Western Values: destroy, abandon at sea

Unconscionable failure to bear consequences of Western-made disasters

Excerpt, editing by Carolyn Bennett 

“The country of my birth, already so damaged, is now crippled by fear of all-out civil war,” writer and lecturer Sami Ramadani warned in March of last year. But, he said, “In the people there is hope.”

FLASHBACK Iraq

Continuing, compounding disaster

“On the eve of the 2003 invasion,” Sami Ramadani writes in quoting his words from 11 years ago: “‘In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself:

 ·         …it backed Saddam [Hussein]’s party, the Ba’ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats;  

·         …it backed the Ba’ath party in 1968 when Saddam [Hussein] was installed as vice-president;  

·         …it helped him [Saddam Hussein] and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement;  

·         …it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980;  

·         …it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he [Saddam Hussein] was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs;   

·         …it encouraged him [Saddam Hussein] in 1990 to invade Kuwait…; 

·         …it backed him [Saddam Hussein] in 1991 when [George H. W.] Bush suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan…; and  

·         …it backed him [Saddam Hussein] as the ‘lesser evil’ from March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions and the policy of ‘containment’.

“…When it was no longer in their interests to back him [Saddam Hussein], the United States and the United Kingdom drowned Iraq in blood.

“That war has still not been consigned to history – not for the people of Iraq or the region.”

The total dead, wounded, displaced, traumatized – has never received a full count and countless thousands of Iraqis are missing. Of a million internally displaced people (IDPs) and another four million refugees, only one million have been able to return to their homeland. 

And the United States and UK “still refuse to accept the harmful consequences of radioactive depleted uranium munitions.” US officials claim not to have “used chemical weapons in Fallujah – but Iraqis see the evidence: …poisoned environment, cancer and deformities.” 

In one of the richest countries on the planet, a “lack of electricity and clean water and other essential services continue to hit millions of impoverished and unemployed people.

“Women and children pay the highest price. Women’s rights and human rights in general are suppressed daily.”

Ramifications of the US-led war on Iraq – “an unmitigated disaster with genocidal dimensions for the Iraqi people” – continue “to fuel conflicts and sow discord in the region.” In its earlier atrocities, invasions and provocations, Sami Ramadani continues:  

· …the US-led occupying authorities nurtured a ‘political process’ and a constitution designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord.  

·         Having failed to crush the resistance to direct occupation, they [US-led occupying authorities] resorted to divide-and-rule to keep their foothold in Iraq. 

·         Using torture, sectarian death squads and billions of dollars, the occupation has succeeded in weakening the social fabric and elevating a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day, salivating at the prospect of acquiring a bigger share of Iraq’s natural resources, which are mostly mortgaged to foreign oil companies and construction firms. 

·         Warring sectarian and ethnic forces, either allied with or fearing US influence, dominate the dysfunctional and corrupt Iraqi state institutions, but the US embassy in Baghdad – the biggest in the world – still calls the shots.  

·         Iraq is not really a sovereign state, languishing under the punitive Chapter VII of the UN charter.

“The northwestern region of Iraq borders Syria and it is where General Petraeus [retired US military officer, public official, former CIA director David Howell Petraeus] funded the Sahwa ‘awakening’ militias in order to crush resistance in that region. Al-Qaida-type terrorists are also active in the area. They are natural allies of the terrorist al-Nusra Front of Syria.

“The de facto alliance between the US, Turkey, Israel and militants that has appeared in Syria is being mirrored in Iraq, with the additional ingredient of Saddamist remnants. US pragmatism knows no bounds!”

Sami Ramadani concludes his 2013 article

“The immediate prospects are frightening but I write with the image of a brave Iraqi child imprinted in my mind.

“I saw him in Baghdad in July 2003. He was shouting angrily, waving a clenched fist of defiance at a US soldier whose machine gun was menacingly aimed at him.

“With that free spirit and with solidarity among the people – a democratic and free Iraq shall surely rise strong and prosperous.”

 

Today's Europe to Migrants

RT reports

  

Failure to bear consequences for Western-created crises, consequences

Since the year 2000, an estimated “22,000 migrants” have died trying to cross from the Middle East and Africa via the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. But instead of rescue missions, Europeans have come up with “a new limited European Union border security operation ‘Triton’” to be set against migrants on November 1.

Britain wages endless wars and oppression in the Middle East and Africa yet rejects people who attempt to escape their suffering (as does the United States). “The British Refugee Council has railed against the UK government’s decision to “‘withdraw help’” from migrants, saying such callousness “will lead to more people ‘needlessly and shamefully dying on Europe’s doorstep.’”

 

Western Values

“‘People fleeing atrocities will not stop coming if we stop throwing them life rings,’” said the British Refugee Council’s chief executive. To a person running for his or her life, from a country in flames, “‘boarding a rickety boat in Libya,’” for example, seems a “rational decision.’”

 

Yet “‘the British Government seems oblivious to the fact that the world is in the grip of the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War.…” The answer to migration is not to build higher fortress walls in Europe but “‘to provide more safe and legal channels for people to access protection.’”

Sources and notes

“Iraq’s pain has only intensified since 2003,” March 14, 2013, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/14/iraq-pain-2003-civil-war

Political exiled from Saddam’s regime Sami Ramadani was also a campaigner against US-led sanctions against, invasion and occupation of Iraq. The Iraq native is a lecturer in sociology and writer on current affairs in Iraq and the Middle East. He is also a member of the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition-UK. Twitter at @SamiRamadani1

‘Shameful’: Rights groups slam UK scrapping of Mediterranean migrant rescues,”

October 28, 2014, http://rt.com/uk/200075-uk-rescue-mediterranean-migrants/

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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“Cruel and Unusual” remains unconscionably cruel

Death Penalty
by whatever name

US High Court Justices’ 1970s-1990s arguments still apply to a “legal” barbarity

Edited by Carolyn Bennett

“The question does the system accurately, consistently determine which defendants ‘deserve’ to die can … [never] be answered in the affirmative.”

Capital Punishment USA

“

 Brennan

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity; but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment. Therefore, the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment” [William J. Brennan]

Justice Brennan

William Joseph Brennan Jr. (b. April 25, 1906 – d. July 24, 1997), appointed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 until 1990. He was known for “outspoken progressive views.”  Justice Brennan authored landmark case opinions including “Baker v. Carr establishing the ‘one person, one vote’ principle; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that required ‘actual malice’ in a libel suit against those deemed ‘public figures.’ He has been described as historically one of the Court’s “most influential members.”

US Constitution
a Work in Progress

“

The government … devised [by the drafters of the Constitution of the United States] was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights we hold as fundamental today.…

“Some may more quietly commemorate the suffering, struggle, and sacrifice that triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document, and observe the anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled.

Supreme Court of the United States 

“I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights.” [Thurgood Marshall on the occasion of U.S. Constitution’s bicentennial (1987)]

Justice Marshall

Marshall had a long record of strong support for U.S. Constitutional protection of human rights and the two justices, Marshall and Brennan, were allies on the High Court in opposing the death penalty.

Brennan and Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled four years later that the death penalty was constitutional in some circumstances.

Marshall 

Thurgood Marshall (b. July 2, 1908 – d. January 24, 1993), appointed by US President Lyndon Baines Johnson, served on the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991.  Before coming to the high Court Marshall was a lawyer who was best known for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education, a decision that desegregated public schools. He served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (appointed by President John F. Kennedy) and then as U.S. Solicitor General (appointed by President Johnson)

“

Those who wrote the Eighth Amendment knew what price their forebears had paid for a system based, not on equal justice, but on discrimination.

“In those days the target was not the blacks or the poor, but the dissenters, those who opposed absolutism in government, who struggled for a parliamentary regime, and who opposed governments’ recurring efforts to foist a particular religion on the people. Id., at 155-163.

“But the tool of capital punishment was used with vengeance against the opposition and those unpopular with the regime. One cannot read this history without realizing that the desire for equality was reflected in the ban against ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ contained in the Eighth Amendment.

“In a Nation committed to equal protection of the laws, there is no permissible ‘caste’ aspect of law enforcement. Yet we know that the discretion of judges and juries in imposing the death penalty enables the penalty to be selectively applied, feeding prejudices against the accused if he is poor and despised, and lacking political clout, or if he is a member of a suspect or unpopular minority, and saving those who by social position may be in a more protected position.

“In ancient Hindu law, a Brahman was exempt from capital punishment, and under that law, ‘generally, in the law books, punishment increased in severity as social status diminished.’ We have, I fear, taken in practice the same position, partially as a result of making the death penalty discretionary and partially as a result of the ability of the rich to purchase the services of the most respected and most resourceful legal talent in the Nation.

White

“The high service rendered by the ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment is to require legislatures to write penal laws that are evenhanded, non-selective, and non-arbitrary, and to require judges to see to it that general laws are not applied sparsely, selectively, and spottily to unpopular groups.” [U.S. Supreme Court FURMAN v. GEORGIA, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) 408 U.S. 238 

Justice White

Byron Raymond White (b. June 8, 1917 – d. April 15, 2002), appointed by US President John F. Kennedy, served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1962 until 1993. White took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty – though he was not against the death penalty in all forms – and “was one of five justices who voted in Furman v. Georgia (1972) to strike down several state capital punishment statutes, voicing concern over the arbitrary nature in which the death penalty was administered. The Furman decision ended capital punishment in the United States until 1977.”

“

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.”

Stevens

“Arbitrariness in the imposition of the death penalty is exactly the type of thing the Constitution prohibits, as Justice Lewis Powell, Justice Potter Stewart, and I explained in our joint opinion in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). … Today one of the sources of such arbitrariness is the decision of state prosecutors—which is not subject to review—to seek a sentence of death. It is a discretionary call that may be influenced by the prosecutor’s estimate of the impact of his decision on his chances for reelection or for election to higher office.” [Justice John Paul Stevens]

Justice Stevens

John Paul Stevens (b. April 20, 1920), appointed by US President Gerald Ford, served on the Supreme Court of the United States from December 19, 1975, until June 29, 2010. During his tenure, Stevens served with three Chief Justices: Warren E. Burger, William Rehnquist, and John G. Roberts.

“

I yield to no one in the depth of my distaste, antipathy, and, indeed, abhorrence, for the death penalty, with all its aspects of physical distress and fear and of moral judgment exercised by finite minds.

“… Even if we can feel confident that these actors will fulfill their roles to the best of their human ability, our collective conscience will remain uneasy. Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, […] and despite the effort of the States and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake.”

Blackmun

[After many years’ trying] “…to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor,” he resolves, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.…

It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies.

The basic question—does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants ‘deserve’ to die?—cannot be answered in the affirmative.

Justice Blackmun

Harold Andrew Blackmun (b. November 12, 1908 – d. March 4, 1999), appointed by US President Richard Nixon, served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 until 1994.

Sources and notes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Brennan,_Jr.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=408&invol=238#f158

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall

FURMAN v. GEORGIA CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA No. 69-5003 Argued January 17, 1972, Decided June 29, 1972: Mr. Justice Douglas, Mr. Justice Brennan, Mr. Justice Stewart, Mr. Justice White, and Mr. Justice Marshall have filed separate opinions in support of the judgments.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_White

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Stevens

“Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: The Evolving Jurisprudence of Justice Harry Blackmun” – Justice Harry Blackmun’s long struggle to reconcile his concern for the individual, his respect for legislative and judicial process, and his awareness of the fallibility of individuals and institutions formed a jurisprudence that continues to instruct” by Melissa M. Weldon and Paul M. Shapiro, article posted February 7, 2013, http://mnbenchbar.com/2013/02/tinkering-with-the-machinery-of-death/

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES No. 93-7054 BRUCE EDWIN CALLINS, PETITIONER v. JAMES A. COLLINS, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, INSTITUTIONAL DIVISION on petition for writ of certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the fifth circuit [February 22, 1994] Justice Blackmun , dissenting.

“On February 23, 1994, at approximately 1:00 a.m., Bruce Edwin Callins will be executed by the State of Texas. Intravenous tubes attached to his arms will carry the instrument of death, a toxic fluid designed specifically for the purpose of killing human beings. The witnesses, standing a few feet away, will behold Callins, no longer a defendant, an appellant, or a petitioner, but a man, strapped to a gurney, and seconds away from extinction.” http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-7054.ZA1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Blackmun

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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“Racism” slur serves regress never progress

Relations among human beings require collective human effort

By Carolyn Bennett

Addendum to thoughts by Mac Donald and Siegel

Some Americans feel that “the Government” is an external entity that is “out to get them.” Some Americans feel that the United States (of) America is an external entity that is “out to get them.” In each case, each feels separate and apart, alien and self-alienating, although neither would take personal responsibility for alienating self.

These thoughts surface though not for the first time after reading recent articles by the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal writers Heather Mac Donald (“Ferguson’s Unasked Questions: In the Missouri city and elsewhere, the media clings to predetermined conclusions,” October 6, 2014) and Fred Siegel (“Ferguson Fury: Activists, Journalists Stuck in 1960s Racial Resentments,” August 19, 2014). Siegel exposes the debilitating “grudge” mentality and Mac Donald the equally counterproductive “race-racist-racism” mantra.  

 

I

 was lucky, I guess, because as an adult and an older person, I realize that I never felt alienated either from government or from the USA. I was raised pledging my allegiance to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands; and though I was born and raised in a racially segregated U.S. South, I was raised neither on “racial inferiority” (or superiority) nor on race (racial) resentment. These pathologies never took root in my character. I grew more and more to focus on my own “mission,” so to speak, my own work; and when the call came in 1960s asking what I could do for America, I finished my college credential and answered by joining the U.S. Peace Corps and serving as a teacher in West Africa. There began my worldview.

I have seen the resentment that Fred Siegel observes and have myself fairly recently asked a black woman who had expressed disdain for a baseball team that she said had been slow in hiring black men the questions MacDonald asks, “How many qualified black people applied?” How many of those applicants were turned down? The woman didn’t know but she still held on to a grudge. I told her I cannot afford to hold on to resentments because it hurts me, does injury to my insides. It reinforces pathology or at least an unhealthy psychology and so unhealthy human relations.

In any situation there are always many variables that a reasonable person – not blinded by resentment (re-feeling of perceived or actual wrongs) – can see. But none are so blind, as the saying goes, as those who “will not see” and or say out loud the truth. There is another saying I like: “fix the problem, not the blame.” I believe Americans in general and black Americans in particular concerning the case at issue tend to fail solutions while wallowing in blame.

I

 am also of the opinion that “racism” is too easy a response and it accomplishes nothing except counter-resentment, flashes of anger – how dare you call me a racist. I have wondered how resentful black people would feel if someone flung an epithet at them. This is another delusional “apart from” but people are people regardless to their color or race or nationality or creed, et cetera.

The Trayvon Martin/Michael Brown cases and fallout – incidents, confrontations, call them what you like (and I agree that media histrionics distracted, drove a wedge between human beings and cast aside actual facts on the ground) – might never have happened if people in communities had as a matter of routine practiced “community.” These things don’t spring up all of a sudden. They simmer and fester and one day their toxicity breaks into the open. If Americans joined as Americans, they could solve human relations issues together before and prevent them from boiling over.

Is this too much trouble? Is it too much trouble to assemble in a church basement or public hall and reason together? Is it too much – as Mac Donald says – to even register and vote? (I don’t remember hearing that voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer went around yelling “racists” and “racism.” Black people, as Mac Donald implies, are no more sacrosanct than are white people, no better or worse as police officers or public officials.  Name-calling gets you nowhere – unless your aim is to get nowhere except backward.

My final point is that there is among United States Americans of all stripes a character or culture or strain of violence that manifests itself in foreign and domestic relations.

If we speak of killings in our cities and towns and on our college campuses, we cannot divorce these from the evidence in U.S. officials’ choice of violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and other places. We cannot divorce sanctions and drone warfare abroad from an actor’s, a football player’s, a soldier’s violence against women.

We can talk about these things. But so long as we see ourselves as apart from America and Americans and government and or apart from peoples in other lands; so long as we choose to hold on to and deepen resentments or play one against another – one or another race or sect or ethnic group or nation – we can never solve our problems as people, as human beings.

That’s my take on an issue that plays out again and again in dark pageantry, in show, in media frenzy; when what we need to apply is an all-encompassing humanity (this foundation of our equality) and soul-searching, seriously self-reflecting honesty.

I

’ve got another thought that I often tell people. If all you’ve got to commend you is race or color (characteristics you had absolutely no part in creating), then you don’t have much or even anything going for you.

As to those who feel apart from America and or apart from government, we ARE America and we ARE government, from local to federal levels.

One of our serious problems is that we are ignorant; some of us are deliberately, obliviously ignorant. I like that quote attributed to our fourth president, James Madison, and inscribed on the Madison Building of the Library of Congress in Washington:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

What is the meaning of “progressive”?  This is not a bad word, in my view. We have come a long way since Madison’s time but we cannot fulfill the promise and potential of America unless and until ALL of us together own this land and participate fully in its civic and social, ethical and human uplift, its substantive progress.

Carolyn LaDelle Bennett, author of

Unconscionable (published in September 2014)

No Land an Island No People Apart (published in 2012

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent books in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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Scahill talks wars, backfires, beneficiaries and Team Blackwater-Clinton-Obama

US in Iraq

UNCONSCIONABLE US FOREIGN RELATIONS

Editing by Carolyn Bennett 

Journalist and author Jeremy Scahill is founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and  book and documentary Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. 

Scahill appeared today on the New York-based Democracy Now program. These thoughts were particularly on point.  

Pakistanis protest
USA

Deniability and Impunity

Currently at trial on charges of murder and manslaughter are four former Blackwater operatives who were “allegedly involved in a 2007 massacre” in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead when a Blackwater unit indiscriminately opened fire. The four mercenaries have been charged with killing 14 of the 17 Iraqis.

In answering Amy Goodman’s question on this matter, Jeremy Scahill said the incident at Nisour Square in Baghdad “was the worst massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of mercenaries (private contractors) that we know of in Iraq.” But, he said, “It is always the people down the chain that face the consequences.”

Pakistanis protest
USA

While the four accused “should be prosecuted, should be convicted, for what they did and should be in prison, the leadership of Blackwater should also be there.”  Blackwater founder and chief operating officer Erik Prince held these positions when Blackwater was “essentially ‘Murder Incorporated’ in Iraq and when there was a company environment” in which mercenaries “were encouraged to view every Iraqi as the enemy” and when Blackwater operatives “committed many massacres” beyond the massacre at Nisour Square. Scahill takes the view that Prince should also stand trial.

Wikipedia note: The American private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince was originally named “Blackwater.” In 2007 the company gained notoriety “when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad [Iraq].” In 2009 Blackwater was renamed “Xe Services.” In late 2010, a group of private investors purchased the company and installed a board of directors and new senior management. In 2011 the former Blackwater assumed the name “Academi.” The company founder, Erik Prince, reportedly “retained the rights to the name Blackwater and has no affiliation with Academi.” In 2014, the company became a division of Constellis Holdings along with Triple Canopy and other security companies that were part of the Constellis Group as the result of an acquisition.

Despite the notoriety of this ever name-changing private military company, the United States federal government continues to employ and partner with it. “The Obama administration contracted the group to provide services for the CIA for $250 million.” Academi subsidiary International Development Solutions in 2013 “received an approximately $92 million contract for State Department security guards.”

Scahill summed up, “Until we as a society stop cutting off who’s held accountable at the lowest ranks, nothing is ever going to fundamentally change.” In other words, no one should be above the law.

Dark Shadows

Libyans protest
USA

As if current President Barack Obama’s ruthless performance were not enough, shadowing in the wings toward the next U.S. presidency is a character “more hawkish” than the current second-term president who, Scahill says, “has emerged as a pretty significant hawk … [in] a totally militarized presidency.”

But the Clintons, Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, “are two of the most fierce projectors of the politics of the American empire and they [enjoy] very close relationships with some of the most nefarious characters from the [George W., Jeb and George H.W.] Bush family.”  The families together constitute something like a monarchy, Scahill said. (Ah, the perks of cronyism, nepotism, corruption, Yale, Harvard, and legacy hires.)

When she was head of the State Department of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton “acted as though she was also sort of Secretary of Defense.” During her tenure as Secretary, the “State Department,” he reports, “was deeply involved with plotting covert action around the world, using the State Department as cover for CIA operations.”

Hillary Clinton, Scahill said, “is a fierce neoliberal who believes in backing up the so-called ‘hidden hand of the free market’ with merciless, iron-fisted military policies.”

Libyans protest
USA

Backfire

“For many, many decades … U.S. policy has been its own worst enemy in one sense – We have created the very threats we claim to be fighting.”

Every time we kill civilians in drone strikes, Scahill said, “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula becomes stronger in the sense that they have a greater propaganda movement that they can roll out.” But beyond this obvious creation and perpetuation of enemies and violence, the big beneficiary of war is “the war industry.…

Middle East

“Under Mr. Transformative Presidency Barack Obama,” Scahill said, “the administration has been an incredibly great friend to the war industry,” which is the greatest beneficiary of the Obama policy. 

Middle East
Camps

Every Tomahawk cruise missile launched – and coming soon a next-generation- longer-airborne-sustaining jet-propelled drones – ensure that major beneficiary (and major political campaign financing) military industrialist Lockheed Martin and like brands never stop making “a killing off killing.”

Sources and notes

“Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s Orwellian War in Iraq: We Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting,” October 3, 2014,  http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/3/jeremy_scahill_on_obamas_orwellian_war

Journalist and author Jeremy Scahill is founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept; author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and the documentary of the same title, both released in 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Scahill

Blackwater brief at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Blackwater Baghdad shootings at Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “On September 16, 2007, Blackwater Security Consulting (since renamed Academi) military contractors shot at Iraqi civilians killing 17 and injuring 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad. The killings outraged Iraqis and strained relations between Iraq and Washington. Blackwater guards claimed that the convoy was ambushed and that they fired at the attackers in defense of the convoy. The Iraqi government and Iraqi police investigator Faris Saadi Abdul alleged that the killings were unprovoked. The next day, Blackwater Worldwide’s license to operate in Iraq was temporarily revoked.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Baghdad_shootings

The Clintons

William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton (originally named William Jefferson Blythe III) was the 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001) who in his second term (1998) became the second U.S. president to be impeached.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton was a lawyer by training who became a member of the U.S. Senate (2001–09) and a U.S. Secretary of State (2009-2013). As wife of the 42nd president of the United States, she was “First Lady” (1993-2001).

Britannica and Wikipedia biographical briefs on the Clintons

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent books in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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