Chris Hedges Interviewed by Rob Kall

Source:
www.opednews.com

Afghanistan: America's Longest War... and counting

Continuing the Conversation; Moyers/Becevich

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04092010/bacevichwatch.html

Iraq and Afghanistan wars; where's the accountability?

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.
Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, in Washington, DC. Joining us now from Florida is Paul Craig Roberts. He was an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department under the Reagan administration. He was an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. Welcome, Mr. Roberts. When President Obama decided not to prosecute, there were obviously a lot of considerations, both domestic politics and otherwise. But certainly one of the critical pieces of it, if you're going to prosecute, it seems to me that you start with the question of was the Iraq war illegal, was international law violated. And if in fact the Iraq war was waged on deliberate misinformation, it's hard to think of a crime that would be more serious than that. But if Obama were to open that can of worms that the Iraq war is illegal, then the continued occupation of Iraq's illegal, and it puts the entire US foreign policy in the region in a completely different light. So speak about President Obama, his view of the world as articulated in the campaign, this decision not to prosecute, and essentially not just continuing Bush policy in Iraq, but now we can see, more or less, a Bush policy in Afghanistan.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, ECONOMIST AND COLUMNIST: Yes. Well, I can't say why he made the decision he made. All I can say is that the consequence is that we now have a precedent that neither the president nor the vice president are subject to law, they're outside the law, they can violate the law with impunity. This is a [inaudible] development. I can't think of anything worse to happen to the United States than to establish legally that the rulers are not subject to law. The entire history of liberty in the Anglo-American world, it was to tie the rulers down and make them subject to law, to bring the king under the law. So now we've reversed this thousand-year struggle and we've made the rulers unaccountable to law. This is a terrible thing. I'm sure there are all kinds of political and other arguments made, all sorts of interest groups, but this is the outcome. But there was really no discussion of this. And what this shows is that the American people, the political people, the legal professions, that what was really at stake—they had no idea what was really at stake. And to say that some silly war, which actually probably was an act of treason, since it was apparently based on deception—. You know, the British right now are holding these inquiries. They already know that it was based on deception, and they're trying to find out how they can prevent that from happening in the future.

JAY: Part of what's come out early in the inquiry is that it was very clear that Blair and Bush had decided to invade Iraq as early, I believe, as 2002, and the idea that weapons of mass destruction would be more a rationale than an actual reason was clear as far back as 2002. But what do you make of the lack of American media coverage of the British inquiry?

ROBERTS: Well, what does the American media cover? If you're talking about the newspapers and the television, they don't cover anything. So we don't want the people to know that the war was contrived and that some other agenda was being served that we still have not been told. You know, we don't really know—the government's never told us why they invaded Iraq. They lied to us and said, oh, he has weapons of mass destruction, and yet the record is clear that the government [inaudible] did not have these weapons. This is a known fact now. We still don't know why they did it, and they're not going to tell us. And so probably if Obama was trying to gin up the war in Afghanistan, he doesn't want a lot of news coverage of the British inquiry into how Blair deceived his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide cover for Bush's illegal war in Iraq.

JAY: How did you respond to President Obama's speech the other night on Afghanistan?

ROBERTS: Well, I didn't bother to listen to it. I mean, I already knew what he was going to do. [inaudible] interesting thing, because here we have millions of Americans, on that very day, lost their health insurance subsidies from COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985]. So all of a sudden, millions of Americans, no health coverage that day. Or 24 hours before, The Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement to the newspaper, listing all of the metro area foreclosures. In Michigan, 48 percent of the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. And yet Obama thinks we have money to escalate an eight-year-old war that serves no American purpose. You know, it's like the British ambassador Craig Murray said: what the war is about is protecting the pipeline route that the Americans wanted through Afghanistan so they could get the Central Asian gas out without it passing through Iran and Russia. So is this why we should be in Afghanistan? And how do we pay for this? Well, just the other day, Obie, the Democrat chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obie, says, "Oh, we're going to put an additional progressive income tax on every American earning more than $30,000 a year." So I call this trickle-up economics, where you tax the little guy and give it to [inaudible] companies and to the oil companies or the energy companies who would benefit from the pipeline.

JAY: But what do you make of the administration's argument that, one, al-Qaeda's a threat, a vital national security threat, and more than that—?

ROBERTS: That's a total lie.

JAY: And the other piece of it is the issue of dissolution of Pakistan. So what do you make of all that?

ROBERTS: Pakistan is falling apart because we forced our puppet government to attack its own people. All this stuff about al-Qaeda is a lie. It's a hoax.

JAY: Why? Why do you say so?

ROBERTS: Because it doesn't exist in any way that it means anything to us.

JAY: But what's the evidence for that? Because—.

ROBERTS: But what's the evidence that it means anything?

JAY: Well, the evidence—they say the evidence is 9/11, the attacks on the US embassies, and so on. There's certainly been attacks in Europe.

ROBERTS: Oh, you mean they object to our aggressive policies and our hegemony in their own lands. And if this organization exists, it's nothing to do with a state. It's nothing to do with Taliban. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. Pakistan is not al-Qaeda. The whole thing is some kind of a hoax. It's an excuse.

JAY: So what's the—so the real objective is pipelines.

ROBERTS: [inaudible] the 9/11 Commission report. We've had the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission, who apparently drafted the thing, he's written a book and said, you know, the military lied to us. People lied to us who were supposed to be helping us. We've had both cochairmen of the commission say the same thing. The 9/11 truth movement is very large. There are very many very distinguished, intelligent people—architects, engineers, scientists—and they point out all kinds of problems with this report. There's [inaudible] never been an examination. There was a political commission that was denied most of the relevant testimony and information according to their own chairman and legal counsel, and they produced a political document. We don't know what happened. I mean, people can say, "Oh, we believe this because the government did it," but it's the same government that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda connections when we know for a fact he didn't.

TARIQ ALI: “Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome"

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/12/7/tariq_ali_obamas_afghan_pak_syndrome

US military has no business in Afghan civil war

"'Obama's War Choice' pure politics" - Lawrence Wilkerson

Lawrence Wilkerson,"Obama's campaign rhetoric and his generals put him in a corner on Afghanistan."
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security.

Ralph Nader on Obama's Election - one year on

Pilger: Obama a Product of Corporate Marketing

Many will be abhorred by what award-winning investigative journalist, John Pilger, has to say about President Obama. Many will ignore Pilger's thesis altogether but will pounce on his cited examples as proof positive that Dubya was right all along but that Obama is still a socialist. Or a fascist. Or Kenyan. Or not really the president cuz it say so in the Bible.



Now that you've heard Mr Pilger's comments about Barak Obama, consider this: why should the idea that the US president is a product of marketing strategies, public relations tactics, and corporate planning be a surprise? The role of PR firms in US elections goes back at the very least to the Nixon/Kennedy campaigns. Joe McGinniss’s ‘The Selling of the President’ recounts Nixon’s successful re-packaging and his triumph in the 1968 presidential race following his loss to Kennedy in the nail-biter of 1960.

Winning the contest for the highest elected government office in the land (if not the world) is most assuredly a prize that corporate America and those in its thrall would do nearly anything to accomplish. This is the self-evident fact of the matter and incontestable. Putting the concepts Bernays and Lippman proposed in the early 1900’s for manufacturing consent, shaping public opinion and thereby controlling the ignorant herd is standard operating procedure. SOP. So last millennium it’s hardly worth mentioning. Nothing new here. Move along.

How many movies have come out of Hollywood –itself a creature of marketing and PR alchemy – that have told the lurid tales of backroom deals, media handlers, corporate shills, wardrobe consultants, press agents and PR strategists? How many summer-reading novels?

The notion that the US president is a corporate marketing creation should not come as a revelation. (A dispassionate observer might need look no further than the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan to confirm the proposition that the quality of packaging and promotion out-weigh the quality of the candidate in a run for the White House.) Nevertheless, the truth of it is disturbing. Mr. Pilger is doing us all a favor by pointing this issue out to us and rubbing our noses in it.

The chief executive of our government – you know, the one that is of the people, by the people, for the people-is a product. A product that is shaped by focus groups and groomed by market research and then sold to the electorate by callously well-crafted media ads in combination with attractive product placement and the scripted pronouncements of pundits in the pay of corporations.

(I’m not really an expert, but I play one on TV.)

Understanding that Americans insist on feeling they are independent in their actions - exercising their freedom, in the parlance of patriotism- the marketing mavens offer a choice of products. Sales departments also know that making a choice can be daunting. Especially when there’s a lot at stake and the choice is to be made in near total ignorance; some of it willful, some by design.

In the US the electorate’s choice has been limited to two so as not to confound the troublesome herd; crispy or extra-crispy? Paper or plastic? Democrat or Republican? For here or to go?

Third-party candidates become the target of PR attack dogs and relegated to obscurity by corporate programmers and editors and made to appear an irrelevancy to the presidential contest.

And may the one with the bigger war-chest and the better sales campaign win!

What Hollywood movies do not typically deal with is nevertheless very closely scrutinized: the source of the funds in a presidential candidate’s war-chest. Although there are laws regulating campaign financing, there are many ways around those regulations. Laws, lawyers and loopholes; this is not a revelation, either. It’s axiomatic. Little could be more obvious than the fact that legal services cost money in the USA; as do the services of public relations firms, marketing consultants, ad agencies, media advisers, speech writers, press secretaries, wardrobe and make-up specialists, to name but a few that are essential to the selling of the president.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics , a research group which has tracked the money in U.S. politics for a quarter of a century and which does not accept contributions from corporations, trade associations or labor unions, Obama’s presidential war-chest was an unprecedented $745, 000,000. That astounding sum is based on the Federal Election Commission data for the 2008 election cycle. John McCain, the Republican runner-up, raised a paltry $368,000,000 according to the same sources. Third party candidates’ campaign funds were beggarly in comparison; raising a measly $5,457,000 to finance four separate campaigns. The lion’s share of which, $4,000,000 – little more than one half of one percent of Obama’s record-setting total - was raised by seasoned campaigner, Ralph Nader.

The source of campaign funds should raise no eye-brows. The money comes from the political action committees (PAC) of major corporations and institutions.
• Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama’s presidential bid.
• The PACs of media conglomerates National Amusements Inc (which owns media giants Viacom and CBS Corporation) and Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate contributed more than a cool million.
• International business law firms, Sidley, Austin LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Skadden, Arps, and Wilmerhale, kicked in an even cooler $1.6 million.
• Hi-tech powerhouses, IBM, Microsoft and Google nearly doubled the lawyers’ contributions.
• Although it may prompt a warm and fuzzy feeling that Obama’s alma maters, Harvard and Columbia were major contributors along with Standford and the University of California each of these renowned educational institutions is also funded by government research contracts and should be considered part of the military-industrial complex.
• Rounding out the list is General Electric, which benefits directly from the research done by the aforementioned institutes of higher learning as one of the largest recipients of military contracts.

A pattern emerges; international law firms, mammoth media groups, financial sector behemoths, hi-tech giants and colossal military contractors were primary supporters of Obama’s presidential campaign. To risk stating the obvious once more, highly successful corporations and institutions do not go around tossing millions of dollars into wishing wells. They make well-considered and sober decisions, choosing, investments that offer low risk and high probability of profitable returns. An Obama presidency, while seen as ‘dark horse’ by the general public (if you’ll pardon the pun), was assessed as a sound political and financial investment. That these corporate and institutional entities hedged their bets by investing in Obama’s competitors is part of what is known as a balanced investment portfolio and should further negate any lingering illusions that they were foursquare supporters of his message of Hope and change.

This is not news. That this sorry reality is not news exposes the fraud of what passes as democratic process in the United States. The 2008 election campaign of the Chief Executive, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States was paid for by major corporations. That this is merely the most recent one in a long uninterrupted series of corporate-sponsored political contests leads to one incontrovertible conclusion: the US is a Corporatocracy, plain and simple. There should be no one of voting age so naïve as to cling to the fantasy, the irrational will-o’-the-wisp that Goldman-Sachs, Morgan Stanley, IBM, GE and Microsoft et al. will not claim ownership of what they have paid millions to acquire.

Should this depress Obama supporters? Only if they actually believed the PR hype. One more instance of belief as an obstacle to reason.

We should all be abhorred and politically radicalized by this truth.

To view Mr Pilger's speech 'Obama and Empire' in its entirety go to the Real News.

For more about John Pilger and his work; http://pilger.carlton.com/
To view Mr Pilger's speech