Justice Department are notorious for manipulating, doctoring, or inventing evidence to incite fear and intimidate juries to convict.

Yet this entire case appears as bogus as others, and this one is even stranger. Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and Pakistani ISI spent billions recruiting and training Afghan mujahedeen (including Osama bin Laden) to wage jihad against the Soviets. Ronald Reagan called them "freedom fighters." Today, they’re "homegrown terrorists" with no apparent proof they plan crimes, just suspicions based on the flimsiest suppositions.

As for Daniel Patrick Boyd, the so-called ringleader, he arrived in Pakistan after the Soviets’ February 1989 withdrawal. Yet the CIA continued to support a civil war against the Kabul government, and beginning in 1977 began working with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man "responsible for murdering hundreds of dedicated resistance fighters, political workers, and intellectuals (as well as being) a leading figure in the heroin trade," according to Ralph McGehee, a former CIA veteran (from 1952 – 1977) and critic.

In 1977, Hekmatyar founded the Hezb-e-Islami Party of Islam. The CIA backed it with material support and weapons. Boyd arrived in Peshwar, Pakistan in 1989, apparently to work for a Muslim relief organization connected to the movement, not to train and fight as a mujahedeen. But in any event, Washington and the CIA backed the party and his activities.

Now he and the others are called jihadists, the DOJ citing Boyd, his son Zakariya, Yaghi, and Sherifi’s overseas travels as more proof. In March 2006, Boyd and his sons went to Gaza, then to Israel in June 2007 to visit Muslim holy sites. The DOJ claims the first trip was to meet with Palestinians who "believed that violent jihad was a personal religious obligation," and the second to wage "violent jihad," yet no evidence of specific crimes were mentioned or intent to commit them.

In October 2006, Yaghi, it was alleged, went to Jordan for the same reason, and so did Sherifi in July 2008 on a trip to Kosovo after which he "returned to North Carolina in April 2009, for the purpose of soliciting funds and personnel to support the mujahedeen" – the same fighters America backed in Afghanistan, then did again with KLA extremists in NATO/America’s war against Milovesic and Serbia.

Overall, the indictment is as bogus as others. It’s based on suppositions and unfounded claims but no clear evidence of intent to commit or support violent crimes. The defendants are being used to instill fear, justify the Iraq occupation, the escalated offensive in Afghanistan and spillover into Pakistan, and expanded US military presence globally, including on US streets if ordered. It’s happening at a time when we’re all as vulnerable as the Newburgh 4 and North Carolina 7.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday – Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14605

Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman

by Chalmers Johnson

Global Research, August 10, 2009

Tomgram.com – 2009-07-30

 

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past — including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush’s imperial adventures — if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history — to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories — the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which — just as British imperial officials did — has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

"If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world’s sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service’s focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:

"Pakistan’s army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch… from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan’s army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan’s consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Obama’s mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland’s continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."**

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

Chalmers Johnson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Chalmers Johnson

 

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You’ll never think the same way again. . . The Revelation

by William Bowles

Global Research, July 27, 2009

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I have been reading, with much despair and a deal of consternation, the torrent of ‘analysis’ coming out of ‘left’ field about which, if any, side to support in the ongoing struggles in Iran and, at the end of the day, a good deal more is revealed about the ‘left’ in the West than the situation in Iran.

Typically, the ‘left’ has much ‘advice’ to offer Iran, yet the real issue for us, here in the ‘developed’ world is what are we going to do about our governments. Yet such arrogance is not new, it has its roots in the ideology of racism which unfortunately permeates all of us here in the so-called developed world. We look outward instead of inward, where the issues we really need to confront, reside. Let the Iranian people get on with sorting out their own ruling class, they don’t need us to ‘guide’ them.

It is imperative to separate the issue of Western involvement in events from the distinctly Iranian issues of class, religion, gender and so forth, that regardless, have their causes (and solutions) in Iran. This is not say that Western involvement/interference doesn’t affect events and end up being part of the process, but then this is precisely the problem we in the West have to confront: How to separate out the effects of our incessant meddling in other countries’ affairs from the indigenous processes? So, whatever happened to analysis, class, economic, social and otherwise?

The election It’s pretty obvious that regardless of any fiddling that took place, Ahmadinejad ‘won’. I put it in quotes because the real power in Iran, the entrenched theocracy, controls who can and cannot contest elections. Nevertheless it is apparent that Ahmadinejad garnered the most votes even in an otherwise engineered election.

That said, here in the West where everything is boiled down to simplistic headlines that hide the complexity of the underlying events, it is even more imperative that when the ‘left’ does throw its two-pennyworth into the mix, that we take care not to project our own desires (and misconceptions) onto a situation fraught with danger given the central role that Iran continues to play in the West’s ‘Great Game’, just as it has done for well over a century (See my review of F. William Engdahl’s excellent book ‘A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order’ for more on the disastrous effects of Western intervention in Iran, and most important, how Iran fits into Western strategic and economic interests, that form the background to the current situation).

“The early days of summer of 2009 proved quite stormy in the Islamic Republic of Iran in terms of politics. Almost the entire politically vocal population of the 70-million strong Iran, that’s 40 million people, took part in the election of a new president. It is for the first time in Iran’s history that a fully-fledged election campaign has been launched in the country, with the main opponents, old rivals in the struggle for power since the 1980s, namely the incumbent leader (rahbar) Ali Khamenei and Mir Hossein Mousavi, then Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had an opportunity to rally their supporters.” — Iran: the new elite By Vladimir YURTAYEV, 2 July, 2009, Strategic Culture Foundation.

What we (conveniently) forget is the fact that given the total domination by the Western media of events, no matter their location, it is virtually impossible for us to get a handle on exactly what happens, almost anywhere (for more on this see the excellent analysis of ‘news’ coverage in the West by Jeremy R. Hammond, ‘The Case of the ‘Fatwa’ to Rig Iran’s Election’). You need to spend a lot of time digging around to understand what’s really going on, even those engineered by Western interests, let alone the Machiavellian goings on of the Iranian state (just as they are everywhere).

But for the left, here in the West, it’s not an issue of whether to support Ahmadinejad or not, never mind the ‘opposition’ (an opposition that was allowed to contest the election, and as such is every bit a part of the ruling autocracy). After all, Ahmadinejad is not exactly a leftie (in spite of at least one writer, calling him such). No, the real issues transcend Iran and its election.

Yurtayev makes the following interesting observations,

“Meanwhile things in and around Iran are moving in groove, with the partisan media are working off what money they got to (what some quarters thought) spin-doctor a new president, although the previous one has been re-elected. 200 protesters are presented as if they were 200,000. Almost 13 million people make their home in Tehran, so even one million is just one sixth of the city’s grown-up population. The others voted against the protesters. The whole thing boils down to the following: part of the old revolutionary elite that’s taken possession of economic profits gave way to the new elite following M. Ahmadinejad’s win in 2005, an elite that’s emerged on the basis of the Army and that’s relying on the other part of the old revolutionary elite, related to rahbar Ali Khamenei. The problem is whether the new old elite will manage to persuade the opponents not to take all of their money out of the country or not.”

There are two things going on here, the first is Iran from the inside. We forget that inside Iran, the vast majority of people have other things on their minds than what the West says or advocates (another example of our damn arrogance). We assume that all or most Iranians view events just as we do and afford them the same importance, but forget that most of our contacts with Iran are effectively in and of the West, even those originating with Iranians (see Hammond above for examples). All the comments and opinions we get exposed to are designed for the Western mind(set), largely reinforcing existing stereotypes.

As Yurtayev points out, in Tehran, the majority supported Ahmadinejad. But what we saw on our tv sets were vast crowds, whether for or against Ahmadinejad, who knows? The media didn’t tell us or they misled us into thinking that they were mostly composed of Mousavi’s posse. One thing is clear: there all kinds of internal power plays going on in Iran that are tangenital to relations with the US and the nukes slash terrorism nonsense. If I were a student of Iranian politics, I could figure out what kinds of interests were involved and make some educated guesses at where its all headed, but I’m not. In any case, what we think of events in Iran are neither here nor there.

What is important is Iran in the international arena, as an ‘object’ of Western interests, whether economic, political, strategic, it inhabits a media ‘space’ created specifically for its Western audience. You know the stuff, ‘inscrutable’, ‘evil’ even, but definately beyond our ken and in need of ‘translation’ for us dummies.

Thus for all of us here in the West, let alone the lefties, it is vital to separate the two, after all we can support Iran’s independence and autonomy without supporting or opposing Ahmadinejad.

Let the Iranians get on with their own struggles and let us support them by concentrating on stopping ‘our’ governments interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations like Iran.

William Bowles is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by William Bowles

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